Simon Hunter
THE LOCAL police in Murcia have opened an internal investigation after an inspector forced a Gay Pride show to be stopped because singer Rocio Saiz had removed her shirt and was singing topless.
The 31-year-old musician has for 10 years now sung the song Como yo te amo bare-breasted, something that the inspector in question insisted was against the law ‘because there were children present’.
Until the incident, the Gay Pride concert in the southeastern Spanish city was taking place as normal.
But at the moment Saiz removed her shirt, something that she does to represent women’s right to show their bodies, organisers cut the music and came to tell her that the police had said that ‘either she covered up or they would take me away in handcuffs’.
Speaking to Spanish daily El Pais, the singer said that she refused to do so, and was eventually draped by one of the organisers in a rainbow flag, which is a symbol of the LGBTQ+ communities.
In a statement that she released via social media, Saiz explained that she was told by the inspector that she had ‘broken who knows how many laws’, and that he was shouting at her.
He is also alleged to have said that she ‘doesn’t know what work is because no doubt I had never worked in my life, but that he was doing his job’.
She also claimed that he said that ‘this is what you have voted for’, an apparent reference to the success of the conservative Popular Party at the May 28 local and regional elections but also the far-right Vox party, which is openly hostile toward the LGBTQ+ community and is pledging to roll back equality policies in the administrations where it has representation.
“And he is right, the problem is not him,” Saiz wrote on Twitter, in reference to the police inspector. “This is what you have voted for.”
The Popular Party won the recent regional elections but fell short of a majority, and will need the support of Vox to form a government, while in the local elections the PP won with a majority of 15 seats, compared to the Socialists’ eight and Vox’s six.
When news emerged on Monday that the Murcia police would open a probe into the inspectors actions, she once again took to social media to say: “That they are accepting that this has been an abuse of power is the happiest outcome for me after the humiliation that we suffered at the hands of this man.”
Saiz also denounced the fact that she was receiving hate messages via social media in the wake of the incident, with a screenshot of a man who described her as a ‘degenerate’. But she also received hundreds of messages of support via the same platforms.
Read more:
- Far-right Vox-led council bans gay ‘rainbow’ flag from public buildings in Valencia area town in Spain
- Far-right ‘ultras’ charged with hate crimes after tearing down gay ‘rainbow’ flag from public square in Spain’s Mar Menor
- Spain’s Costa Blanca targets more gay and lesbian tourists plus extra Brits and Germans
