It's A Scandal

Here's a strange old thing. A Palma councillor has become embroiled in a scandal whereby he has allegedly used 50 grands' worth of council money as payment for visits to bars and clubs - not any bar or club, these are gay venues. Sounds like a lot of money, you might think, and it is. I suppose it's not too difficult to figure out  what some of the money may have been spent on.

The press is lapping it up, so to speak. Had the money gone on the attractions of girlie bars, the scandal would, I suggest, still very much be a scandal, though it might have received more of an "oh, he's a bit of a lad" reaction. Today the front page of "Ultima Hora" has a grainy photo taken by a mobile, which apparently shows Rodrigo de Santos, under a headline bearing the words "orgies" and "drugs". It's all the gift of the Gods for the media. The trousering or rather untrousering of the council's moolah seems almost irrelevant now as gay sex, rent boys and drugs all come to prominence.

There are aspects of Majorcan life of which I am largely unaware. I knew that there were gay bars in Palma, but that's all I knew; thanks to the reporting I could now tell you where you could go and receive favours in return for cash, either one's own or a town hall's, but I won't. Majorca, the Majorca of the tourist, is gay-lite. The scene, such as it is, is centred on Palma and is low-key by comparison with Ibiza. One gets a sense of this when looking around at websites. Choose sites for most major cities and destinations around Europe and chances are there will be a gay and lesbian section. If there are such sections on websites here for parts of Majorca, I haven't come across them. In my part of Majorca in the north, there is a bit of gay beach in Playa de Muro, but in the resorts there is no such thing as a gay bar.

However, Majorca, and Spain, have a relaxed attitude towards homosexuality, or at least that is how it appears. The new maturity of the country's politics, echoed in the PSOE's recent election win, demonstrates that the populace can accept liberal policies such as those on same-sex marriages. Spain has been dubbed a "Nordic" country in the Mediterranean for this very reason, and this in a country of the macho and the Catholic Church, albeit that the latter has a diminishing influence. The scandal, and the prurience that it inspires, is not a reflection of attitude, it is a reflection of the media knowing a good story when they can sell newspapers. It would be the same in Britain; actually it would probably be a lot more sensationalist. That the councillor may have frequented gay clubs is of course part of the "shock" value of the story. But it should not overlook the fact of pocketing a sizable wedge of public money. What he did with it is, in some ways, beside the point.

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