Homophobia in the Canary Islands: A personal reflection

Growing up gay in the Canary Islands

The homophobic insults I received as a child had a Canarian accent. Maricón, bujarra, trucha, mariquita, julandron. Before I even knew what I liked, the boys in my neighbourhood and at school wanted to make it clear that I was different, amid mockery, kicks, and those aspirated ‘s’ sounds. In the late 90s, our streets still normalised homophobia; in the early 2000s, the Canary Islands didn’t have even a quarter of the dissident role models it has today. Knowing who you were meant having a constant internal conversation, without an honest connection with others. Building your identity meant being unable to build it at all.

The weight of heteronormativity in Tenerife’s suburbs

In the neighbourhoods of the Tenerife metropolitan area, there was barely any option but to carry the prison of heteronormativity on your shoulders, without arousing suspicion. Making sure it didn’t fall when passing a group of blokes with their TN shirts, gold chains and sunglasses on the backs of their heads. Crossing the street, quickly, without letting the trembling in your legs show. And as you crossed the square, even faster. Not giving any kid the chance to say, ‘Look, we’re one short.’

Football, Tete, ‘el canarión el que no bote’, Don Omar, Aventura, Tego Calderón, souped-up cars, ‘that bird’s a stunner’ and ‘look at me again sideways so you can see’ were the foundations of our streets. This was the benchmark of Canarian identity, also for many queers, lesbians and trans women.

Tourist areas as an escape

The tourist areas functioned as oases from this reality. It is no coincidence that Puerto de la Cruz was the cradle of queer normalisation on the island. For me, Los Cristianos-Las Américas meant an escape from the constant ‘bloody hell mate’ that I no longer wanted to hear directed at me. There I could be Deivid and perform a different person. A heterosexual one, never mind, but far from the homophobia rooted in the Canarian neighbourhood.

If the foreigners also insulted queers, the language barrier meant I didn’t understand them. What mattered was the possibility of another world where the streets rang to the music of Beyoncé, Rihanna and so many other artists who were a refuge for deviants like me. Soon, the walks along the avenue connecting Los Cristianos beach with Las Américas took on another meaning: blonde, blue-eyed blokes with defined torsos began to shape my sexual inclinations too.

‘The girls prefer the V-line to be visible rather than the abs,’ said one of my friends when we passed the stretch where the Hotel Mediterranean Palace was. I wasn’t ‘the girls’, but from then on I had another body part to focus on during the journeys between beaches. That line at the sides where the abdomen ended and the swimwear began.

Discovering desire beyond the neighbourhood

Discovering my sexuality among shirtless foreigners, free from the hostility of my neighbourhood, allowed me two things. It gave wings to the sexual fantasies that my mind personified in the body of a European man ‘from France upwards’, and, years after so many invented worlds and scenes, it helped me lose the fear of fantasising also about what I had rejected. The fascinating thing about desire is that it does not respond to logic or reason, and above all, that it takes us to the darkest and most unexpected places.

The rosary of black beads I was given for my first communion was almost identical to the one worn by the chavs from the estate behind San Honorato. Putting it on and using it in a way I had never done before now took me down one of those shadowy paths. And, on the same forbidden routes, I also invented fantasies that began with ‘and what would it be like with the bullies from the little square?’, ‘and with a fascist?’, ‘and with the chavs in the photos on my sister’s computer?’ Some of those sexual fictions ceased to be fiction and materialised in real life over the years.

Shifting dynamics and the new ‘other’

Reality was changing. In the neighbourhoods of the metropolitan area, the dynamics that had marginalised us from setting foot on certain streets at certain hours were being dismantled. They disappeared, as did those neighbours. The homophobia of that time was reduced through education and waves of gentrification. Chavs, scallies and Latin Americans were driven out of their neighbourhoods, while the number of shirtless tourists increased amid record visitor arrivals.

Today, graffiti asking tourists to ‘get lost’ are common on facades, walls and bus shelters. A shared cry of desperation which, on one hand, coincides with a 6.7% increase in British tourists last June and, on the other, with a response that people are no longer ashamed to utter: ‘The problem isn’t the tourists, it’s the Moors.’ Tension in the streets, where the ‘other’ is being redefined. And soon, a ‘tourists go home’ that begins to be written with the same logic as ‘death to macho men’ and ‘all men are potential rapists’, ceasing to be spontaneous cries for help and becoming maxims upon which to build political imaginaries that point fingers, blame and moralise, without producing changes in the order of things.

Recognition without transformation

The politics of recognition, which allowed me to enjoy pop divas beyond the touristified south, remained just that. Recognising that precarity can also be dusted with glitter. Filling lampposts with stickers that identified us as oppositional, and which I also stuck. Leaving no room to understand why the bully who spent his afternoons on the neighbourhood streets without studying, nor me, who invested mine under the promise of a future, can afford to buy a house today. Poverty in our neighbourhoods is now more diverse than ever, precisely at the moment when echoes of ‘cara al sol’ are resounding, approaching, also in the schools.

Choosing our enemies

Faced with this landscape, the trenches are starting to fill, always pointing at the other to shoot down any opportunity of also finding oneself in them. Sometimes, this other says ‘Allah, please’, ‘Barça’, ‘Barzakh’, other times ‘ciao’, ‘vosotros’, ‘bye’, ‘au revoir’. If the enemy is one of us, we now have a variety of options to choose from. Where to pick, in the retreat, the straw man responsible for all our ills. Where to raise walls to be safe from ourselves.

And in the midst of so many bellicose speeches, the bombing of all understanding, whether the invasion arrives by plane or is picked up by Salvamento Marítimo, of dismissing symptoms with contempt as if they were causes, we queer people from the neighbourhoods keep searching in chavs, mainlanders, whores, Moors, fascists, old people, black people and middle-class women for the homeland we never had. Finding in the ‘enemies’ also little pieces that speak to us of ourselves. Even if they hurt.

And I shout ‘bloody misogynist bastard’ and I want to say ‘the bloody norm that turns you into a man by stripping you of everything that makes us human’ and I yell ‘sod this bloody island’ and I mean the bastards at the top who plunder, exploit and make us precarious and I erupt into ‘foreigner, go home!’ which, on the paths of my desires, means ‘come inside, into my house, finally my house, because I want to discover myself anew.’

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