Saturday, June 17, 2022, Barcelona, Sónar festival. It’s my first time at an international festival. In fact, it’s my first time at a festival in general, because at 22 years old I’ve never had that experience, not even as an audience member. I’m backstage and there’s half an hour left to premiere an ambitious show designed especially for this occasion. My dancers are doing some stretches that would have already served as staging. In the distance you can hear the clamor of the public, even though they have not yet opened the access to the dance floor. managerGemma del Valle tells us that the organization has decided to bring forward our performance, because the crowd is so huge that they need to open the doors to avoid such a large crowd at the entrance. While they put the inears (headphones) and the technicians rush to their posts, everything falls silent, and the frenzy that anticipated my departure disappears from my mind. Suddenly, a carousel of images starring the Samantha of the past comes to mind…
I remembered those summers in my grandparents’ village in León. A bucolic village sheltered by a beautiful valley where my supposed school holidays took place. And I say supposed because no environment was completely holiday-like for a fat, effeminate teenager who walked through life with the mannerisms of Jessica Rabbit. It might seem that being the school sissy was torture, but that was a caress compared to being the transvestite of a rustic region of León. The summer period, far from granting me a respite from the marginal school life of a “dissident”, became a hell dressed in clear skies and lavender where a horde of ferocious children took over from my classmates, ready to vomit all kinds of insults at me and make me understand through violence that my existence was a problem. Spitting, pushing, shooting with BB guns, offensive comments about my weight, my voice, my gender, my sexual preferences. I even remember one time when they impaled a huge toad with a pointed stick and relentlessly chased me until they cornered me to beat me with that ominous amphibian skewer. I didn’t know if I felt more sorry for myself or for that poor animal that was slowly dying just so transphobia could run wild.
I remembered those summers in the village, where my only consolation in the face of so much adolescent injustice was to hug my grandmother’s skirts, sheltering in her arms and feeling her warmth while I wished she would never know who I really was, because deep down I knew that her outdated ideals and uncompromising morals were going to erase that comforting love that her doughnuts gave me. After all, the candor of her kitchen was always going to be there to save me… unless I dared to put on a dress or sing my freedom without pretending a deep voice.
That was my childhood, my adolescence, a brushstroke of color surrounded by an enormous and gloomy scale of grays, doing the impossible so that the fantasy of living, the illusion of opening my eyes another day, could resist the beatings of a ruthless world that could not stand the unfettered creativity of a girl discovering her path.
I thought back to all the summers I spent throughout my life, hiding from anyone who crossed my path, escaping reality and escaping myself, hiding the bright, gagging the truth of who I was, acting under the yoke of the socially stipulated because I knew, or rather I had been made to know, that someone like me should not have been born.
Suddenly, the music started playing and an electrifying roar filled the venue, filled with an audience that tried hard to drown out the vibration of the speakers with their frenetic cheers. My concert was beginning. show at one of the most important festivals in the world. My show was starting and so was the pain and misfortune that I had suffered for so long.
For the first time in a long time, I remembered who that innocent, introverted girl was, who didn’t want to bother anyone because everything was scary. I also remembered that the person I am today was nothing more than that girl’s dream. I felt proud, happy to be who I was. So, I put on my heels and walked out onto the stage, without resentment, without fear, and with the conviction that not only was I made for the world, but that the world was made for me.
Activist and excommunicated
Samantha Hudson (León, 24 years old) is a singer, actress, influencer and LGTBI activist. In 2015 she published an audiovisual project entitled Maricón, which cost her excommunication by the bishop of Mallorca, but it was in 2021 when she became known as an artist with a monologue at the Feroz Awards. She has participated in Masterchef Celebrityreleased albums and acted in films.
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