Alberto Méndez Pinto

Homosexual couples legally united

In the first half of the present year, 2005, Spanish law has presented an important change in favour of homosexual couples. After years of fight on the part of this sector of the society, today, finally, in our country, matrimonial links between persons of the same sex is possible.

The opposition to this event is strong from many different sectors, which has provoked an authentic revolution. Nevertheless, that every person has the right to choose with whom to share his/her life means a victory for democracy.

Between those who have been grateful to this new law is Jaime Gonzalo, a young man who presents his story and his internal struggles until he was able to show the world, without any complex, his homosexual condition. Since childhood he felt that he involuntarily felt a sexual desire directed to persons of his same sex. It was something that he neither chose nor was choosing. He was not sure whether this situation was of a genetic origin, but he was neither satisfied with the explanations he heard that referred to homosexuality as a deviation due to psychological factors or related to difficulties in the " family environment ". He was only sure, and it was his real truth, that from early childhood he had had to live with this situation.

As he was growing up, and after leaving his stage of "innocence", he was acquiring a conscience of his situation, and he understood, from what he heard from society, that what he was feeling was an abnormal and unacceptable situation. From that time on he struggled to conceal his reality and tried to be "normal" in society. A very critical one indeed those days! When adolescence and early youth came he felt that, together with developing in the physical and biological way, he was also maturing in the affective and emotional aspect. He felt that his homosexual desire was growing in intensity.

Today he does not want to hide his natural feelings of love, but he wants to live it in his deep intimacy and with discretion. His major desire is to be happy and to share this happiness.

This young man, Jaime, stands out nowadays, and this way finishing, startled, them following.

"To be gay is to accept in essence what we are living what we are in happiness,   developing our potentials, accepting and assuming our capacities and weaknesses; being happy for what we are and living through it;  being conscious that what we do is not bad if we respect the freedom of the others. To be gay is to live through love, freedom and responsibility".