Being from a town of just over 2,000 inhabitants in the interior of Valencia, in the 80s, was not exactly an easy situation for a lesbian woman. “I perceived that my sexual orientation was not going to allow me to be happy there or have what I wanted,” explains Katy Pallàs, teacher and activist for LGTBI rights, former president of the Association of LGBTI Families and the European Network of LGBTI Families. . It was not an unfounded feeling. When she fell in love with a woman at the age of 15 and explained it to her surroundings, many friends turned their backs on her. “At school they pointed at me, they called me a dyke in the hallways. I needed to get out of there and live in anonymity. Going to the University in Valencia became my salvation goal.”
Sparsely populated municipalities in rural areas and even some small cities can be hostile territory for many LGBTI people, who do not feel free enough to express their feelings in public. This makes them dream of an anonymous and free life, so they consider leaving their town to go live in the city. They undertake what is known as sexile: exile motivated by sexual orientation or choice.
Bernat Aragó is a technician in the Activism area at Amnesty International Catalunya and has a master’s degree in Urban Anthropology, Migrations and Social Intervention from the Rovira i Virgili University (URV). He has studied sexile in depth and confirms that the collective imaginaries around the realities of the town and city influence the perpetuation of the phenomenon. It is evident that in all the cases of sexile that occur there are people of all types, but it is true that, according to Aragó, there are several patterns that are repeated. “The vast majority of people who ‘sex’ are usually gay or bisexual men,” he explains. “Women don’t do it as much, because many don’t have any visibility.”
Aragó details that the majority of sexiles occur at a young age because it coincides with the stage of beginning university studies, when many young people leave to study in a larger city. At this stage they make the determination not to return to reside in their place of origin, which has become a hostile environment. This is exactly what happened to Katy Pallàs, who arrived in Valencia, studied at university and made her life with a woman, whom he married years later, in 2006.
Sexile is not always a conscious and meditated decision, but “many times it means not returning to the origin, or perhaps taking many years to consider a possible return,” according to Aragó. “I have not returned to live in my town, but I visit it often, everyone knows me, they know that I am an LGTBI activist. For me, the difficulty of the town has been the work that my mother has had to do there. Over time it has become a reference for other mothers and fathers of LGTBI people,” explains Pallàs.
Sexile is one of the factors that make up the exodus from the countryside to the city that has been occurring for years in many countries. “In Catalonia, sexile has a lot to do with certain conditions in the place of origin, where there is no clear visibility of the LGBTI community, there are no references, meeting spaces or others with which to relate. It does not depend so much on hostility of the place of origin and what the city of Barcelona represents in particular as a pole of attraction in many aspects for the LGBTI community,” says Aragó.
It is not that in some towns day-to-day life is more or less difficult for an LGBTI person, but that many see Barcelona – or the nearby big city – as the promised land of liberation. With the advances made in recent years in social recognition and LGBTI rights, with the expansion of new references in social networks and in cinema and television, the expert considers that the traditional dichotomy of “religious, conservative people” should no longer apply. and intolerant” compared to the “cosmopolitan, open and tolerant city. “The naturalization of the LGBTI community, also outside the big cities, has allowed towns and small cities to exist with organized people and references, beyond these big cities,” explains the researcher.
Pallàs explains a recent experience that highlights these changes. Some homosexual friends, over 60 years old, got married this summer, in the center of the town from which she had to leave. “The young people made them a circle, everyone applauded them, they kissed publicly, they were dressed in wedding dresses. It was fantastic! One of them had exiled himself to England, but, on the other hand, thirty years later she celebrated her wedding in the town and lives there, happy and integrated.
Bernat Aragó assures that, despite the progress, in the collective imagination there is still the image of towns as the most conservative hostile space. According to the activist’s studies, the figures reveal that the reality is just the opposite. The number of attacks on LGBTI people in a city like Barcelona is “infinitely greater than in smaller towns or cities. “It is true that Barcelona has a support network, meeting spaces where they can interact or even have sexual opportunities, something that does not happen outside the city,” the researcher points out.
That is precisely what Pallàs points out as the current reason for the sexile. “Nowadays the reasons why LGTBI people leave towns is not to hide, but to find more possibilities to interact with people. Today the exile is less, and in the towns regional associations have been created that provide a lot of protection, security and empowerment for people who live in rural environments,” explains the teacher, who is also a member of the board of directors of the LGTBI Platform. of Catalonia.
That large cities like Barcelona are a welcoming and attractive city for the group does not mean that homophobia has disappeared. “The false sense of security that this anonymity of big cities gives us plays a double role. People flee their places of origin because they feel judged and watched, because they are afraid to go out holding hands for fear of being known. , but the fact that everyone knows each other in the town can be safer than the anonymity of the big city,” Aragó reasons.
But the experience of sexile can generate significant disappointment. From the frustration of not being able to live with complete freedom in the place where you were born, you can end up in an even worse scenario: a city in which anonymity can be a double-edged sword.
