The first time I heard about Sitges was when my one-time girlfriend told me about a club she’d visited there showing Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange - then unavailable in the UK - on a large screen above the dance floor.
Thus, the town entered into my thoughts as a place of improbable glamour, excess and mystery, a kind of bohemian hedonists’ paradise on sea.
Fast forward 15 years to the present day and Sitges is the town where my parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles in law all live, a friendly, welcoming collection of people who wouldn’t know hedonism if they found it in the shower.
Strangely, though, this has only made the town all the more interesting for me. Sitges is a town of immense contrasts, where the public and private lives, tourist and local experiences, summer and winter are almost unrecognisable to each other, a place where Catalan tolerance and general skill for bumping along happily enough resonate. And if you don’t necessarily have to have grandparents-in-law there to realise that, it does at least help.
Sitges is ‘the Jewel of the Mediterranean’, a small seaside town built on fishing and wine; it stages one of Europe’s most famous film festivals; it is also, famously, “the gay city of Spain”, home to a wealth of gay and gay-friendly bars, home to Mr. Bear Sitges and a resplendent Gay Pride, including - why not? - a High Heels race.
For British people what Sitges most closely resembles is Brighton - an unorthodox seaside resort where people form the nearby capital go to escape the day to day. But while Brighton has some 273,000 residents, sprawling over a reasonably large portion of coast and hills, Sitges is tiny, home to just 30,000 people and 5,000 hotel beds, as well as the thousands of day trippers who arrive on the train from Barcelona, all packed into claustrophobically small streets.
Sitges is like Brighton, then, but amplified and condensed, packed into a needle’s eye but no less exuberant for that. It’s a weird place, really, but whenever I mention this to my girlfriend, who grew up in Sitges, she just shrugs and says its was the perfect place to be young.
This shrugging seems typical of local’s responses to Sitges and its endearing strangeness and I find it very admirable.
“Doesn’t it bother you that Sitges is always packed with tourists?” Shrug. “How can you drive a car here?” More shrugs. “And the noise from the clubs?” Shrug shrug shrug.
This happy shrugging also pretty much sums up local residents’ response to their town’s fabulously gay fame. Sitges was home to Spain’s first gay club, Trailer, in the 1980s and also plays host to the country’s oldest gay nude beach. Today it is known as one of Europe’s premier gay resorts, with 35 gay clubs, saunas and hotels listed on sitges.nighttours.com.
The locals - some of whom are gay too, of course - know all this. And their response is sanguine, barely batting an eyelid as muscled gay couples walk arm in arm down the street, stopping for a quick nuzzle.
Of course, in an ideal world, this should be nothing of note. No one should ever be judged on their sexual preferences and we should all be free to give affection as we see fit.
But we don’t live in an ideal world and it is telling that stuffy insitutionalist British newspaper The Telegraph in its generally very positive review of Sitges warns readers who are troubled by “public displays of same-sex affection” to stay outside of the centre of town. Put it this way: I can imagine my own grandmother’s response to staying in Sitges and it wouldn’t be that happy.
My girlfriend’s grandmother, on the other hand, is delighted to call Sitges home. She’s lived there since the 50s and wouldn’t want to go anywhere else.
“Has Sitges always been similarly bohemian?” I ask, rather skirting around the issue.
She shrugs (of course). Yes, she replies, it started with the artists who came here in the 19th century.
And the gay visitors?
She shrugs again. It’s none of her business.
Perhaps I shouldn’t be so surprised by this: Spain is, according to the Pew Research Centre, the country that is most accepting of homosexuality, with some 88% of Spaniards saying it should be accepted by society (versus 60% in the US and 76% in the UK).
But for many British people Spain is still seen as still being a deeply religious place (rightly or not) and - as Pew points out - there is “far less acceptance of homosexuality in countries where religion is central to people’s lives”.
Sitges is the counter to this idea: a gloriously liberated little town, where grandmothers push shopping baskets down the Calle del Pecado (disappointingly not its real name) and the Corpus Christi Flower Festival joins Gay Pride in the municipal calendar.
Yes, it is expensive, jam packed with people and often impossible to find towel space on the beach. But in a world where only 1% of Nigerians think that homosexuality is acceptable, then Sitges’ famous shrugging might be a lesson to us all.
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