I return home on a Friday night around eleven o’clock. A well-off neighborhood, quiet, full of grandparents, some terraces below, people passing by, and someone walking his dog. Two very young men, a little younger than me, look like me, my same clothes, my same face, pass by me as I go up and they come down, we cross each other by my doorway. “Uuuh -sharp, forced, mocking voice- what a nice bag!”, they say giggling and pointing to the white cloth satchel. That’s all there is to it. I’d like to think I’m looking at them sideways with murderous eyes as I put the key in the door and disappear. We have shared only a few insignificant seconds of our lives.
I also want to scream in their faces how stupid they are, how unfair and childish it is for them to make fun of someone and to do it this way. At this point, I say to myself, outraged: Is this still happening? I have come all this way, all these years so that suddenly, after all this time, two idiots can once again make fun of me in such a pitiful way… and I have to keep quiet?
I close the door cursing myself for not having answered back. I have not done so not because it is not worth it, not because I think they won’t understand me, not because I wanted to punish them with my indifference. Any of those three reasons could be true, but the only true one is that I have not answered them because I’m not daring enough, and I’m not daring enough because I am not trained to dare but to keep quiet. Time has given me wisdom and distance, but it has not yet trained me enough to defend myself in time against two macho and rude children.
They have their immaturity, I have mine. But I can accept theirs, I accept their little world, I accept their arrogance, I accept everything that their macho and ill-mannered fathers and mothers have not considered important to teach them, I accept it.
For a moment I think that in reality what has happened is not so serious, that it is not so far from being a prank. At the end of the day, it probably wouldn’t have gone any further than that. I have not been called a faggot to my face to insult me (like others). I have not been beaten until I ended up in the hospital or the cemetery nor have I been harassed in a group to terrorize me, as it happens with other homophobic aggressions… Luckily I immediately rebuke myself for that inertia, also homophobic, in which I have just fallen: the inertia of minimizing, of playing down, of pretending that nothing happens because, after all, we have not ended up in the emergency room, in the police station or the cemetery.
Then I resituate myself in the wise man that time has turned me into, in the proud man I want to be when I grow up, and I affirm with forcefulness that these extremes are not necessary to hurt, to bother, to insult, to attack. I affirm that insidiousness, half-laughter, low-level mockery are equally blameworthy, they are forms of sexism, they deserve to be condemned.
Just because those rude kids –who probably just had to laugh at me a little bit to feel better about themselves– haven’t done anything worse to me doesn’t mean their behavior should be overlooked. Fighting homophobia is also about looking at the small things. Because what they have not done to me is suffered by others, not in Iran or Uganda, but our self-satisfied and ignorant Spanish paradise. Inhabited by people who, with good and bad intentions, play down the existence and style of Pride or even openly censure it, believing it to be harmful, unnecessary, incomprehensible. The accommodated ignorance of those who do not get their faces smashed, insulted, or killed, or who do but do not realize it. Cruel and undisguised ignorance of those to whom homophobia does not kill.
While homophobes -sometimes proud, sometimes unconscious- allow themselves to do as they please, I keep hearing that Pride today is not necessary and that it is a deformation of reality. That visibility in the form of a show is nonsense, a frivolity that doesn’t represent anyone but those who chant it among feathers, glitter, and nudity. It is intended to dispense with extravagance and promote a decent Pride when extravagance is precisely one of the key aspects that give meaning to the Pride festival. Yes, festivity because, even if it is vindictive, it never ceases to be a celebration, not a funeral or a forum for intellectuals.
It has not yet been understood that exaggeration and extravagance are not only a perfectly respectable lifestyle of a few but a statement of principles valid for all. They are a means through which the visibility of difference is exaggerated to demonstrate that difference does not kill anyone.
