It’s been six years since I last attended Orgullo Madrid, and that last time in 2019 I had to leave halfway through the Saturday night parade in order to get some sleep before flying to Paris at 6am to play at The Breakfast Club (yes that party). I’d been going to Orgullo since 2012, the year it coincided with Spain winning the World Cup and for a week the streets of Madrid were the site of an unprecedented collision of elated heterosexual football fans in kit and equally delirious gays all losing their collective minds. In those early years, as the parade finished, me and my friends would wander the streets of Chueca with 1-litre calimochos in hand, stopping at the street parties to sing our hearts out o ‘A Quien Importa’ or ‘I Don’t Care’ before invariably ending up at Gris or La Sixta.