W alther Valbuena, a journalist and drag artist, had to leave Colombia. His best friend, a trans woman, had been murdered by a former lover who wanted to get his hands on their apartment. “My only crime was being her friend,” he says.
“I was shot in the leg. When I went to the police, they dismissed it, saying it’s not serious. I explained that I was shot at during a robbery and they said, no, it was because you’re a maricón [poof].
” Valbuena, 37, is from Cali, which he describes as “the capital of salsa”; he now finds himself in the more sedate surroundings of Campdevànol, a village of 3,200 people in the foothills of the Catalan Pyrenees, as a pioneer in the programme Comunitats Rurals Queer. Relocating LGBTQ+ refugees to small villages may not be the most obvious way of slowing the depopulation of rural Catalonia, but for Jordi Coch, the rural activist who devised the programme, the aim is twofold: to break with the stereotype of rural communities being narrow-minded and intolerant; and to mitigate one of the least discussed causes of rural depopulation. “People leave villages for economic reasons, for lack of work or services, but they also leave because they have a different or dissident sexual identity,” he says.
“We want to bring refugees who are refugees because of their sexual preferences, because people with different sexual identities who live in rural areas don’t have role models. We want to create this community.” View image in fulls.
