The enigmas of Paloma Chamorro: from a symbol of La Movida to a Spanish queer icon

Five years after the death of

the figure of the journalist is taking on a renewed dimension and a retrospective documentary has been released on RTVE Play under the title

, which covers her professional career on television giving some unpublished details about her life.

Known mainly for being the presenter of

and other cultural programs on Spanish Television from the 80s to the 90s, her career and presence in social life seemed to fade at the entrance to the 21st century, which is why this new work deals

.

As a result of the recovery of archival material from the TVE audiovisual collection, to make documentary programs such as

.

or

, it began to be verified that Chamorro's works were unusually modern, reissuing his appearances and revaluing his post-

aesthetic , his groundbreaking contents and his role in the Spanish cultural change in the transition as one of its protagonists.

In

not only are his most popular contributions remembered and recontextualized, but it

.

In an interview with his partner Jesús Ordovás, in his oral chronicle of

, Chamorro gave some details that have not been discussed often, such as

, which he describes as "very cultured and refined".

"They only washed my face with soap and a sponge a couple of times, because I was backcombing my hair and painting myself."

Although she did her high school and pre-university science degree, she studied philosophy at the Complutense, where

, who, according to her, "were ignorant people who had never picked up a book in their lives," with which who

, entering the world of theater.

They only washed my face with soap and a sponge a couple of times, because I was backcombing my hair and painting

It was thanks to this activity that by chance a test arose for her to be a presenter in the

program in 1973, which was followed by

in 1975, moments in which black and white still reigned and the censorship imposed by the Franco regime.

It was her in

, where

.

After making a proposal for a cultural program that was rejected because a veteran wanted the space for himself, Chamorro was included in it as a condition of the network, which stung the director, who made him pay

.

There he would learn everything about the profession, since he did everything from being a telephone operator to running the editorial line or sharing a discussion table with Fernando Sánchez Dragó.

Nobody was unaware of his weight there, so they ended up commissioning his own program:

.

In 1977,

, but it did not prevent the program from being taken away from him again.

To avoid the commotion, they gave her the space

, in which she interviewed various personalities linked to the world of painting such as

and where she stayed until 1981, when,

in 1983. It was the explosion of La Movida and she was in the right place.

Madrid was exploding with pop and rock groups, there were new rooms, stations, fanzines and many also wanted to show it on television.

.

The journalist tried to surround herself with people related to what was happening, she wanted to include Ordovás in her team, who had discovered many groups that would appear on the program on Radio 3, such as Pegamoides, Los

,

Total

Golpes

, but he could not enter due to his contract.

The announcer has always highlighted her merit beyond being the visible presenter of

since "she pulled it through despite all kinds of problems,

, which is why it was revolutionary in Spain».

Chamorro revitalized a current that was emerging on

, from Radio España, in the late 1970s, but today it is difficult to contextualize the importance of the proposal in 1983, since the format went beyond music, including film directors. , artists, people who did photography or painted.

The idea was to reflect everything that was happening and for the concerts to have direct sound, since the presenter had been outraged to see Ramones lip-syncing on the

program .

This is how he managed to get the vanguard from all over the world to come through, with names like

performing live, while he interviewed La Movida leaders such as

.

Among representatives of "high culture" such as the designer Francis Montesinos, the writer Jesús Ferreiro, the photographer Ouka Leele and even the mayor Enrique Tierno Galván,

represented the popular outcry based on controlled transgression, with Almodóvar shouting that his drug Favorite was

,

or Stiv Bators showing his pubic hair without pants.

Meanwhile, the presenter, with her impossible carding and her groundbreaking style,

, conquering the Spanish youth who at night went to Madrid venues such as

,

or

and they were reunited with that environment with their weekly television appointment.

The bands that attended

went from being nobody to selling 3,000 LPs

There was a point at which the fashionable characters who congregated in the nightlife cultural environment offered to collaborate with Chamorro, who began to form an important part of the movement itself, beyond its magnetism on the air, symbolizing the generational explosion of the scene. .

Patricia Godes, another key music journalist of the time, recalls in her

that one of the key places of the time, where everyone met in addition to the Rastro, was

, «and their meetings to eat anchovy paste and Miko ice cream».

Perhaps this was the reason why she was blamed for bringing her friends to the program, something inevitable when she herself tracked her content at concerts, which were the social acts of the moment.

But the role of his figure went further,

.

Faced with the current that now tends to demystify the movement, the journalist defends it by stating that "it was a riot".

She attributed her contacts, simply, to working on what she liked, "

.

I can't do it, but I can from Dinarama or Psychedelic Furs.

You can't amuse people with something that doesn't amuse you."

And this will is what made him get large groups, in addition to a criteria that sought the latest, so much so that when he began to negotiate with some they were not yet as important, as in the case of Culture

.

The impact of

was unusual,

, but not even the record companies offered their support while Chamorro carried on by writing the script and directing each program.

But the greatest difficulties were ideological, which led to boycotts, sabotage, denunciations, and slander.

the journalist, who received explicit insults from ABC, the newspaper

o

, with headlines such as "the age of the nose" or "Vilma flintstone and her breath of brothel and dunghill", although they were nothing like the attack that would break the cloud.

The most conservative and nostalgic sectors of the dictatorship pressured to cancel the program

until they succeeded, when Chamorro was prosecuted for offenses against the Catholic religion for a video by the Moon Child group in which, according to them, appeared

-actually a crucified lycanthrope-, although she would finally end up acquitted by the Supreme Court in 1993. But the coup caught on and on May 2, 1985 Paloma Chamorro said goodbye, dedicating her last program "to those who have attacked us, boycotted and they have done everything possible so that

ceased to exist, they have been our best encouragement ».

Later she would recognize that

: They took away production, technical or lighting equipment while communicating that it had been their decision because they were tired.

Her fame as a diva of modernity has been recast in recent years as a

shadowy

From that moment on, he produced programs such as

and music and art specials such as

, while in the 90s he directed documentaries and shorts while alternating his less and less relevant presence with talks and conferences related to the world of art.

In 1988, in an interview with Manuel Hidalgo on the

program , he spoke of his vocation to make programs for fewer people, for a more practical reason than can be assumed.

«It is not so much preference as that I have no choice but to do it, because

», at that time he was already talking about his disappointment with the movement that made him popular, but only because of the obstacles he encountered.

. "

Her fame as a modern diva has been recast in recent years as a

shadowy

In her conversation with Ordovás, she stated that her boarding school “was a nightmare, I only got rid of that when I spent the summer in Los Molinos, where I was just another boy.

All my friends were boys and I was comfortable being a boy.

However, her sexual orientation was never in the focus of what her figure has represented.

begins with David Bowie's Heroes playing, and not by chance.

In the book

by Roberta Marrero, titled according to the lyrics of the song, there is a chapter dedicated to Chamorro and

within a celebration of LGTBQ+ culture in which a place is made to resignify the figure of the presenter as the national icon that had never been claimed.

The journalist herself recognized that La Movida took place within the limits of the hegemonic without actually changing anything in that social aspect.

However, the characters he invited on his show, and those he surrounded himself with,

, whether they were international figures such as The Smiths or the Culture Club, or Spanish figures such as Almodóvar and Macnamara, who declared in his program that when she grew up she wanted to be "an artificial woman".

She also had a great relationship with Alaska, which need not be introduced, and in general the entire cultural movement with which she was associated was full of representatives, from Las Costus to Tino Casal.

Icónica Chamorro

has answers about her last years of life from her life partner, while important personalities such as Almodóvar, the painters Miquel Barceló and Guillermo Pérez Villalta, Alaska, Antonio Alvarado, Fernando Méndez Leite, the architect Oscar Tusquets and many colleagues claim his charisma and courage at a time full of pressures and obstacles, which helped a transformation increasingly trivialized by a generational revisionism of insiders.

Paloma Chamorro did not equate herself with the artists she interviewed and took to perform in her space, but rather

, enough to already be a cultural icon of the history of Spain.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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