Born: 1951 (date unknown)
Died: August 25th, 2025
José María Sánchez Silva, who has died aged 74, was the first senior Spanish military officer to come out as gay. His decision to do so, in 2000, had a huge impact on a society in which the armed forces were a bastion of socially conservative values and he helped pave the way for the country’s ground-breaking introduction of marriage equality a few years later.
“It was the most important coming-out-of-the-closet Spain has seen,” says Mili Hernández, owner of the Berkana bookshop in Madrid, who was instrumental in Sánchez Silva’s decision.
READ MORE
“Everybody heard about it, because it was in all the newspapers, it was on all the TV programmes and on the news bulletins,” she says. “What he was saying was that anyone can be gay: your doctor can be gay, your teacher can be gay, so this was a big step.”
Until then, Sánchez Silva had enjoyed a successful, relatively low-key career in the army, rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel. After the death of the dictator Gen Francisco Franco in 1975, the country made a swift and mainly successful transition to democracy, embracing liberal values. But the Catholic Church still wielded substantial influence and the military was regarded by many as not having moved with the times, making the idea of LGBTQ+ people in the military taboo.
A well-read law graduate, Sánchez Silva started visiting Berkana bookshop, which specialises in LGBTQ+-related literature, when he was stationed nearby in central Madrid in the late 1990s. In the heart of Chueca, Madrid’s gay district, Berkana was run by Hernández, an activist who had been part of the social and sexual changes of the 1980s and 1990s.
When he told her he wanted to come out, Hernández suggested he do so via Zero, a well-established magazine catering to the LGBTQ+ community. It was a nerve-racking experience. Mario Suárez, who worked at the magazine at the time, recalls the soldier’s “fragile body, that solemn voice, his erratic state of mind” when he visited the offices for the interview.
The cover of the magazine’s September 2000 edition was a close-up of a 49-year-old Sánchez Silva, saluting in uniform with a headline that declared (almost certainly not altogether accurately): “The first gay member of the military”.
“In the army, there is a law that says ‘I won’t ask and you won’t answer’,” Sánchez Silva told El País, a few years later. “There is a perverse pact of tolerance in exchange for silence and the hiding of feelings. I broke that pact.”
His decision immediately made waves and drew a backlash from conservative circles. The military’s own statutes had been changed in 1985, in theory ensuring that members of the armed forces could no longer face discrimination for their sexuality. But the minister for defence, Federico Trillo, known as a hard-line figure in the conservative government at the time, described Sánchez Silva’s actions as “unfortunate”. And within the army itself there was open hostility. “You are not forgiven and will never be forgiven for what you have done,” one colleague told him. Another fellow officer left a letter on his desk telling him that “homosexuality is worse than the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse put together”.
Sánchez Silva filed a complaint against the author of that letter, but the army ruled that it was not a disciplinary matter.
It was all part of what Sánchez Silva later described as “four years of ostracism”, which culminated in him abandoning his military career. And yet, he was not publicly welcomed with open arms by the LGBTQ+ community. This was apparently because, although his politics were firmly on the left, the Spanish military was still viewed with deep suspicion by the community, which had suffered under the Franco regime.
“The LGBT movement, which at that time was really on the up, didn’t pay attention to him and never supported him,” Hernández says. “That was his great sadness for many years.”
However, his coming out did embolden others, not least in the military, police and civil guard, to follow suit (and last year, the matador Mario Alcalde came out as pansexual, the first man to declare himself non-heterosexual in a similarly macho world).
Hernández and others also credit him with pushing Spain towards a greater respect for the LGBTQ+ community, leading to the approval of gay marriage by a socialist government in 2005. A year later came perhaps the ultimate validation of Sánchez Silva’s actions when two male soldiers got married in Seville.
Sánchez Silva died in a military retirement home in the Guadarrama mountains outside Madrid. He had requested that his ashes be kept alongside those of his parents, in Mallorca. The socialist prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, paid tribute to him on social media, saying: “With courage, he opened the way towards a fairer and more equal Spain. We will always remember his example.”
