Spain's right and the LGTBI movement: the real fight is over subsidies

The right and the LGTBI community: the real fight is over subsidies

Every summer the same scene repeats itself: flags on balconies, solemn speeches and a figure that keeps resurfacing in the conversation. The figure of 300,000 euros. That amount, according to the annual accounts of COGAMA, the association that organises Madrid Pride, is what it receives in public subsidies, compared with just 52,000 in membership fees. The contrast fuels an uncomfortable question: does hostility towards the LGTBI agenda stem from gaiity or from public money?

What annoys people is not the orientation, but the noise and the money

A substantial part of the criticism does not question relationships between people of the same sens. What is being pointed at is the "constant drumbeat": the ever-present role in schools, TV series, adverts and town halls, and the pattern of demands that never seem to end. According to this analysis, the problem would not be identity but political instrumentalisation: a grievance is manufactured, courses and observatories are offered as the solution, and the State pays the bill.

The purple points figure illustrates this well: installing that service for a week at a village fair costs 15,000 euros, with volunteer staff and two hours of prior training. The figure circulated as an example of how money is spent on awareness-raising with no apparent oversight.

The Schwarz video and emotional blackmail

In this context, a video by an analyst named Schwarz has been circulating. His thesis: the LGTBI movement has moved from demanding rights to imposing an orthodoxy. The mechanism he describes is threefold: a legitimate grievance is identified, it becomes the only lens through which to analyse reality, and any dissent is incivil as -phobia. The result is blackmail: either you accept the whole programme, or you deny the original discrimination.

Not everyone shares that diagnosis. Some see it as a Manichean simplification, typical of the attention economy: the preachy left and the clumsy right exploit the same media niche. But the idea that excessive prominence generates backlash keeps coming up.

The historical hypocrisy: socialism persecuted too

Another front in the debate is the past of communist regimes. The references to Nicolae Ceaușescu, Mao Zedong and Stalin are explicit: all of them repressed gaiity, some as a bourgeois vice and others through active persecution. The criticism targets those who today sell the left as the community's saviour, ignoring the fact that many of its historical role models practised homophobia as harsh as —or harsher than— the right's.

The response is not long in coming: a distinction is drawn between the "blatant" homophobia of the right, easy to detect and attack, and the "subtle" homophobia of the left, which applauds at Pride and then downplays things in everyday life with subsidies and paternalism. There, one sector adds, real respect is the kind that makes no noise.

The final contrast is disconcerting: while the discussion centres on some 300,000 euros for one particular association, the debate ignores the 400,000 million euros in annual regional government budget. The intensity of the fight over the flag seems inversely proportional to the interest in the big numbers.