The question is as uncomfortable today as it was 25 years ago. How does one make amends for the innocent, especially when it comes to celebrities who are publicly paraded in sordid trials turned into spectacles? Because the pain remains. Jesús Vázquez shows it clearly in the documentary series Arny: A Story of Disgrace (which premieres this Friday on HBO Max), in which the ’90s actor and fashion host recalls being swept up in a few months of homophobic rage in the mud with Jorge Cadaval (from Duo Los Morancos) and Javier Gurruchaga (from La orquesta Mondragón). Nothing to do with that case of exploitation of minors in a downtown bar that shook a conservative Seville hungover from Expo ’92. The case morbidly entertained Spain, with a parallel trial on television that saw a vein in the three-ring circus celebrities, sex and lies leading to a very local affair. The docuseries is a collective atonement in three chapters and an invitation to reflect on whether we’ve learned anything.
All were marked by this case of underage prostitution that rocked a Spain where gays were openly called “faggots”: those acquitted (32, including all celebrities), those convicted (16, including an aristocrat), the victims (es it was proved that there was underage prostitution in this bar), the press (which showed the taints of faded journalism), the judicial system (which was as blind as Carca)… All muddy with noise and shame.
Jesús Vázquez is the backbone of the three-part documentary directed by Juan Moya, which focuses on the failure of the system, the parallel process and shame; in the persecution of homosexuals that was effectively unleashed with this case and that ended up devastating the then nucleus of the first Chueca in the 1990s (Madrid neighborhood) Sevillian-style. Vázquez is the only one of the celebrities involved to show his face in the production, which covers the botched investigation into this affair, which ran amok in 1996 when it was revealed that celebrities were involved in a case of underage corruption. which hitherto had passed painlessly and ingloriously on straight pages, in tail summaries.
“Not one judge judged me, the whole society judged me”, sums up Jesús Vázquez between tears that they can never erase after the ordeal he endured with his mother, before which he was in court he even lied, he was acquitted to die in peace.
The Arny’s Pub case in Seville went from a purely local affair to a national scandal in January 1996 when it was revealed that some twenty people with connections to the world of entertainment, politics, media and justice were being investigated by the Group of Minors (Grume ) of the Police of Seville. The then-owner of the Investigative Court No. 13 of Seville, María Auxiliadora Echávarri, is the worst station in the series (which she didn’t want to take part in). It was the time of the witch hunt: a pool was published every morning in which the only condition had to be to be a known homosexual and to be seen on the streets of Seville. It was the joke of bars, including ambient bars, around town.
Curiosity was unleashed and spread to TV shows, where notably Crónicas marcianas and La sonrisa del pelicano used the matter to win over audiences. The greed came: a lawyer prepared a document offering the TV channels en bloc 35 witnesses or defendants (for 40 million pesetas then, 240,000 euros today, without applying inflation for almost 30 years) or for up to 600,000 pesetas per person, a business that denounced EL PAÍS.
The Arny Club, in an image that appears in the documentary.
The parallel trial, even before the hearing began, was tragic for people like Jesús Vázquez or the juvenile judge Manuel Rico Lara (acquitted and now deceased), a humanist who fell victim to a clear revenge of united forces. But it also served to see how the case was built on an original lie, that of “witness number 1”, José Antonio Sánchez Barriga, who, after blaming left and right, said one fine day (first on TV and for a low price, of course), that it was all a lie, that it was “a small job” that the police had given him. Today he is still in prison: he committed three murders (one of them under age, even before Arny: he told it as an anecdote one day). It didn’t matter: they all went to the bench.
The documentary by Cuarzo Producciones offers a soul-searching on the “media circus” that erupted around the Arny trial, but puts aside the actual convictions of prostitution and corruption of minors to focus on the system’s failure to shame the persecution, in the damage that the persecuted unjustly and falsely (for two years!) impossible to hide).
Jesús Vázquez (left) and Jorge Cadaval (right) at the entrance to the Seville court during the trial of the “Arny case” in 1998. Emilio Morenatti / EFE
To do this he uses a medium tone, full of testimonies in which he reflects on what happened, how this matter got out of the hands of the police, the judiciary, the press, the lawyers, up to what was a case of corruption of minors became an example of the homophobia installed in Spanish society, as this description of one of the accused by one of the Grume bosses makes clear: “He’s a fag, depraved and very intelligent for dirty business.”
The documentary’s focus is to show how “a horrific criminal act” was “turned into a homophobic weapon” in a “demonization of homosexuality”. All in a Spain where the gay was called a fag (on the street without holding back: it was the insult used by the machos), the bars later called “environment” were “sissy slums” (literal phrase he told me a case investigator)…
Now that lynching, cancellation and fake news on social media are the order of the day; In which activist media with contempt for truth and balance bring the embers into the sardine, with parallel processes out of habit, we have to ask ourselves again: have we learned something? The answer comes on TV.
Jorge A. Rodriguez He reported as a journalist from the night of the raid and the search of the premises to its resolution before the Supreme Court about the Arny case and takes part in the documentation.
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