PUT THAT IN YOUR PRIDE AND SMOKE IT, AGAIN (AND AGAIN AND AGAIN)

what happens in chueca happens again and again in chueca. and it wasn’t any surprise that i’d found myself again (but again) in that subterranean disco where i’d lost the key to my spanish boyfriend’s heart, which maybe hadn’t been not so long before but was definitely very early on. still, we (you or i, anyway) wouldn’t have expected to see so many people at the bars that evening after, or, well, we wouldn’t have expected to see so many people at the bars to watch the tournament final between spain and italy. and after the rout (after the rest of the country joined chueca in singing that one queen song), we remarked again that we wouldn’t have expected to see the streets so clean that evening after -- after having seen them so almost unimaginably dirty at eight o’clock that morning. it had been a party the night before, in the streets, city sanctioned and only halfassedly supervised by the municipal police. and as had been noted at the party, the new mayor of madrid would just have to eat her humble ham, and that meant pride cleanup…and own up: that pride is money, and that the argument she’d made about the pears and the apples in opposition to the same sex marriage law hadn’t made any fucking sense. not that we had been at the party the night before to be proud of money or marriage, but, well, we all have to try to meet somewhere in between, and the night before people were meeting at the party (although, probably, the new mayor wasn’t there). still, she had the ghetto cleaned up in time for the people to go back to watch the game and to restart the party -- or, as it were, to go back to the party to watch the game. and then the party continued after the game. and then, as if as a reward for having roused ourselves on that second day to support the country and the party and the country of the party, answers. and consequence. of course, with the streets full of flags it was only a matter of encounters before we found out that the columns were the columns of hercules, but none of us could have expected (and none of us at all this time) that the man who would make that explanation, the man from murcia, would end up dancing the sevillanas with us when they put them on at the bar into which we followed him and his…well, whatever you’d call them  but what did it matter? and this -- our impromptu homo feria the day after the party happened in chueca (where the party will always happen again, and where we hadn’t been surprised that we’d found ourselves, again, in that other subterranean bar dancing with the guy who wasn’t from brooklyn and the one who wasn’t piqué) -- if we couldn’t argue that we hadn’t already had our pride the night before with the rest of them, well, then we were uniquely proud of this. and we danced with light and heavy hearts. and when the bar closed, the streets were still clean -- at least, that is, in chueca, because the party that night was further to the south and to the east, although we didn’t realize the extent of it until we went in search of a taxi on gran via and were met with the phalange of national police that was sweeping the crowds away from the cibeles (as the crowds threw their empty bottles at the advancing line, those bottles that the municipal police had, for another night in a row, allowed the crowd to empty in the streets). and so the next day we skirted gran via and the cibeles carefully, not for the memory of the police (who were nothing but helpful in directing us to where we could find a cab as they removed one of the barriers that the crowd had raised in the road) but for our knowledge of the crowd. and the victorious national selection arrived at the cibeles to greet its still frenzied (reintoxicated) supporters. we could hear them, and we could see the tide flowing out down the paseo del prado to meet the sea of red and yellow around the fountain. but we skirted them. the bear trying to get drunk at the madroño tree was the municipal symbol more representative of our weekend, anyway. still, somehow, and maybe it was the sloth of the finally waning hangover -- but really, who are we kidding, it was early regret and nostalgia -- the red and the yellow, the kingdoms and the crowns surrounded by the pillars of hercules: that giant flag of aznar’s billowing languidly over the plaza de colón with the setting sun shining occasionally in between the billows was comforting…or inspiring…or maybe seemed somehow deserved. fucking immigrants. but that’s why we love freedom.