The rainbow flag with a black ribbon flies during a protest for the death of Samuel Luiz in Puerta del Sol, in the center of Madrid, on Monday, July 5.
Editor's Note:
David Valenzuela is a member of CNN's Journalism Standards and Practices team.
A Spanish journalist settled for more than a decade in the United States, he was a correspondent for Agencia Efe in New York and the United Nations before joining CNN in Atlanta in 2012.
Follow him on Twitter at @ValenzuelaCNN.
The opinions expressed in this comment are yours.
(CNN Spanish) -
I have not stopped thinking about Samuel Luiz these days. When I woke up on July 4, his name was repeated in all my social networks thanks to a tag that went viral in my native Spain and that I will no longer forget: #JusticiaParaSamuel. How the reality that that hashtag opened before me hurts: Samuel was 24 years old, he went out to have fun with his friends in the city of A Coruña and received a beating that cost him his life. Just horrible. The authorities are studying what caused such a savage crime and do not rule out homophobia as a motive. A friend who was with him has no doubt that he was killed for being gay. He says that when they pounced on him, they yelled a homophobic insult at him. Yes, that derogatory, rude word. We all know it well and many of us would even like to claim it as our own. Lately it even triumphs as the title of a television series.But how hard is it to think that among the last thing Samuel heard in life is that word loaded with hatred, which for centuries has been in charge of making those who receive it believe that he is not as man as the one who releases it struts to be.
They have called us since we were children, myself included. I remember how a group of older boys would laugh at me at recess and sometimes mutter the word. Others threw it as an insult to be heard and pointed at. They laughed, I think they said, because I had too many friends and too few friends. Someone also told me that sometimes I walked like a girl. I didn't like sports either. It did not fit within his heterocentric macho paradigm. And they pointed to me perhaps as they had also pointed to Samuel before that fateful encounter.
Samuel's father had the courage to get on the phone with a television show and speak fondly of his son.
He even said that they had never discussed their sexual orientation.
Broken with pain, he explained that only once did they try to bring up the subject.
Samuel told him “what one is or ceases to be is up to each one”, to add that “there is a time to talk about things, now is not the time”.
And that moment never came.
Outrage in Spain over the death of Samuel, a young gay man who received a brutal beating in A Coruña
Samuel decided not to speak at home. Like him, many of us have been silent for years. We got into a survival shell. A breastplate resistant to insults, abuses and attacks. Also proof of ourselves, our insecurities and our lack of understanding about who we are. Because yes, that insult not only steals part of our childhood and adolescence, it also sometimes steals our identity. I denied my identity for years, always in armor that can be very powerful and withstand all kinds of attacks. But one day you can't take it anymore and everything explodes. And then everything improves, thanks above all to the support group that you surround yourself with and that makes you see that you are the way you are. You are gay, lesbian, bi, trans, queer and you are as wonderful as any neighbor's kid.And sometimes it is still impossible to talk openly about who you are with your family. It takes more time, a time that was taken from Samuel.
I want to think that this boy who, according to his father, came with him to Spain when he was barely 14 months old from Brazil lived his life away from home as he wanted. With the support of her friends, with the acceptance and tolerance of the diversity that has marked Spanish public life in recent decades. But alas, Samuel is not alone in a long list of people who suffer from the hatred of others. In the month of Pride in Spain there have been more than enough headlines of attacks against members of the LGTBI collective. The collective's observatories attribute it in part to a normalization of hate speech that is seen, not only in Spain but in much of the world, at the hands of some retrograde political parties and organizations. Before that, the best antidote has been the street:the mass gatherings throughout Spain demanding justice for Samuel are a thousand times more powerful than the insults and violence. I want to think that Samuel saw the Spaniards saddened together by him, shouting out loud or with the silence of their flags and posters so that there is no more aggression, so that once and for all our way of being, showing off or loving not our death sentence.
