What Happened In Vigo: A Personal Reckoning With Masculinity, Desire And Consent

When I hear the word “Vigo,” a flurry of overlapping images flashes through my mind. One of them is totally useless: I think of Viggo Mortensen and the San Lorenzo football club. I don’t know much about the U.S. actor, and I’m not a fan of San Lorenzo, unlike Mortensen, so that one quickly fades. Then another image comes — intense, laced with a feeling and a story I’ve rarely told in detail, about something that happened in that Spanish city.

If I stop and pay attention, I can still feel a hand on my right thigh. I’m 21 years old, passing through Galicia’s Vigo for just a few hours, and right above my knee is the hand of a man named Paco — maybe in his 40s — who somehow talked me into going back to his apartment. Now it seems obvious, but at the time, I didn’t see that hand coming.

The word “Vigo” also brings up Celta and Chacho Coudet. Even though I haven’t played in years, football has always been my emotional, historical, and geographic GPS. It’s also how I communicate with friends — and with my kids. Yes, football as a metaphor. But more intense than any metaphor, more vivid than football, is what happened in that apartment.

Here’s the short version. In 2002, I moved to Mallorca for almost a year. Just before heading back to Buenos Aires, I spent a month living in Ourense and training with Quiroga, a third-division football team in Lugo, another Galician town. My flight back to Mallorca departed from Vigo, so I decided to spend the day exploring the city. I have many vivid memories of that day.

¿Te apetece?

It’s raining. I’m wandering around, trying to find the Old Town. I’m standing in the middle of a bridge, trying to read a paper map — because it’s 2003 and Google Maps doesn’t exist. I’m lost. A man walking toward me offers to share his umbrella and asks where I’m headed. He says he’s going that way too and offers to show me around. I see no reason to say no.

It’s around noon. He tells me his name is Francisco, that he has two teenage kids, and that he’s doing better after a divorce three years ago. I tell him someone recommended I try orujo de café — a traditional Galician coffee liqueur — while I’m in Vigo.

Then, suddenly, Francisco gestures toward some plastic curtains and asks, “Wanna go in?” The door to the house is open, and inside there’s a woman with few clothes on. “Come on, ¿te apetece?” he says. “What do you think?” We’re standing on a cobblestone street, and once I catch on, I say no thanks, I’m not looking to pay for sex. I’d rather get lunch.

Why not try both and find out?

Francisco suggests we grab a drink at a bar he likes. We sit outside, order beers, tortilla pinchos, and cheese. The conversation flows easily. He tells me about the city’s changes and his own professional progress. He’s proud — post-divorce, he managed to buy a flat in a neighborhood with a bad reputation that’s now on the rise.

I tell him I trained with the team in Quiroga but couldn’t play because I was undocumented. That I’d been seeing a girl in Ourense, but her parents didn’t know. Then I talk about my plans to return to Buenos Aires and finish my journalism degree. I ask if he recommends the coffee orujo or the herbal one.

“Why not try both and decide?” he says. “I’ve got some really good stuff from my parents’ village. You can try it and check out my neighborhood — it’s close by.”

I remember it like it was yesterday. Everything seemed perfectly normal at the time. So we went to his place. I charged my phone — just for SMS and calls, no smartphones yet — and sat down to sample the liqueurs. I didn’t like them. I’m not big on aguardiente. He downed both shots he poured for himself.

I asked how to get to the airport. He sat next to me and pointed at the bus stop on a map with his right index finger. As he explained, his left hand snuck behind me and rested on my shoulder.

Male sexuality feels like uncharted territory — as a friend puts it, “an unexplored galaxy.”

“Uh… mmm… no, no,” I said, tense, pulling away.

He kept talking like nothing happened and immediately tried again. He caressed my leg and leaned in once more. I became more nervous. I didn’t know what to do. I’d never been in a situation like this. I moved his hand away, stood up, and asked where the bathroom was.

All part of the same package

At 21, I had never once questioned whether I liked women or men. I hadn’t even asked myself the question. Today, at 43, it feels more complicated. Sexual orientation isn’t something we choose — but what about what we allow ourselves to explore sexually?

Male sexuality feels like uncharted territory — as a friend of mine puts it, “an unexplored galaxy.” It’s easy to link that to our fear of homosexuality. It’s this lurking specter we’re raised with, summed up in that age-old warning: “Don’t do that — that’s gay.”

Whatever “that” is, when we stop ourselves from doing it, we stop ourselves from feeling. Because feeling is also considered “gay” — meaning weak, fragile… and not manly. To feel is to enter soft terrain, where men lose themselves and get scared.

That same friend — 11 years older than me — says: “Imagine how far you still are from being able to figure out what you actually want and be true to that. That’s where the terror and taboo come from, right? It’s all part of the same male package: we can’t connect, can’t hold pain, can’t handle weakness or doubt. So what if one day you’re partying and something happens with another dude? So what? For women, being with another woman isn’t some cultural defeat. But for us? Why is it such a taboo, such a big deal?”

There’s an answer in the words of poet and filmmaker Lucía Lubarsky: “There are so many doors that, once you walk through them, your masculinity is suddenly in question. That doesn’t happen to women. If a woman likes another woman, it doesn’t undermine her identity as a woman. We’re all playing from the same old music sheet — but while women have been rewriting theirs for a while, men are still clinging to the classical version.”

Homosexuality

But all this — I’m only writing now. Back then, in my teens and childhood, I had no clue. The air around me was different. That was a time when being gay was shameful, and seen as a mental condition that could be “cured.” It wasn’t until 1990 that the World Health Organization finally took homosexuality off its list of illnesses.

I grew up in a conservative neighborhood, in a religious family. I went to an all-boys Catholic school. The kids who seemed even remotely gay were made fun of, constantly. I often wonder what it was like for them to navigate those years, surrounded by other teenage boys obsessed with mocking “fags” — while secretly flipping through porn magazines together.

I feel a strange sense of joy seeing a former classmate on social media now, happily with a male partner. Maybe because I imagine he finally freed himself from his context and got to live the way he wanted. And maybe it eases some of the guilt I carry for not doing more to stop the mockery back then.

Back to Vigo: without knowing any of this consciously, but carrying it all anyway, I remember standing in Francisco’s bathroom, staring at myself in the mirror, shaken.

“How the hell did I end up here? Do I like this guy? Do I want to sleep with him? If I say no, is he going to get aggressive? If he touches me again, do I need to punch him?”

For me, it ended simply as an awkward anecdote. But what if I had been a woman?

It was all so bizarre.

I walked out and told Francisco I was leaving. I grabbed my phone and jacket and headed to the door.

“Leaving already?” he asked with a grin. He handed me a small scrap of paper and, winking as he shook my other hand, said:

“Call me Paco, we’re friends now, okay? This is my number. Come by whenever, and we can have fun. We’ll call some girls, have a few drinks, and all that.”

Detail of Michelangelo’s David statue. — Photo: Gene Gallin

What if I had been a woman?

It wasn’t until early 2017, over lunch with a journalist couple, that I finally understood something I’d never even considered. The woman — who’s from Galicia — listened to my Vigo story and simply said: “That kind of thing happens to women all the time. Imagine if you had been a woman in that exact situation.”

By then, the Ni Una Menos feminist movement had already been active in Argentina for two years. I remember how a senior editor at a paper I worked for underestimated that first 2015 march — but we still covered the massive protest. At the time, I still saw it as someone else’s issue, something distant. Until that Galician journalist made her comment — and it changed my perspective.

So I started revisiting what had happened in Vigo: Paco’s manipulation, which I never saw coming, and my panicked escape through those now-dry streets, weighed down with questions and shame, rushing toward the airport.

It took me 14 years — and a woman’s insight — to even begin imagining what that situation would mean if I hadn’t been a man. For me, it ended simply as an awkward anecdote. But what if I had been a woman?

No punch

Speaking of discomfort — just three weeks ago, I was at a beach near home, in Greece. It was 9 a.m., and I had taken a break after dropping off my kids at preschool. I was walking on the sand, staring at the sea. There was no one around.

On the way back to the car, I noticed a man up ahead. As I got closer, I saw he had pulled down his pants and, staring at me, was masturbating.

I kept walking. Just as I was about to drive off, I saw him again. He came hurrying toward me, gesturing like he wanted to have sex. It was grotesque, absurd, invasive. I rolled down my window and used my basic Greek: “Γεια, καλημέρα, όλα καλά;” (“Hi, good morning, all good?”)

He kept getting closer, making gestures with his hands and an open mouth.

If I, a man, sitting in my car, felt disturbed and a little scared — what would’ve happened if a woman had been in my place? I wanted to say something, but I had no idea how he’d react. I figured that if things went south, I could drive away or call the police.

I thought of Mike Tyson’s line: “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”

So I left — no punch, but full of frustration. Because even if he had thought I might be into a spontaneous beach fling… At what point does someone think that’s the way to approach another person? What makes a man think another human being would feel safe — or aroused — when some stranger stops jerking off just to chase them down and make signs begging for a blowjob?