Esteban Jiménez, a Rising Cello Star

His musical vision, full of elegance and sensitivity, always ready to excite, has recently led him to be the second Spanish musician since 1997 to be Laureate in the prestigious Witold Lutoslawski International Competition in Warsaw, where he also obtained the Special Jury Prize for the best interpretation of a work by said composer and Special Prize granted by the Polish Society of Authors and Composers.

Initially a student of Richard Eade's (Soloist at the Seville Royal Symphony Orchestra), and Iagoba Fanlo's (Real C.S.M. Aragón), he has expanded his training in different masterclasses with teachers such as Frans Helmerson, Sung-Won Yang, Johannes Moser or Norbert Anger.

As for his record, he has been awarded first prizes in the 17th International Violoncello Competition in Portugal, the first International Valencia Cello Competition, the Paderewski International Cello Competition or the Slava International Cello Competition, and finalist in others, such as the Llanes 20th International Violoncello Competition or the 7th David Popper International Cello Competition.

His debut as a soloist took place at the age of 11 with the Seville Philharmonia Orchestra, in the León Auditorium, performing the Kódaly Sonata. He has performed on the most important stages in Madrid, such as the Juan March Foundation or the National Auditorium and recently with the Warsaw Philharmonic under the baton of Marek Mos.

He has been part of the prestigious Barenboim-Said Foundation and is currently completing his training at the Katarina Gurska Higher Music Center in Madrid with professors Karolina Styczen and Michal Dmochowski, where he enjoys an Honor Scholarship for his foundation.

How ‘Gay’ Became an Identity in Art

 

Andreas Andersen, “Interior with Hendrik Andersen and John Briggs Potter in Florence,” 1894, from
“The First Homosexuals:The Birth of a New Identity, 1869-1939” at Wrightwood 659 gallery in Chicago.Credit...

 

Two groundbreaking exhibitions in Chicago explore the shift in portrayals of same-sex attraction. They are being staged at a fraught moment. Arthur Lubow reports. 

The New York Times, July 12, 2025

When did homosexuality change from a description of what people do to a definition of who they are? How was an act transformed into an identity? In this precarious moment, as White House pronouncements, court decisions and public polling indicate backsliding support for gay rights in this country, such questions, long chewed over by scholars of sociology, philosophy and gender studies, are addressed in two impressive art exhibitions in Chicago.

Six years in the making, “The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity, 1869-1939,” at Wrightwood 659 gallery in Chicago, through Aug. 2, is an eye-opening global survey of same-sex-oriented art. With roughly 300 works on view, venturing beyond Europe and North America to include Latin America and Asia, it is a huge show. Yet the curator Jonathan D. Katz, who was assisted by Johnny Willis, said that procuring loans from international museums for an exhibition with this title and focus was a struggle, and more often than not, the requests were refused. Indeed, at the last moment, two promised paintings from Slovakia, which is governed by a socially conservative populist party, were withdrawn; a large black-and-white reproduction of one is hanging on a wall.

Coincidentally, a superlative exhibition nearby, “Gustave Caillebotte: Painting His World” at the Art Institute of Chicago until Oct. 5, explores how the Impressionist master concentrated on the portrayal of men, at a time when turning the male gaze on another man was almost unthinkable. Most of his depictions are not overtly homoerotic. However, in a large painting, scandalous in its day and startling even now, he viewed from behind a naked man drying himself. It’s the sort of boudoir picture that his friend Edgar Degas frequently made of female bathers. Caillebotte, who died at 45 in 1894, lived with a woman and never identified as gay. An important lesson drawn from both shows is that categories like gay and straight are markers of our time, not his.

Gustave Caillebotte, “Man at His Bath,” 1884, from “Caillebotte: Painting His World”
at the Art Institute of Chicago. The Impressionist master turned the male gaze on another
man, an almost unthinkable perspective at the time.Credit...via Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

As documented in the erudite and sumptuous “First Homosexuals” catalog, the term “homosexual” (and “heterosexual”) came into being in the 1860s, along with “urning,” a newly coined word that has not lasted so well. Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, a German lawyer, divided humanity into those who are innately attracted to the opposite sex, and the “urnings” who are enamored of their own. A few years later, the writer Karl Maria Kertbeny came up with “homosexual.” Unlike Ulrichs, he viewed sexual choice as a changeable taste, not a binary division, akin to deciding what dish to cook for dinner. Yet in the years that followed, Ulrichs’s hard-and-fast split between gay and straight came to be popularized with Kertbeny’s terminology.

Katz argues that at about the turn of the 20th century, in light of behavioral and psychological research, same-sex attraction shifted. Instead of something that could turn like a weather vane, it came to be regarded as an immutable orientation, and the objects of erotic fascination for gay and lesbian artists changed, too. Earlier gay artists embraced indeterminacy and represented bodies that blurred the line between masculine and feminine. But once homosexuality was no longer viewed as a momentary preference, androgynous adolescents gave way to muscular men and buxom women.

Gustave Courtois, “Narcissus,” 1872, from “The First Homosexuals,” at Wrightwood 659.
Courtois in his early works elided the distinction between male and female.Credit...
Marseille, musée des Beaux-Arts/Claude Almodovar-Michel Vialle; via Wrightwood 659

Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret, “La Blanchisseuse (The Laundress),” 1879. Graphite, ink and ink
wash on paper, Wrightwood 659.Credit...via Schiller & Bodo European Paintings and Wrightwood 659

Two paintings in the show by the academic French painter Gustave Courtois illustrate this transformation. In 1872, Courtois limned the nude body of a young model who posed as the self-adoring Narcissus. With his sex discreetly hidden by a ribbon, Narcissus elides the distinction between male and female. But over the next 35 years, Courtois rechanneled his energies. Painting a portrait of Maurice Dériaz, a professional bodybuilder, in 1907, Courtois clearly relished Dériaz’s dark mustache and bulging biceps as emblems of virility.

Courtois is believed to have been the life partner of another painter, Carl Ernst von Stetten. The exhibition includes a polished drawing of them walking arm in arm, which the art historian André Dombrowski asserts in an essay is the first known depiction of a modern gay male couple in European art. Women more frequently paired off as loving friends; the show features many depictions of lesbian domesticity, including the photos that Alice Austen made on Staten Island at the end of the 19th century, of herself and her friends, holding each other tenderly or frolicking in drag.

Alice Austen, “The Darned Club,” 1891, a depiction of lesbian domesticity. Austen
made a tender image on Staten Island of herself and her friends.Credit...via Wrightwood 659

Many of the gay male encounters portrayed in Western art are fleeting or transactional. In early 20th-century America, George Bellows, who was not gay, made a print of a public bathhouse that centers on a naked effeminate youth flirting outrageously with a stout older chap; and Charles Demuth, who was gay, depicted himself in conversation with two sailors on a street outside the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Same-sex relations between men were thought to be driven by lust, not affection.

But in other cultures, same-sex relations and gender nonconformity were accepted. The exhibition includes fascinating depictions of cross-dressers in the early 19th century on the street in Lima, Peru; the erotic adventures of a young man engaged with male and female lovers in a Japanese scroll from the mid-19th century; and the tender intimacies in the early 20th century of Uzbek men with youths who worked traditionally as singers and dancers.

Francisco Fierro, “Hombres vestidos de mujer,” circa 1834-41, depicts a cross-dresser
on the street in Lima, Peru.Credit...Museo de Arte de Lima, via Wrightwood 659; Photo by Daniel Giannoni

Charles Demuth, “On ‘That’ Street,” 1932. Watercolor over graphite.Credit...via Wrightwood 659

And even in the West, by the end of the 19th century, one can find affectionate scenes of domesticity, such as a painting from 1893 by the Danish artist Emilie Mundt of her female partner, their adopted daughter, and the partner’s elderly father at the piano; and a remarkable portrayal the next year by Andreas Andersen of his sculptor brother Hendrik lying under a duvet and stroking a pink-ribboned kitten, as the artist John Briggs Potter, naked at the foot of the bed, pulls on a sock.

For sheer eccentricity, it would be hard to outdo Elisàr von Kupffer, who called himself Elisarion. With his partner, Eduard von Mayer, also an artist, he lived in a mansion in southern Switzerland that he deemed a temple dedicated to a self-styled religion that denied gender differences. His endearingly campy 1915-16 oil painting of two youths in a chapel being joined in union by another young man, all of them nude, is said to be the first artistic depiction of a same-sex wedding.

Elisàr von Kupffer, “La Nuova lega (The New Union),” 1915-1916, an early depiction
of a same-sex wedding.Credit...Municipality of Minusio — Centro Elisarion, via Wrightwood 659

Unlike these gay fantasies, in the art of Caillebotte there is no certain tip-off to sexual orientation. A wide-ranging talent who energetically pursued boating, boat design, philately and gardening, along with painting, the independently wealthy artist was for many years remembered primarily as a patron of his fellow Impressionists, bequeathing his collection of their work to France. When his own art was rediscovered, it was hailed for its radical use of perspective and cropped framing, which he derived from photography. The more recent curiosity about Caillebotte’s interest in masculine subjects raises questions that can’t be answered, and the curators are careful to avoid making any claims about his sexuality.

But naysayers who argue that finding traces of homoeroticism in Caillebotte’s work is an unsupported anachronism are mistaken. His first major painting, “Floor Scrapers,” depicted bare-chested muscular men stripping the wood parquet in the apartment of his parents. Its rejection by the establishment Salon of 1875 led Caillebotte to ally himself with the Impressionists and exhibit with them the following year. When he took up boating at his country estate outside Paris, his paintings of the sporting activity, unlike those of his colleagues Manet, Monet and Renoir, depicted only lithe men at the oars, rather than fashionable male-female couples. Most of the men he portrayed were not engaged in war, hunting or business, but within domestic settings thought to constitute the feminine domain.

Caillebotte, “Floor Scrapers,” 1875. The Art Institute of Chicago focuses on his subjects,
often lithe men, but the curators are careful to avoid making any claims about his sexuality.Credit...
via of Musée d’Orsay, Dist. GrandPalaisRmn / Franck Raux

These musings are not merely the product of our own day. The almost life-size “Man at His Bath,” with its subject prosaically naked rather than heroically or classically nude, provoked embarrassment and hostility when Caillebotte tried to exhibit it in 1884. It would have held pride of place at Wrightwood 659; none of the artists in that show, gifted and intriguing as many of them are, approaches Caillebotte in achievement. He painted the towel with white and gray slashes of pigment, but stippled the skin lovingly in flesh tones, with rosy highlights on the buttocks. Eventually, the canvas was accepted for an exhibition by the progressive Brussels artists society, Les XX, in 1888, but the organizers hid it in a back room to avoid attention. The following year, the leading Impressionist dealer in Paris, Paul Durand-Ruel, declined to show it, and Caillebotte, who didn’t need to sell his paintings, withdrew from exhibiting for the remainder of his life.

Caillebotte’s reputation hardly rests on his predilection for male subjects. His vertiginous depictions of the street as viewed from his balcony, which are included in the exhibition, are justifiably acclaimed. His most famous painting, “Paris Street; Rainy Day,” a treasure of the Art Institute, with its exaggerated perspective, bold cropping and a choreography that softens the bustle of urban life into a gentle ballet, doesn’t gain anything from scrutinizing in what direction the male protagonist is looking.

“Paris Street; Rainy Day,” 1877. Caillebotte’s masterwork at the Art Institute, with its exaggerated perspective and bold cropping, softens the bustle of urban life into a gentle ballet.Credit...via The Art Institute of Chicago, Charles H. and Mary F. Worcester Collection

Indeed, the hunt for telltale signs of his sexual orientation turns ludicrous at times. The notion that the working-class fellow looking out over the Pont de l’Europe, in Caillebotte’s painting of that name, could be a sex worker eyed by the well-dressed bourgeois who is the artist’s double — as suggested in an essay by a feminist art historian, Norma Broude, that is cited in the catalog — strikes me as absurd. Yet refusing to acknowledge the homosocial, and in some instances homoerotic, elements in Caillebotte’s work is also a distortion of the record.

At this politically charged moment, American arts institutions seem anxious to avoid controversy. Wrightwood 659 offered to send its monumental exhibition to a major museum, without a fee and even covering the costs. It received no acceptances (although an abbreviated version, one-fifth the size, will be shown at the Kunstmuseum Basel next year). And the Art Institute chose a banal and anodyne title for its Caillebotte exhibition, “Painting His World,” forgoing the title of the Musée d’Orsay and the J. Paul Getty Museum shows: “Painting Men.” Asked why, the Chicago curator Gloria Groom said the new title was more “inclusive”: the show displays the artist’s sole female nude and a few other nonconforming works. But in practice, the rebranding obscures the originality of this take on Caillebotte’s oeuvre. Maybe the art world has not come so far as we might think from the days when “Man at His Bath” was hidden in a virtual closet.

The very gay life of writer Edmund White

 By Aaron Hicklin

The New York Times, June 7-8, 2025

Edmund white might have invented the unapologetic queer on the page. At least, he did for me. Nothing coded gay, vaguely tragic; nothing furtive or metaphorical or obscure behind the billowing curtains of literary flounciness.

I can still recall the thrill of spotting the cover of his 1983 novel "A Boy's Own Story" in a rotating rack of paperbacks in a bookstore in my dull, conservative hometown, Marlborough, England. I must have been about 15. It was the mid-1980s, the thick of the AIDS plague, and gay men were being cast as vectors of their own destruction.

It was a complicated time to be thinking about coming out. But here was a novel with a boy on the cover who looked close to my age, his thick glossy hair gently ruffled by the wind, his lips plump, his jaw strong. His tank top revealed the slope of his shoulders, the contours of his biceps.

I'd never seen a cover or read a book that spoke to me like that. The fact that a gay teenager could exist in fiction blew my mind. The fact that one, like me, could exist in the world did, too. "A Boy's Own Story" was daring not just because it placed a queer adolescent at its center, but also because it did so with sophistication, introspection and horniness. The narrator --clearly, as with all of his narrators, based on him-- is vividly real.

Ed White and I were later to become friends, when I had  moved to New York and was editing Out magazine. This was not a surprise: Ed, who died on Tuesday [June 3] at 85, was always very open to meeting young literary men. He was a raconteur and had stories for miles. I lapped them up. We all did.

Talking frankly about sex was a hallmark of his writing. (Among his many nonfiction works was "The Joy of Gay Sex," a sex manual he co-wrote [with Dr. Charles Silverstein] in 1997.) He always saw himself as a gay writer for gay readers, the distinction he drew between his generation of queer writes and those who came earlier, like Gore Vidal and James Baldwin. They might write gay characters, but they never seemed to be writing for gay readers. Ed was.

The Stonewall riots of 1969, which he took part in, had reshaped him. Before Stonewall, "we had always thought of ourselves as a diagnosis, as a malady," he once told me, echoing the medical establishment's view of homosexuality. "Suddenly, it was all switched, and we were a minority. I saw myself as a freedom fighter. It mobilized my anger. I just think anger towards other people is better than self-hatred."

His most recent book, "The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir," published in January, continued that fight to just tell his story, both his own and also, though the details might vary, all queer people's. Ed had no patience for prudes, and he loved to talk about young lovers who were "gerontophiles," a word he clearly relished. He didn't care for respectability. "Gay men have seldom been candid about their sex lives and are even less so now they are getting married and fathering offsprings," he wrote in a rather salty forward to "The Loves of My Life."

Off the page, he was just as defiant. The British writer and playwright Neil Bartlett recalls attending a lavish soiree in Paris in 1984, hosted by Marie-Claude Brunhoff, a society fixture. Mr. Bartlett was Ed's companion for the night, and was, at Ed's insistence, seated next to the host despite his wearing eyeliner, a chain around his neck, and jeans peppered with so many holes you could see right through them. "I have never been prouder to be someone's piece of rough trade," Mr. Bartlett said.

One virtue of being a pioneer of autofiction: Everything is already out there. Ed never felt the need to censor himself. "From the beginning of his writing career, White enjoyed shocking readers in the spirit of Jean Genet. on whom White wrote a wonderful biography," said the writer and academic Blake Smith. "You can find basically every sexual scenario from incest to cuckoldry to hustling in his novels --and a lot of it in his memoirs as well!"

The last time I saw Ed was on April 7, in what would be the final on-camera interview for a documentary Brian Montopoli and I are making. Ed was eager to plumb his memories, even if the names sometimes took a little longer to surface. Sitting in his small apartment in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood, I felt that I had stepped into a vanished New York, one where books spilled from the shelves and the walls crowded with art from friends --including a portrait by Robert Mapplethorpe of Ed with Truman Capote.

Whenever I visited, I'd bring a cake or cookies, and we'd sit at the cluttered dining table, while Ed brought me up to speed on what he'd read, who had visited, and what he was working on. He was always working on something. That never changed. A new novel was underway, he told us; another had just been sent to his agent.

We talked a lot about the legacy of the Violet Quill, a group of seven gay writers that met irregularly in New York in 1980 and 1981 and that included Christopher Cox, Robert Ferro, Michael Grimley, Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, Georgee Whitmore and Ed. Four died during the height of the AIDS epidemic. Mr. Picano died in March. Only Mr. Holleran now remains.

On that last visit, we landed on our documentary's working title: "The Winter of Edmund White," a nod to his age, but not to his spirit, which remained impish, magnetic and razor sharp. When the subject of death arose, he was characteristically unflinching. "The dying part I don't look forward to, but being dead is OK. It's like being asleep," he said. Then, with that sly, knowing smile of his, he added, "I guess I think if I keep writing, I won't die."

On that score, he was right. Through his books, Ed endures. He embraced the role of gay elder, guiding generations who came to him for direction and support. No one was better read or more willing to share what he had read. His apartment was a kind of salon, where he and his partner, the writer Michael Carroll, hosted a rotating cast of artists, writers and thinkers. He was so generous with his time, and endlessly curious.

So many younger writers owe their careers to his encouragement and support (he was prolific at writing blurbs for debut authors' books), and in a sense they could be called his progeny. "He was like my N.Y.C. parent," the writer Christopher Bollen replied when I texted him to commiserate. "I'm so heartbroken. But also so lucky."

A revelation from that last interview was that Ed still met weekly with a boyfriend from his teenage years. For someone who had lost so many friends and lovers, this struck me as profoundly poignant, but it also exemplified Ed's idea of queer or chosen family, long before the term became hackneyed. He had gone through AIDS, and contracted HIV in 1984. He understood that queer family was all he had.

Writing for Ed was a confessional. In more that 30 novels and memoirs he revisited much of the same territory, even when his books were set in the future, like his 2022 novel "A Previous Life," in which he explored a devastating affair with a young Italian aristocrat by imagining his former lover as a ridiculous old man looking back on a forgotten gay novelist called Edmund White. What an audacious move for an octogenarian novelist. He was also a stylist, one who cared about sentences, but he also liked to "roughen up beautiful surfaces," to quote the writer Garth Greenwell, another White protégé.

"If gays have gone from invisibility to ubiquity and from self-hatred to self-acceptance, we should recognize we are still being pushed off cliffs in Yemen --and from the top fronds of Florida palms, for all I know," he wrote in "The Loves of My Life."

Most important, he understood that our stories had to be written so they could not be undone, and that books were the last defense against erasure. That his death should come on the same day that Defense Secretary Pete Hegeseth has ordered the Navy to review the names of vessels honoring prominent civil rights leaders, including Harvey Milk, is the kind of bitter coincidence that probably would have made him laugh.

Not that he craved straight society's approval. Edmund White had no use for shame, and, in both life and work, he refused to sand down the edges of queer existence to make it palatable. Acceptance was never the point. Truth was.

Spain Is an Example to the World

By Omar G. Encarnación

The New York Times, August 11, 2025

Migrants on the Spanish island of Gran Canaria last year. 

PHOTO: Borja Suarez/Reuters

Spain is having a moment bucking Western political trends. The country has recently recognized Palestine as a state, resisted President Trump’s demand that NATO members increase their defense spending to 5 percent of gross domestic product and doubled down on D.E.I. programs. But there’s no better example of Spain going its own way than immigration. At a time when many Western democracies are trying to keep immigrants out, Spain is boldly welcoming them in.

The details are striking. In May, new regulations went into effect that eased migrants’ ability to obtain residency and work permits, and the Spanish Parliament began debating a bill to grant amnesty to undocumented immigrants. These reforms could open a path to Spanish citizenship to more than one million people. Most of them are part of a historic immigration surge that between 2021 and 2023 brought nearly three million people born outside the European Union to Spain.

Demand has something to do with it: Like many Western democracies, Spain needs more people. Last year the national birthrate was 1.4, the second lowest in the European Union and well below the 2.1 threshold needed to maintain the country’s population level of around 48 million people. Spain also has a big economy — the fourth largest in the E.U. — fueled by a travel and tourism industry that is brimming with jobs that most Spaniards do not want.

But unlike in other countries, backlash has been strikingly muted. That’s partly because some of these pro-migrant measures stem from society at large. The push for the undocumented immigrants’ amnesty did not originate with the government, tellingly, but with a popular petition that garnered 600,000 signatures and was endorsed by 900 nongovernmental organizations, business groups and even the Spanish Conference of Bishops. The government, in turn, has designed a humane and pragmatic approach, offering an example for other countries to emulate.

There are, to be sure, some very Spanish reasons for the exception. Because of its vast overseas empire, Spain was for centuries a mass exporter of people. During the Spanish Civil War and the four-decade-long dictatorship of Gen. Francisco Franco, some two million people were forced to leave the country, fleeing famine, violence and political repression. Up until the 1970s, Spain provided migrant laborers to farms and factories across Europe. After the 2008 financial crisis, which sent unemployment soaring to 25 percent, thousands of professionals left Spain for jobs abroad.

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This rich and complex history helps explain the relatively high level of tolerance for immigration among Spaniards. In 2019, a Pew survey found that Spain had by far the most positive attitude toward immigrants in Europe. This was no outlier. A 2021 study of polls going back about 30 years showed that “Spain has consistently maintained more open attitudes toward immigration than the European average, with less rejection and a greater appreciation of its contributions to society and the economy.”

Spain’s fragmented sense of national identity is another important factor. The strength of regional nationalism in places like Catalonia, the Basque Country and Galicia makes it harder for right-wing politicians to mobilize the public against immigration through nationalist appeals and xenophobic arguments. A Spanish version of “France for the French,” the doctrine of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, would be absurd in Spain. It took until 2019 for an explicitly anti-migrant party, the far-right Vox, to even enter the Spanish Parliament.

Ultimately, however, Spain’s immigration politics owe most to the administration of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, one of the last exponents of social democracy in Europe. Although decidedly liberal, Mr. Sánchez’s approach is far from an experiment with open borders. Instead, it’s as pragmatic as it is deliberate. It’s true he has built-in advantages not shared by other European leaders. But by marrying practical solutions to an uplifting message, he has provided a case study in how to build support for progressive immigration policies.

For starters, the government smartly prioritized immigrants from Latin America, allowing them to apply for citizenship after just two years. Fluent in Spanish and overwhelmingly Catholic, Latin American immigrants blend with the local culture even in the least cosmopolitan parts of Spain. A case in point are Venezuelans, who are now barred from entering the United States, thanks to Mr. Trump. To enter Spain, they need only a plane ticket and a valid passport. In the first three months of the year, 25,000 took up the opportunity.

A lot of strategic thinking has gone into using immigration to alleviate some of Spain’s biggest problems. Labor shortages in technology, hospitality, agriculture and elderly care, for example, are being addressed by granting international students work permits. Immigrants have also been incentivized to settle in so-called Empty Spain, those parts of the country where the population has dried up. Some of the 200,000 Ukrainian refugees who have settled in Spain since 2022 have brought new life to villages and towns on the brink of extinction.

Most important, perhaps, Mr. Sánchez has excelled at framing the case for immigration. He has emphasized its economic benefits, including bringing younger workers into the social security system and filling jobs unwanted by Spaniards. An expanding economy is adding authority to these arguments. Since the pandemic, the Spanish economy has outperformed its European counterparts. Last year, while Germany, France and Italy experienced modest growth or even a contraction, Spain grew a healthy 3.2 percent.

Even so, Mr. Sánchez has not shied away from speaking in moral terms, drawing on Spain’s history as a nation of migrants and refugees. “We have to remember the odysseys of our mothers and fathers, our grandfathers and grandmothers in Latin America, in the Caribbean and Europe,” he told Parliament last year. “And understand that our duty now, especially now, is to be that welcoming, tolerant, supportive society that they would have liked to find.”

How long Spain will continue to extend the welcome mat is an open question. Polls show that concerns about immigration among Spaniards are rising, driven in part by the sensationalist coverage of the arrival of African refugees. Thousands have drowned in recent years attempting to reach Spain, and those who manage to enter the country are generally deported. Right-wing parties, especially Vox, are exploiting this humanitarian crisis. Should Vox manage to enter government after the next election, which must be held before August 2027, a turn against immigration will certainly follow.

For now, though, Spain is proving an important point: A generous immigration policy is not a threat to the nation or to a thriving economy. More than that, it is a resource for growth and renewal that Spain’s peers spurn at their cost.

The Black Hole ⚫️ a short film about greed

 

Looking the other way / Wegschauen

By Ricki Blanco, El País, 28.07.25

Of course I've seen the photos of starving Gazan children, but the thing is

I don't understand politics…

Natürlich habe ich die Fotos der hungernden Kinder im Gazastreifen gesehen, 

aber ich verstehe nichts von Politik…

Alain de Botton on the Benefits of Being Away from Home

Estrada Nacional 2, Alentejo, Portugal. Photo: Toni Amengual

Though we tend to love our homes and think of them as anchors of identity, there are also disturbing ways in which they can fix us unhelpfully to a version of ourselves we no longer wish to side with. The familiar curtains and pictures subtly insist that we should not change because they do not, our well-known rooms can anaesthetize us from a more urgent, necessary relationship with particular questions.

It may not be until we have moved across an ocean, until we are in a hotel room with peculiar new furniture and a view onto a motorway and a supermarket full of products we don't recognize that we start to have the strength to probe at certain assumptions. We gain freedom from watching the take-offs and landings of planes in a departure lounge or from following a line of distant electricity pylons from a train making its way across barren steppes. In the middle of a foreign landscape, thoughts come to us that would have been reluctant to emerge in our own beds. We are able to take implausible but important leaps, encouraged by the changes around us, from the new light switches to the cyrillic letters blinking in illuminated signs all around us.

Being cut loose from the habitual is the essential gift of travel, as uncomfortable as it may be psychologically fruitful. Christianity once took our feelings of dislocation and placed them at the heart of a thesis as to the spiritual benefit of pilgrimages. Without accepting the church's analysis, we may nevertheless be inspired by its approach to the value of feeling like a lonely outsider. As much as any destination, it is isolated periods in untried hotel rooms, in paleozoic canyons, in disintegrating palaces and empty service station restaurants that facilitate an underlying psychological or spiritual point of our journeys. (The Observer, Sunday, June 6th, 2010)

Alain de Botton is the author of many books including 'How Proust Can Change Your Life' , 'The Art of Travel' and 'Essays in Love'. His most recent work 'A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary' is published by Profile Books.

The Night Train_short film

The Night Train (Nattåget) is a precious Swedish short film directed by Jerry Carlsson, and first released at the 2020 Venice Film Festival, starring actors Khalil Ben Gharbia (Paris, 1999) and Erik Nilsson (Stockholm, 1993). 15 min.

Oskar is on the night train, heading home after an interview in Stockholm. With a long night ahead of him, he makes eye contact with Ahmad. For the first time, he meets the gaze of someone who feels the same desire as he does.

Berlin's Memorial to the Homosexual Victims of National Socialism

In Nazi Germany, homosexuality was persecuted to a degree unprecedented in history. In 1935, the National Socialists issued an order making all male homosexuality a crime; the provisions governing homosexual behaviour in Section 175 of the Criminal Code were significantly expanded and made stricter. A kiss was enough reason to  prosecute. There were more than 50,000 convictions. Under Section 175, the punishment was imprisonment; in some cases, convicted offenders were castrated. Thousands of men were sent to concentration camps for being gay; many of them died there. They died of hunger, disease and abuse or were the victims of targeted killings. 

The National Socialists destroyed the communities of gay men and women. Female homosexuality was not prosecuted, except in annexed Austria; the National Socialists did not find it as threatening as male homosexuality. However, lesbians who came into conflict with the regime were also subject to repressive measures. Under the Nazi regime, gay men and women lived in fear and under constant pressure to hide their sexuality.

For many years, the homosexual victims of National Socialism were not included in public commemorations –neither in the Federal Republic nor in the German Democratic Republic. In both East and West Germany, homosexuality continued to be prosecuted for many years. In the Federal Republic, Section 175 remained in force without amendment until 1969.

Because if its history, German has a special responsibility to actively oppose the violation of gay men’s and lesbians’ human rights. In many parts of the world, people continue to be persecuted for their sexuality, homosexual love remains illegal and a kiss can be dangerous.

With this memorial, the Federal Republic of Germany intends to honour the victims of persecution and murder, to keep alive the memory of this injustice, and to create a lasting symbol of opposition to enmity, intolerance and the exclusion of gay and lesbians.

The memorial sits on the edge of Berlin’s biggest park, Tiergarten, within view of the Brandenburg Gate, Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, and the new, terror-proof American Embassy. It consists of a concrete stele, thirteen feet high, with a small window through which viewer’s can watch a looped video, shot by Robby Müller (Wim Wenders’s cinematographer) and directed by Dogma 95 cofounder Thomas Vinterberg, of two men and two women kissing. The memorial was designed by the Danish-Norwegian duo artists Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, and was inaugurated in 2008.

Homo Memorial in Tiergarten, Berlin