BoBink, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Monument contra l'homofòbia
A 2006 pink-triangle sculpture on the Sitges seafront, marking 5 October 1996.
Reasons to check it out
- An inverted pink triangle in painted iron, 110cm on a cement base, put up on the Passeig Marítim in 2006
- Marks the tenth anniversary of the events of 5 October 1996, when the town's gay scene was violently confronted
- The plaque reads 'Sitges contra la homofòbia / Mai més / 5 d'octubre de 1996-2006'
- Catalogued by the town council itself as part of the municipal open-air sculpture park, not left as a private memorial
The nearest thing Sitges has to a thesis statement is 110 centimetres tall, made of iron sheet painted pink, and pointing downwards at a cement block on the seafront promenade.
An inverted triangle is not a neutral shape. It is the badge homosexual prisoners were made to wear in Nazi camps, reclaimed by activists in the 1970s, and choosing it for a monument in a resort town in 2006 was a decision to make the place's queer history read as history rather than as a brochure.
What the date on the plaque means
The plaque says: Sitges contra la homofòbia / Mai més / 5 d'octubre de 1996-2006. Sitges against homophobia. Never again.
The 1996 half needs unpacking, and the sources do not fully agree, which is worth saying rather than smoothing over. The town council's own sculpture-park catalogue records only that the monument marks the tenth anniversary of homophobic incidents in Sitges on 5 October 1996. PinkNews, reporting the unveiling in 2006, describes a demonstration ten years earlier against a plan to record gay men on the beach at night, and violent counter-protest — eggs and stones — against the people demonstrating. Fuller and grimmer accounts circulate in guidebooks and listicles; none of them is sourced well enough to repeat here.
What is not in dispute is the response. The town did not quietly host a plaque paid for by a bar association. It put the thing on the main seafront and catalogued it in the municipal sculpture park, which is a very specific kind of civic statement.
When to actually stand in front of it
It takes two minutes to look at and it is free, so the honest advice is about when rather than whether. The monument sits on the open promenade with the sea behind it and no shade, and in high summer at midday it reads as street furniture you walk past on the way to a beach. Early morning or the hour before sunset, with the promenade half-empty, it reads as what it is.
Don't miss the base. It is a working memorial, not a finished one — people leave things there, as the 2016 photograph above shows, and what is at its foot on any given day is more of the point than the sculpture above it.
It is a ten-minute walk from here up to Parrots and the bar strip, and doing those two in that order — monument first, terrace after — is a better afternoon than doing it the other way round.
Sources: Ajuntament de Sitges — Parc escultòric: 18 · Sitges contra l'homofòbia, PinkNews — Monument against homophobia in Sitges (11 October 2006), Wikimedia Commons — Category: Monument against homophobia in Sitges (geotagged)
