Madrid stable and carnal. The Gay Pride – which the mayor Alberto Ruiz Gallardón promoted with great enthusiasm for years, almost with the poorly disguised vocation to replace the main festival of San Isidro as the great celebration of the liberal city – gathered yesterday in Madrid hundreds of thousands of people, strangely guarded by miles and miles of security fences.
The route that forms the promenade axis of the Prado-Recoletos and Gran Via, a three-kilometer cross that connects Atocha with Colón, to the north, and Plaça d’Espanya, to the west, is the breakwater of all discontent and the 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 left and for the Catholic right, who made this overturned T the playground of their discomfort with José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero’s abortion and equal marriage laws, when the PSOE decided to expand the civil rights of Spaniards to celebrate the new century.
But the police deployment had never before felt the need to stabilize the demonstrations, as if a million red-faced British hooligans were expected from the Premier. Madrid’s great avenues had never experienced the strange and heterogeneous siege fever with which the city received yesterday this explosion of the world, the devil and the flesh that is the usually very frequent manifestation of LGTBIQ Pride.
The corralito extended not only along the entire route of the demonstration, from Plaça de Carlos V, in front of Atocha station, to Plaça de Colón, but also along Calle d’Alcalá, Gran Via, Callao Square, Puerta del Sol, Pedro Zerolo Square and even Spain Square. The police had established strict controls on the sale of alcohol in the various venues which caused confusion among the attendees, a markedly transversal and even family audience. The fountains of Neptune and Cibeles were walled off with several lines of defense, as if the soccer fans were about to celebrate the tenth world cup of the Spanish national team.
Vice Presidents Yolanda Díaz and Teresa Rivera and 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 the pacts of the PP with the national Catholic formation Vox are taking shape, pointing out in a particular way the civil and political rights, with the prohibition of flags with the rainbow in the institutions in which they govern and the suppression of services and bodies both autonomous as municipalities dedicated to Equality policies and the fight against gender violence.
This is the paradox of the pre-electoral moment that gives a unique accent to yesterday’s very frequent celebration of Pride in Madrid: while the Government faces the more than solvent performance of Spain in economic terms 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 played through, above all, the legislative action of the Ministry of Equality, trying to silence the LGTBIQ group and embracing negationist postulates regarding the character structural of sexist violence, between chest beatings and haranguing in defense of “freedom”. It was not futile that yesterday’s 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 emergence of the ultra-right, men molded with sacrifice and discipline, in tank tops – the unofficial uniform of this celebration of the flesh – claimed and displayed under the sun, not just their identity, but their militancy in the hedonism, an express invitation to party, music, alcohol and the patent praise of popular carnal pleasures.
There was no shortage of billboards and chanted slogans rebuked for the puritanism that has raised the multicolored flags – gay and also trans – of Madrid’s institutions, the main one, the City Council led by Mayor José Luis Martínez Almeida , which excused the possibility of damage to the heritage for not showing the colorful flag of sexual freedom.
The rally, which started long before the parade, with tens of thousands of Madrid residents and many migrants – mainly Latin Americans – and European tourists poured into the streets from midday or camped out in the shade of the trees on Paseo de Recoletos, in front of the museum del Prado, had a kind of angry cry, as if more than commemorating the rebellion of the customers of the Stonewall Inn and the takeover of the Greenwich Village neighborhood in 1969, yesterday’s in Madrid was a praise of that inclination to the pleasure and extravagance that has always characterized the town, to the horror of the court.
The brivalls claimed ownership of the street and their bodies in the face of the old and brand new courtesan reaction, which has again taken the form of hiccups in the sacristy and confessional. For a few hours, the exalted city remembered that school, daughter of hedonism, founded by Aristippus of Cyrene, defender of individual pleasure and sensory experience as the main source of knowledge and happiness. In other words, the left wanted to tear the banners of Bacchus from the pious hands of the new right.
