Madrid stabled and carnal. Gay Pride – which the mayor Alberto Ruiz Gallardón promoted with great enthusiasm for years, with the poorly concealed vocation of replacing the patron saint festivities of San Isidro as the great celebration of the extremely free and cosmopolitan city – gathered 800,000 in Madrid this Saturday people, strangely guarded by kilometers and kilometers of metal fences.
The route formed by the Paseo del Prado-Recoletos and Gran Vía axis, a three-kilometre cross that connects Atocha with Colón, to the north, and Plaza de España, to the west, is the breakwater for all the discontent and euphoria of the capital of the kingdom and the kingdom itself, from the mobilizations for public health to the overwhelming celebrations of March 8, the favorite space of street politics for decades, both for the Catholic left and right, which made this “T ” knocked down the playing field of his anger with the abortion and equal marriage laws of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, when the PSOE decided to broaden the civil rights of the Spaniards to celebrate the new century.
But the usual police deployment had never before felt the need to stall the demonstrations, as if a million rosy British Premier hooligans were waiting. The great avenues of Madrid had never experienced the strange and variegated fever of the siege with which the city received yesterday that explosion of the world, the devil and the flesh that is the usually very crowded manifestation of LGTBIQ Pride.
The corralito extended not only along the entire route of the demonstration –from Plaza de Carlos V, in front of the Atocha station, to Plaza de Colón– but also along Calle de Alcalá, Gran Vía, Plaza de Callao , the Puerta del Sol, the Plaza de Pedro Zerolo and even the Plaza de España. The police had established rigorous controls on the sale of alcohol in the different venues that caused a lot of confusion among the attendees, a markedly transversal and even family audience. The Neptuno and La Cibeles fountains were walled in with various lines of defense, as if a soccer fan were about to celebrate the tenth World Cup for the Spanish team.
The vice presidents Yolanda Díaz and Teresa Rivera and the ministers Felix Bolaños, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, Ione Belarra and Irene Montero were the important government representation in a celebration as festive as every year, but especially political in the current electoral situation, in which they the pacts of the PP with the national-Catholic formation Vox taking shape, pointing out in particular civil and political rights, with the prohibition of rainbow flags in the institutions in which they govern and the suppression of both regional and municipal services and organizations dedicated to policies of Equality and the fight against sexist violence.
That is the paradox of the pre-electoral moment that gives a singular accent to yesterday’s very crowded Pride celebration in Madrid: while the government pokes its chest at the more than solvent Spanish economic performance during the most complex legislature of the last half century, the right makes a case against the extension of civil rights that the executive has carried out through, above all, the legislative action of the Ministry of Equality. He does it with prayers before the Constitutional Court, trying to silence the LGTBIQ collective and embracing denialist postulates regarding the structural nature of sexist violence, between chest beatings and harangues in defense of “freedom”.
It was not trivial that yesterday the Pride demonstration had as its motto an allusion to the new modalities of family coexistence and social organization, not only to the validity of desires and identities: “For our rights. For our lives. With pride!”.
Faced with this emergency of the extreme right, men molded with sacrifice and discipline, in tank tops –the unofficial uniform of this celebration of meat–, claimed and exhibited under the sun, not just their identity, but their militancy in hedonism, a express invitation to party, music, alcohol and the clear praise of popular carnal pleasures.
There was no lack, in the billboards and the chanted slogans, a collection of reproaches for the puritanism that has lowered the multicolored flags – the gay banner and also the trans – of the Madrid institutions, the main one, the City Council directed by the mayor José Luis Martínez Almeida, who excused the possibility of damage to property so as not to display the colorful flag of sexual freedom.
The concentration, which started long before the parade, with tens of thousands of people from Madrid and many other migrants –especially Latin Americans– and ruddy tourists pouring out into the streets or camped out in the shade of the trees on Paseo de Recoletos, in front of the Museo del Prado, since noon, had something of an angry shout, as if rather than commemorating the rebellion of the clients of the Stonewall Inn and the seizure of the Greenwich Village neighborhood in 1969, what happened yesterday in Madrid was a praise of that inclination to enjoy and to the extravagance that has always characterized the Villa, to the horror of the Court.
The villains claimed ownership of the streets and their bodies in the face of the old and brand new courtly reaction, which has once again taken the form of sacristy and confessional hiccups. For a few hours, the disheveled city remembered that school, daughter of hedonism, founded by Aristippus of Cyrene, defender of individual pleasure and sensory experience as the main sources of knowledge and happiness. In other words, the left wanted to tear from the pious hands of the new hunting rights, rods and steaks the banners and delicacies of Bacchus.
