Dave Wiseman
I went to my first Spanish ‘Pride’ event a few days ago and we marched down the main drag. But boy, was I disappointed! It should all have been a drama in my mind. Sequinned drag queens in stillettos would run out in front of cars and give them an index finger. The normally strictly unsmiling guardia would lead us, a phalanx of happy smiling cops in sexy uniforms proudly holding up their ‘Pride’ banner. People on the streets would stop and wave, smiling, slightly aghast but also secretly in awe of the pageant and colour, as their kids shouted, laughed and drank in the positive vibes. Cars would honk their horns in greeting, like they had done loudly and often when Almeria FC went up into the premier league a few months back.
But no, none of that actually happened. No drag kings or queens, the police watched unsmiling as they held back the traffic, seemingly unaffected in any way by the procession. Nobody was that all that bothered on the streets and those in cars just looked a tad annoyed at having their journeys home curtailed.
Did I see any homophobic abuse? No. Did I feel threatened that our relatively small group of around five hundred people was going to be arrested . No, not really, (though there’s an important comment I’ll return too). Nothing bad happened, at least as far as I’m aware.
‘In seventy countries relations between persons of the same sex are penalised with physical punishment or imprisonment, in eleven you could expect the death penalty’
Amnistia Internacional flyer
My friends had spent the afternoon making banners. There was Beccie, glammed up and ready to sashay with a variety of home made cardboard signs. ‘There’s no Pride in Prejudice’ one read. Nice that! Jennie had had two rainbow hearts drawn on her face by Steph and wore her hair in pigtails decorated with multicolored Pride ribbons, hastily cut from our vimpel streamers, using a house key. We were up for a vibrant march.
Yet at the end of the short distance we went, (about a mile maybe) Steph clearly wasn’t satisfied. Where was all the music, the singing, the dancing she bemoaned? I agreed. Like her I’d been expecting something a little more… well, maybe a little more like the previous forty or so Pride marches I’ve been on in my life. Yes, there was chanting, though it was with the thick andalucian Spanish, I’ve found so difficult to pick. up. There was a big, slightly scary woman with a megaphone too, exhorting us to shout and sit down a couple of times too on the road as she recited some stats about oppression. There were plenty of rainbow flags being held & some even waved aloft. And so many varieties now too. What exactly does the grey mean in the flag? It feels a little confusing, even to me. Yet the energy seemed muted somehow. It was if we were seeing the ghost of an experience that had been seen fleetingly, then run away, escaped.
Now, I’m only too aware that we were the outsiders here. Almeria actually has a tiny resident population of Brits (incredibly, in fact just about 200 the latest census data suggests out of 200,000 people). And clearly there were different cultural norms happening. I had a whistle on a pretty rainbow string and was planning to happily toot along as we walked. But I started and people looked uneasy. I saw that no one else was blowing or even holding whistles. I realised that whistles are associated with the civil police here, they tend to whistle when you’ve done some wrong, something bad. It’s not a good sign. So it’s another culture and clearly it’s right to respect that. But I’ve seen happy marches here with a lot of life to them and this wasn’t even especially happy, it felt subdued. I’d asked a gay professional South American expat couple I’d met a few weeks back about going to such events like this but one of them told me, no, we just like to mix with everyone, not go to political events and stuff like that. Fair enough. Maybe that’s just what just young people feel nowadays? Honestly, it felt like a cop out to me but I respect the decision.
Maybe, in fact very likely, I’ve been spoilt by decades of big noisy fun prides in the past in the UK. Specifically in London & Brighton. Bands, floats, dancing, cheering, clapping and chanting. Well yes, very likely, these are huge events attracting nearly a quarter of a million people. Five hundred on a small city street simply wasn’t going to match that. Yet is ‘spoilt’ the right word, shouldn’t that be our ‘right’ if we wished?
And yet. And yet..there are big Pride events in Spain in almost every large city here each year (when covid doesn’t rule the agenda). Barcelona, Madrid, Valencia Prides are justifiably infamous for being kick ass events. Yet here it’s all more low key. There’s one -relatively small- gay bar (‘Babilon’ since you ask) and not much else really. Of course it’s pretty well known that queer bars are closing at the rate of knots anyway, even more widely. The clubbing scene has been decimated too, by Covid, by rising rents and expenses, by the recession and by the resurgence of right wing councils being heavy handed on licences. We’ve just had a local election and Vox, the ultra right wing party here did well in it, with three members on the council here now along with six from the Partido Popular, a right wing party broadly in line with the Conservative Party back in the UK. The death of two dozen people in the Spanish enclave of Melilla, a hundred and seventy kilometres (one hundred miles) due south of us, on the North African coast a few days ago, whilst trying to get into it by scaling the fences en masse was widely reported and seems very local to us, with the port ferries chundering back and forwards from here to there every day; in fact there was another demo here to protest about that the following day.
Since Covid things haven’t felt quite the same either, it’s as if we all now realise just how thin the veneer of ‘normal society’ is, and it’s a bit of shock, that any sudden movement will bring it crashing back down on us. Just how easy it was to get us to all to stay inside for months on end by declaring a health emergency. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not disputing the necessity for caution then; the curfew seemed right at the time. But it’s a scary time again, when much seems to be uncertain in our world and little seems like it can be taken for granted. People are simply more cautious. Jobs are no longer given things, for a lot of us Brits (well about 48% in fact), Brexit was a system shock we are still floundering over. Travel we took for granted in the past is uncertain, no more free movement, airlines are no longer remotely sexy, they are understaffed, carbon polluting affairs & their schedules are in shreds; and we still wear masks on all public transport. It’s not been an easy ride.
Despite all this though I recognised that things would still have been different here in south east Andalucia. Growing up in London (well ok, I mean whilst I was in my twenties and thirties) it was easy to forget I was at an epicentre. People came to London from the ‘berbs to go clubbing in Soho et al. I was on its doorstep. I was young with the money & energy to go out and get -well, frankly -wasted. Yes, I cheered when down in Cornwall, where I’d readily left at eighteen, having spent most of my youth there, lesbian & gay clubs opened in places like Truro & St Ives (Saddletramps: I loved you!). But then they closed again.
Yes, I cheered when gay programmes like ‘Out in the UK’ begun in the early eighties, when soaps got real gay characters (nod to Micheal Cashman) and civil partnerships then marraige suddenly became an option for same sex couples in the UK and other liberal countries around the world, like Spain. It was all good. But that was then and this is now. Freedoms are eroding, being swept away. In the States gay marriage could be swept away as the (black) judge on its supreme court Clarence Thomas suggested recently, in the same way as the rights of women to have an abortion have been. And in places like Afghanistan, gay men are being murdered as always for being gay. And that’s by the State not single homophobes. As the Amnesty International flier they were giving out at our Pride said: (in spanish)’En 70 paises las relaciones entre personas del mismo sexo son penalizadas con castigos fisicos o carcel. En 11 de ellos podran suponer la muerte (‘in seventy countries relationships between people of the same sex are penalised with physical punishment or imprisonment, in eleven of them they could expect the dealth penalty’).
Orgulla de Ser : www.orgulladeser.org
Amnestia Internacional website
So I guess people are uneasy. When things become less certain people often retreat into their own lives to protect themselves as much as they can. Generally, they do not poke their heads up to be targets above the parapet. So whilst all this change personally makes me angry, fires me up, I realise I am one of the lucky ones who can afford to be so (although something about my current status here as a resident simply by the grace of the Spanish authorities makes me flinch too). I love Spain and the Spanish and don’t particularly want to leave, to return to that inward looking country of the dreary 52% again.
Ok. So what’s your point you say. Cut to the chase then and I’m saying I realise my expectations are very high, at a level they have no real right to be at. Yes, living in big cities here in western Europe is generally a liberal relaxed affair, yes in a lot of my homeland people generally are now pro LGBTQI+ rights. And yes we have big noisy well attended Prides. But- and it’s a big but- as has been shown in the States in the last week with the abortion decision (technically the repeal of Roe v Wade) those freedoms can change, opinion can change (28% of Americans in a poll in the last month say they would take up arms against their own government if necessary) and in many places things aren’t getting better- they are getting worse. You think things can go only one way but history shows us, time and time again, that things can and do get worse. One step forward. Two steps backwards. Now is the time to get out there and protest against these changes. It feels unsafe, it feels a little dangerous, it feels exposed.
So, yes the march was small, it was subdued, it was less than I’d expected but the important thing I think is that we were simply there. And that it happened at all, in the confines of (relatively little) Almeria. We all brought our widely different experiences to the march yes but we all marched together. ‘El gentes unido jamás se dividirá’ (‘The people united will never be divided’) they chanted. And yes, I did get that one! Bravo: well said Almerians!
