It's the end of July and this should mean that Pride month is over, but two weeks ago Collboni participated in the Pride demonstration in Barcelona and a week ago a car in Berlin ran over a group of people celebrating the festival in the Tiergarten: several injured and one dead. Some time ago, Pride was on June 28th, commemorating the anniversary of the Stonewall rebellion on that same day in 1969. However: for some years now, things have been stretching and stretching, as happens with any event from which some kind of economic benefit can be derived.We are aware of the conflictive relationship many people have with the idea of Pride and celebration. Why isn't there a straight Pride, that there's no need to highlight what society already perceives as normal, that so much scandal and so many flags are not necessary. The attack in Berlin is a good example: even though the jihadist motive might have only sought a crowd of people to attack, there is something symbolic in the terrorist choosing a mass that was demonstrating for their rights.What we don't know, however, is how the LGBTIQ+ community relates to the idea of Pride and celebration. And it is that there are those who do not miss a single party and are at all the demonstrations, but there are those who, on the other hand, have a complex relationship with it. I am not referring to the commercial, consumerist, and whitewashing drift of the event, although that too, but I am referring to a deeper issue. I am probably writing about this now because I have found myself in this liminal, strange space, where one does not know exactly what to be proud of or what exactly to celebrate. Some will say: we must reclaim our own existence, which is no small thing, especially considering what happened in the German capital, as if it were a harbinger of what may happen in the coming years. I know. It is essential. However, this does not mean that one cannot have a tense, complicated relationship with it. The thinker and activist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick explains very well that identity cannot be understood queer only from the simplistic logic that goes from initial shame to final pride in a victorious liberation process, which is how it is often presented. She argues that even today, even here, despite all the pride and all the celebrations, shame continues to be a constitutive part of the experience queer. In the eighties, Leo Bersani already maintained that desire for someone of your own sex has nothing of political radicalism per se: there is a big difference, he said, between having a sexual preference and choosing a subversive and combative lifestyle. Referring to gay men, he maintained that it was essential, in homosexual desire, to question the ideas of masculinity and homosexuality that founded heterosexual thought, in which there was a “good homosexual”: one who maintained the powerful role of the man. A gay liberation movement that questioned these dispositions needed to be defended. In 2010, Judith Butler rejected the Berlin Pride award, not only due to the commercialization of the event, but also by raising a question: when we claim Pride as a collective, transversal feeling, what happens to those who do not feel or cannot feel it? She was referring to structural racism and discrimination against LGBTIQ+ migrants. Who can demand that they feel proud? Proud of what?However, recently the journalist Álex Vicente asked the sociologist Didier Eribon, awarded this year at the Berlin Pride, what he thought of the word pride. And he answered an idea that seems important to me, despite all the nuances I have exposed: “Being gay socially condemns you to shame and sadness. It is necessary to claim a strength of affirmation and transgression”. Today I'll stick with this: some will call it “pride”; others, “celebration”, and others will call it “the need to claim a strength of affirmation and transgression”. Given the panorama, it is still very necessary.

"Love knows no borders": this was the banner that Queen Máxima of the Netherlands held up this Saturday during the massive party and demonstration of Amsterdam's Pride Day, making her the first European queen to participate in and lead a march in favor of the rights of the LGBTIQ+ community.

Born in Juneda, in Les Garrigues, Ferran Poca, now a businessman and LGBTQ+ rights activist, spent 35 years exactly what people expected him to be: "I worked at La Caixa bank and became a regional manager with many employees under my supervision and a salary higher than I've ever had." But his life took an unexpected turn: "I heard an inner voice telling me that this wasn't what I was meant to do."

The arrival of tourism to the Costa Brava in the 1950s and 1960s marked a radical change in lifestyles. In Lloret de Mar, where hotels replaced the large Indiano houses, the first gay bars appeared in the early 1960s, thus becoming pioneers in LGBTQ+ leisure on the Costa Brava. As Xavier Orri, secretary of Plurales, the LGBTQ+ Association of Lloret de Mar and employee of the Lloret de Mar Municipal Archive Service, who has conducted extensive research on the subject, recalls, tourism brought about a "significant change in the mentality of the population of Lloret de Mar, who quickly adapted to new social trends and knew how to maintain an attitude of respect and distance from the Catholic morality imposed by the Franco dictatorship."