Copyright 2000 The Nation Company L.P. 

 

The Nation

 

 September 18, 2000

 

A Day for Building Gay Rome :

 

A MARCH OPPOSED BY THE VATICAN ENERGIZED THE MOVEMENT AND RALLIED ITS ALLIES

 

World Pride Roma 2000 

 

By George DeStefano

 

    "Free Sexuality in a Free State," demanded a placard at the World Pride Roma 2000 gay rights march, held July 8 in the Italian capital. The young man carrying the message was one of the several hundred thousand gays, lesbians, transgenders and eterosessuali who took to the streets of the Eternal City in defiance of a campaign by conservative politicians, ultraright nationalists and the Vatican to prevent the march from occurring. 

 

 

    The triumph of World Pride (a weeklong program of conferences and cultural and social events culminating in the march) offered the edifying spectacle of Italy's small, and heretofore politically quiescent, gay movement out-organizing the most powerful antihomosexual forces in Italian society. But the clerical/rightist assault not only mobilized Italian gays. It also rallied straight liberals, leftists, intellectuals, artists and other Italian citizens who recognized in the efforts to block World Pride an attack on the "lay state," the Italian Constitution and its guarantees of freedom of speech and assembly. 

 

 

      The first signs that the right intended to make a cause celebre of World Pride came in April, when Francesco Storace, of the National Alliance, was elected president of Lazio, the region that includes Rome. The NA is aggressively antigay--its leader, Gianfranco Fini, has declared that homosexuals should not be allowed to be schoolteachers--and Storace lost no time after his election in calling for World Pride to be banned. The NA quickly found an ally in a Vatican outraged by the prospect of hordes of sodomites from Italy and around the world descending on Rome during the Giubileo, the Catholic Church's millennial Holy Year celebrations. The Holy See demanded that the civil authorities either move the gay event out of Rome or force its cancellation. 

 

    Other conservatives from the Polo coalition (which includes, besides the NA, media mogul Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia party and members of Italy's former ruling party, the Christian Democrats) joined in to denounce World Pride. "Italy needs children, not homosexuals," said graffiti that appeared in Rome in the weeks before the march. The tiny but vociferous far-right Forza Nuova group promised to add a bit of fascist muscle to respectable conservative antigay opposition with its threats of violence against Pride participants.

 

    The reaction of political conservatives and the Vatican was hardly surprising. What was shocking was the response of two of Italy's most prominent liberal politicians, Rome Mayor Francesco Rutelli and Prime Minister Giuliano Amato. Rutelli, spooked by clerical/rightist pressure on him and the Rome City Council, revoked city sponsorship of the World Pride event and refused to permit the march's planned route through the city's historic center to the Colosseum. Amato made what had to be the gaffe of the year when he said the event was "inopportune" but acknowledged that "unfortunately" it could not be banned because the Italian Constitution guarantees freedom of assembly and expression. Rutelli and Amato soon faced a torrent of outrage, including some domestic discord when their wives publicly criticized them. Amos Luzzatto, president of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities, expressed solidarity with homosexuals, noting that they were among the victims of the Holocaust. Prominent artists, like the radical playwright and Nobel Prize winner Dario Fo, filmmaker Nanni Moretti, rock star Jovanotti and popular movie actress Maria Grazia Cucinotta (Il Postino), expressed their support of World Pride. 

 

    In the end, all the bluster of the right and the Vatican came to naught. Imma Battaglia, one of the march's chief organizers, called Rutelli's bluff, saying that marchers would go to the Colosseum, permit or not. (A site that represented the cruelty of imperial Rome now serves as an official symbol of international opposition to capital punishment and support for human rights.) When the marchers compromised on the route through the city, the municipal government relented. A demoralized National Alliance canceled its threatened counterdemonstration, and the swastika-sporting skinheads of Forza Nuova also stayed home. 

 

    As the marchers gathered in Piazza Ostiense under a blazing sun, it soon became evident that World Pride Roma 2000 would offer a countercoalition to that of the Vatican and the right. All the leftist parties were there, from social democrats to unreconstructed Communists. Walter Veltroni, head of the Left Democrats, attracted the most media attention, but Fausto Bertinotti's Refounded Communists had a larger presence. Green Party president Grazia Francescato and Senator Luigi Manconi led a sizable contingent. Also marching were Emma Bonino and Senator Marco Taradash, whose Radical Party has supported gay rights since the sixties. The politicos mixed with veteran gay leaders, including Italy's only "out" legislator, Senator Niki Vendola of the Refounded Communists, and with gay and lesbian activists from all over Italy and from Europe and North and South America. In addition to the parties, there were groups of trade union militants, anarchists and animal rights advocates. 

 

    If World Pride presented a united front between the gay movement and the left, the alliance wasn't born that day. The pioneering activists of the sixties and seventies drew upon leftist intellectual currents, basing their critique of homosexual oppression on the works of Marx, Freud, Adorno and Sartre. Italy's first gay liberation organization, FUORI!, placed homosexuality within a broad context of human emancipation, embracing feminism and workers' rights. In the early eighties, Sicilian activists organized a gay group within ARCI, the Communist Party's cultural and recreational arm, and in 1985 Arcigay was established on a national basis. Red and lavender haven't always blended well in Italy; some segments of the left have suffered from a narrow conception of class politics, not to mention a fair degree of sexual puritanism. But these conflicts notwithstanding, the Italian gay movement remains identified with the left, as political conservatives were quick to point out in their condemnations of World Pride.

 

    Opponents of World Pride denounced the event as a deliberate "provocation" of the Catholic Church and of the hegemony of a church- and family-centric culture. And why not? Catholicism is no longer Italy's state religion, but its influence remains immense. Social attitudes toward homosexuality are strongly influenced by the Church's stance that homosexuality is both sinful and unnatural, and that homosexuals should be tolerated only as long as they suffer their condition in silence and don't demand rights or social acceptance. The Church seeks the state's intervention only when gays resist this repressive status quo--as in the case of World Pride. "In Italy, invisibility has been the price for tolerance," observed Sergio Lo Giudice, president of Arcigay. "But gays don't want to be invisible anymore." 

 

    By drawing unprecedented public attention to the status of homosexuals, World Pride achieved exactly what its opponents hoped to discourage. Italy does not have antisodomy laws, and the age of consent for both heterosexuals and homosexuals is 14. The absence of punitive legislation, however, does not mean gays and straights are equal under the law. Homosexuals have no legal protection from discrimination in employment and other areas. Unlike France and even ultra-Catholic Spain, Italy offers no legal recognition to same-sex couples. On a range of other issues, from adoption rights to military service to political asylum, the law is either hostile or ambiguous. 

 

    When tradition and law fail to insure gay invisibility, outright repression can occur. Two years ago, after activists demonstrated against the Church's homophobia during a visit by the Pope to Rome's historic district, the authorities began surveillance and harassment of gay organizations and meeting places. The International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission protested that the crackdown violated decisions by the European Court of Human Rights that "public morality" cannot be used as a pretext for attacks on basic freedoms of assembly and association. Yet the authorities relied on precisely such excuses in trying to suppress the World Pride march and other activities. 

 

    World Pride gave gay concerns heightened visibility in Italy, but the prospects for advancing them don't look especially favorable, at least not in the short term. The right-leaning Polo coalition will probably win the national elections likely to occur late this year or early the next. (The governing center-left coalition has been crumbling since April, when Massimo D'Alema of the Left Democrats stepped down as prime minister.) A week after World Pride, one of the centrist parties left the government to join the conservative opposition. Coincidence? Perhaps. But a few days before the split, one moderate politico told the newspaper La Repubblica that the center should dissociate itself from a left that tends toward "radicalism"-- i.e., support for gay rights. 

 

    But if nothing else, World Pride Roma 2000 delivered the message that the gay movement has been energized and that it has allies among the general population who will not tolerate assaults on the civil rights supposedly guaranteed in a constitutional republic. Free sexuality in a free state as yet remains an unrealized goal in Italy, but la lotta continua. 

 

 

  George De Stefano writes for a variety of publications, primarily on cultural, Italian-American and gay rights issues.