Sexual Liberalism in Spain, Explained — Ahead of the Gay Games
This month we are celebrating Pride, and Valencia is hosting the Gay Games — the world’s largest LGBTQ+ sporting event, bringing over 9,000 athletes from every continent to our city from June 27 to July 4. It felt like the right moment to ask a question that doesn’t get asked enough: how did Spain get here?
When Spain became the third country in the world to legalise same-sex marriage in 2005, many international observers were surprised. How could a country that had been under a fascist dictatorship for most of the twentieth century suddenly be at the forefront of marriage equality? The answer is that the cultural work had been done thirty years earlier, in the streets and cinemas and bars of the transition.
What came before
To understand where Spain is now, you need to sit briefly with where it was. Under Francisco Franco’s dictatorship, which ran from 1939 until his death in 1975, homosexuality was not merely socially taboo — it was a punishable crime. It is estimated that between 4,000 and 5,000 homosexuals were imprisoned during the dictatorship. The lucky ones simply disappeared into silence. This is not medieval history — Franco died less than fifty years ago, and it is still very much in many people’s psyche.
El destape
After Franco’s death, something uncorked. The Spanish word is destape — literally, “the uncovering.” It described the wave of sexual openness that swept the country almost immediately after the dictatorship ended, and it was less a political movement than a collective exhale. Censorship ended, and an “S” rating was created for cinema, allowing films with explicit content to enter the mainstream. Magazines ran nude covers. Bodies appeared in public space that had been hidden for decades.
The speed was the thing. Countries that had never been under such harsh sexual repression took decades to shift. Spain did it almost overnight.
La Movida
Then there is la Movida: the cultural explosion that swept Spain through the late 1970s and 1980s, where sexual liberalism stopped being transgression and became identity — centred on Madrid, but felt everywhere.
Neighbourhoods filled with drag contests. The Chueca district, once avoided, became home to Madrid’s first openly gay-owned businesses. An entire generation of artists, musicians and filmmakers built a specific aesthetic out of the rubble of repression.
Pedro Almodóvar, who emerged from this period, made films where gay characters, trans women, and sexual nonconformity of every variety were not the subject of drama or moral reckoning — just people living lives. That framing mattered. It modelled something to audiences across the country: that this was normal. Spanish normal, specifically.
What that produced
The Spain that exists today, where a same-sex couple walking hand in hand in Valencia draws no particular attention and Pride is a mainstream civic event rather than an act of protest. Where the Gay Games arriving in the city is a point of pride rather than controversy. Valencia was chosen partly because Spain already has some of the most progressive human rights frameworks for LGBTQ+ people in the world.
But what is important to understand is that the framework didn’t create the atmosphere — the atmosphere made the framework possible. What visitors arriving for the Games this week will find is a city, and a country, where the liberalism is not performative. It was truly earned, as one of the most magnificent examples of human resistance and joy.
A very Spanish combination.
