From June 23 to July 2, Madrid will host World Pride 2017, the great world party of LGBT Pride (acronym for lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transsexuals), which this year will bring together three events in one place: the now classic Gay Pride parade in the Spanish capital; the EuroPride, a continental event that has been held every year since 1992; and WorldPride, a global event that was born in 2000.
In 2016, this playful claim brought together more than a million people in the capital of Spain, and it is estimated that the figure could double – at least – in the imminent edition. Furthermore, this explosive response to so many centuries of concealment, repression and suffering has a great economic impact. The Madrid Confederation of Commerce estimates that the event could leave 300 million euros in the city, with commerce, hotels and hoteliers as the main beneficiaries.
And freedom came
Almost no one is surprised today by this tolerance towards the LGBT community, perhaps because memory is weak. It was not until the seventies of the last century that a true liberation began for these people, and the process has been very slow, although with surprises that were unthinkable a few decades ago: today, the traditionally repressive Spain represents a world example of legal rights and tolerance for sexuality. free.
In our country, punishments – and even executions – would end in the 19th century; In 1822, the French liberal influence led to the enactment of the first penal code that did not include sodomy as a crime, although the laws against public scandal could be applied to homosexuals. The penalty in the form of heavy fines returned during the reign of Alfonso XIII (1902-1931), disappeared in the Second Republic and returned with Franco in power.
The punishment was made very harsh from 1954, with the modification of the law of vagrants and crooks of 1933, a change aimed at repressing homosexuals. Many violets – a term coined by the Francoist authorities – would be sentenced to labor camps such as Tefía, in Fuerteventura, where there were dozens of them. The Dangerousness and Social Rehabilitation Act of 1970 spoke of “curing these deviants.” With this objective in mind, two penalties were created: one in Badajoz, for liabilities ; and another in Huelva, for assets . In both , aversion therapies were applied.
Coming out of the closet
That same year the clandestine Spanish Homosexual Liberation Movement was born in Barcelona, lagging behind those that had existed in Europe for decades. The end of Franco changed things; in 1978 the first exit from the public closet took place, that of the activist Armand de Fluvià. Grup de Lluita per l’Alliberament de la Dona, created in Barcelona in 1979, would be the first initiative focused on lesbians. That year the last prisoners for homosexuals were released.
The obstacles continued in the 1980s, but phenomena such as the Madrid Movement, local political initiatives around de facto unions, and certain sectors of culture and the press encouraged tolerance, a process culminated in 2005 under the PSOE government with the Law of Homosexual Marriage, which made Spain the third country in the world to approve the unions of same-sex couples.
Image: Roberto Gordo Saez / CC by 3.0
More information in the report The unstoppable LGBT revolution, written by Manuel Mañueco for issue 433 of Muy Interesante (June 2017), now on sale.
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