Several young people in the Critical Pride demonstration, which, under the slogan "Without papers there is no Pride", was held on June 28 in Madrid. Fernando Sánchez (Europa Press)
Young people who were born in 2005, when same-sex marriage was approved in Spain, will come of age next year.
This is a generation that has grown up in a climate of constant expansion of rights for the LGTBI group: after marriage, the rule on gender identity was approved in 2007 and, a week ago, the Council of Ministers left the draft of the
trans law
;
without counting on the numerous regional legislations.
These legal changes, which have helped make sexual diversity visible and normalized, are the result of the struggle of previous generations, who grew up in an environment diametrically opposed to that of today's young people: persecuted and harassed by lgtbiphobic laws, such as the Francoist one on dangerousness and social rehabilitation approved in 1970.
"The elders have lived through the struggle, while we were born with given rights," summarizes Alejandro Muñoz, 24 years old.
He was born in Salamanca, where he studied Audiovisual Communication, and has been living in Cork (Ireland) for a year and a half.
"I am an intern in the creative team of a company: I edit video," he says by phone.
He is gay – “for me gender is fluid, but I don't consider myself non-binary” – and he doesn't know if he wants to get married: “I am aware that, as a gay white man, I am privileged within the LGTBIQ + community”.
Alejandro Muñoz Aguadero believes that "the situation is tough": "During Pride month, bad things happen to the collective," he says from Cork, where he has been living for a year and a half.
At the end of the seventies, being homosexual was persecuted in Spain.
"To be and to seem so," qualifies Ramón Linaza, a 64-year-old activist.
As Linaza explains, the social dangerousness law “allowed people to be imprisoned without trial and arbitrarily;
one of the reasons was to be homosexual or to appear so”.
Thus, the LGTBI collective began its battle fighting to abolish that norm.
That was the demand of the first Pride demonstration in Madrid, held in 1978. Linaza was part of the head of that demonstration, which was not a pioneer in Spain;
the first march had been called by Barcelona a year before.
Despite the mobilizations, the law that criminalized the LGTBI community remained in force until 1993.
Rights, on the other hand, have always been part of the lives of young people.
"Equal marriage was a cultural earthquake that changed the social perception regarding the LGTBI reality," says Eduardo Rubiño, a deputy in the Madrid Assembly for the Más Madrid party.
"This change affected
millennials
and has allowed generation Z to grow and socialize with acquired rights," continues the politician and activist.
Micaela Trotter thinks that "there is a change in the way we name and address each other; it varies depending on age and how politicized people are."
Jaime Villanueva
Young people understand how difficult it was to live with repression and without freedom and value legal advances.
But it is not always the most relevant.
"Older people are a bit blocked when they see that we don't share the demands of their generation," says Micaela Trotter, 18 years old.
She is a lesbian, a Mathematics graduate student at the Complutense University and an activist “since she was 15″.
She started in feminist movements, and now she is a member of Errequeteerre, "
the Complutense
transmaricabollo group", which has been operating for almost three decades.
"We reject the institutional - she is linked to the normative - and we ask for more social commitments," she explains: "We want society to be deconstructed so that it becomes a safe space for the LGTBI supporters club."
The youth organization of the State Federation of the LGTBI community (FELGTBIQ+ Jovenes) notes a certain generational divergence in the community.
"During youth, especially in the adolescent stage, many vital processes are experienced to which we have to pay a lot of attention," says Blue Rodríguez, 22, who coordinates FELGTBIQ+ Youth, together with Oliver Marcos.
He defines the organization as “a group of young activists, who meet regularly
online
to work, get to know each other or learn” and includes digital activism —and the visibility it brings— as another feature of the contemporary struggle that differentiates them from their predecessors.
He considers the existence of a generational gap to be “undeniable”: “It is not inherent to the collective;
It is present in the whole society.
The new concerns of the group have expanded from the legislative framework and the achievement of rights towards identity, representativeness or affectivity.
Thus, FELGTBIQ+ Jovenes has focused on three points that it considers key: the situation of trans minors with the new law;
attention to LGTBI migrants;
and the inclusion of non-binary people.
A decade ago there was no label to designate the reality of non-binary people (those who do not identify with the male and female gender roles established by society).
"The labels speak of a group of people who share reality with you," says Mía González, 30, who was born in Tomelloso and now lives in Madrid.
For
her
(as she wants to be called, without gender) it was "very important" to feel part of a group and with representation.
For a few months, she has been part of the No Binaries Spain association and she considers the trans law
"necessary" .
She, although she clarifies: "It should be more ambitious."
Mía González describes social networks as "an important way of communicating, making ourselves visible and organizing ourselves": "We have begun to get together."
JOHN BARBOSA
While the use of the newly coined pronouns elle/elles to refer to the neutral gender is normalized among twentysomethings, some older people have problems internalizing it.
"There are cisgender homosexual people of a certain age who find it difficult to adapt," says Rosa Lambea, a 51-year-old administrative worker from Madrid and a lesbian.
She herself has sometimes made mistakes with the pronouns, although she knows that identity is "very important" for young people.
"When it has happened to me, they have warned me and I have corrected it."
"We are learning to socialize in a different way, getting out of the binary," explains Mathematics student Micaela Trotter.
For her, one of the basic points of relationships is the deconstruction of gender roles, inherited from the heteropatriarchal system.
“Some lesbian women also play heteronormative roles,” Trotter laments.
“They are couples of aunts, who are assigned masculine and feminine roles.
It happens with regard to care, day to day, social representation or the way of flirting, where that idea of the hunter and the prey also remains.
In the gay world that complaint is replicated.
In addition, she criticizes a certain “binary bias” in desire and relationships: “There are older people who are not monogamous, but in my generation it is very widespread [not to be];
you live more naturally”.
He talks about polyamory and its variants or sexual flexibility: “It's another gap.
Something that older generations don't always understand.
I think monogamy has been deconstructed a little.
Juan Manuel Sánchez has been married to her husband for seven years.
“But 11 of relationship”, adds this 40-year-old television producer.
He lives in Majadahonda, a city on the outskirts of Madrid where he was born.
At 22 years old, Sánchez verbalized that he was gay.
The following year the Equal Marriage Law was approved: "I got married in 2015, when the tenth anniversary of the law was celebrated."
12 months later, he and her husband were parents.
Her family is "an exception" within her group of gay friends: none have married or have children.
"The only gay wedding I've ever been to is my own," he jokes.
“I am concerned about the rise of the extreme right and its message of hate.
I don't want my daughter to be singled out for having two parents,” says Juanma Sanchez, 40, in her house in Majadahonda, next to a picture of her family.
KIKE FOR
Recently, he was at a party with a group of twentysomethings.
“I saw them very uninhibited and free.
With couples, but taking it more openly.
They also seemed very adult to me: at 20 I was much more naive.
I was amazed to see the naturalness with which they express their identity: they are living a youth that they have stolen from me.”
He remembers that, in the nineties, when he went out with his friends, he did not feel comfortable: “I did not feel identified, but I followed the rhythm.
Note that there were no referents.”
“References are always very important, especially when you are young”, confirms Blue Rodríguez, “to get to know different realities, to see that you fit into one”.
Precisely, Valeria Vegas has become a contemporary reference of the LGTBI collective.
The journalist and documentary filmmaker is the author of
¡Digo!
Neither whore nor saint.
The memories of La Veneno
, a biography of Cristina Ortiz, an icon of the collective, and which served as the basis for the celebrated television series
Veneno
.
She believes that “there is a certain intergenerational isolation”.
“Young people do not always understand the hard times that previous generations have gone through.
While the older ones do not always identify the new struggles with their concerns and formats”, she affirms.
Rosa Lambea acknowledges that some fights no longer challenge her: "It already catches me that maybe I have 15, 20 or 30 years left here and maybe I don't want to be fighting all the time."
Jaime Villanueva
Despite the differences, the veteran Rosa Lambea speaks of “mutual admiration” between the generations of the collective: “The older ones value new energy;
the young women recognize the struggle and the rights achieved.
And they know they have to be kept."
She considers the generational gap in the group to be “irremediable”, but not as something negative.
“It is important that things are questioned, that there are people who want to change things.
If it were not so, the fights would end.
For her part, Blue Rodríguez from FELGTBIQ + Jovenes talks about empathy: “We must not forget that activists are superheroes.
They are people who, apart from their work, have been fighting all their lives to improve our country.
They cannot be asked to also be aware of everything.”
Hence, she considers it relevant “to have a group of young people, whose voice is valued and listened to:
“Intergenerational alliance”, says the politician from Más Madrid Eduardo Rubiño.
“We must make a mutual acknowledgment: of the struggles that have brought us here, and that turned Spain into a vanguard country in LGTBI rights, but also of the new debates, which bear witness to ideas that were left out in the previous decades," he explains: "If we achieve an intergenerational alliance, the LGTBI movement will be stronger."
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