Bob Pop, writer, television critic and one of the national references in the defence of the rights of the LGTBIQ+ collective, reviews in front of the LOVE TV cameras in La Palma how the fight has changed over the years and his current vision of love. Roberto Enríquez, his real name, analyses one of the moments that changed his life in his first job as an intern. When he was 19, the director took him to his office to fire him because ‘he had a pen and didn’t look good in front of the partners’. ‘He made me believe that I couldn’t have a place in that world because I was too sensitive. At the time it seemed normal to me, I thought I was the one who wasn’t normal,’ he says.
However, with time he understood that the problem was not his: ‘I had to find a place where I could be comfortable, and that place had to be built by all of us. I have worked hard to find traditionally straight spaces where I have been able to develop my work’. It is essential, he says, to occupy these spaces and all possible spaces, because ‘the easiest way to live together is to get to know each other’.
On how he lives love, Bob Pop tells journalist Micaela García on LOVE TV that he lives it ‘with a lot of intensity’ and from a polyamorous approach: ‘Polyamory leads us to humbly assume that we can never be everything for anyone. I think it sounds corny, but it is the only answer to many things’.
In fact, he admits that everything that motivates him ‘has a little bit to do with love, especially someone as dependent as me, I feel I’m lucky to have a lot of love around me, to give it and to receive it’.
Thus, Bob Pop relates during the interview that celebrating Pride means showing that ‘we are not ashamed’. ‘As a 52-year-old gay man, I celebrate the pride of having blazed a trail that others blazed for us. I’m proud of the country we’ve built, the world we’ve built, which despite the reactionary hordes and the narrow-minded, caveman response, is moving forward,’ he adds.
