Pride History: Public Shame, Memory and Resistance

An introduction to a Pride Month series

For Pride Month, I wanted to write a small series of reflections about LGBTQIA+ figures whose lives helped open doors for us to live more freely.

The series will explore people whose lives, art, bodies, relationships, politics or visibility challenged the limits of what was considered acceptable. Some were artists, performers, writers, activists, sex workers, public figures, or people who simply refused to disappear.

Some of these names are remembered in certain places, communities or generations but are not always widely known everywhere. Some did not become international icons. Some lived through shame, ridicule, violence, censorship or misunderstanding. And still, through their bodies, creativity, humour, visibility and refusal to become acceptable, they helped create possibilities that many of us live with today.

Because Pride is not only about the rights we have now. It is also about remembering that those rights did not appear from nowhere.

Before many of us had the language, the protections, or the spaces we have today, other people were already living with their bodies exposed to judgement, violence, desire, ridicule or fascination. Some made art. Some took to the streets. Some performed. Some loved openly. Some were punished for simply being too visible.

And still, something was opened through them.

Not always in a clean or heroic way. Sometimes through scandal, humour, survival, sex, friendship, performance, or refusal. But they made something possible for the rest of us.

As someone from Spain, I also feel there is something important about sharing parts of my own cultural memory with people who may not have grown up with these names. LGBTQIA+ history is often told through a few familiar figures, often from English-speaking contexts. But queer memory is much wider than that. It lives in streets, songs, bars, drawings, neighbourhoods, films, scandals, friendships, protests and bodies that made freedom visible before it was safe.

This first part of the series begins in Barcelona.

Not because the people I am writing about were born there, but because Barcelona became one of the places where they made themselves visible.