The Prevalence and Persistence of Homophobia in Italy

ABSTRACT

Italy is an anomaly among its peers in the European Union (EU) because of its resistance to LGBTQ+ inclusion, acceptance, and legitimation. The acquisition of civil liberties—especially the right to same-sex marriage—remains a dream deferred for queer Italians, and the prioritization of transgender rights has just begun to be seen in broader political discourse. This paper investigates homophobia in Italy, and the social constructs and institutions that support it. We account for the pervasiveness of anti-queerness at the state, cultural, and interpersonal levels of Italian society, and offer recommendations for scholars conducting research in these areas.

KEYWORDS:

• Homophobia
• Italy
• same-sex marriage
• civil unions
• masculinity
• family
• Vatican
• Catholicism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Given our interest in how gender and sexual hegemony are deployed by dominant groups, we rely on homophobia as a placeholder for anti-queerness in this review. Still, it should be noted that most extant literature discusses homophobia via the experiences of gay and lesbian Italians exclusively, overlooking the experiences of the BTQ+ part of the queer spectrum. Transphobia and biphobia are tangibly different than homophobia by definition, but all three would fall under the umbrella of homonegativity—i.e., a set of conservative values that privilege heterosexuals and reject queerness—which has also been presented in recent scholarship, as it more clearly points to “the target of prejudice” (Lingiardi et al., 2016, p. 95). With all of this in mind, we discuss homophobia and its implications as a social interaction, because it is achieved via verbal discourse and sometimes physical acts, for example. In a later section, we pay careful attention to scholarship on homonegativity, as the larger concept contextualizes our analysis of dominant attitudes in Italy toward queerness, especially via institutions like the family and the Catholic Church.

2. Several roadblocks still remain for trans Italians, preventing full and/or accessible coverage to hormone therapy. See “Hormone Replacement Therapy in Trans People: The Prescription Maze” (Cavagnacchi, 2021) for a breakdown.

3. Irish LGBTQ+ advocacy groups spent years organizing around the demand for first-class citizenship. By 2010, groups like Marriage Equality and LGBT Noise had starkly denounced the country’s newly signed Civil Partnership Bill (Parker, 2017), which scholars described as a “separate, but equal” form of sexual segregation (see Asher, 2009, p. 482). From there, a “politics of pragmatism” (Neary, 2016, p. 757) among leading activists sought cultural change by normalizing LGBTQ+ people via same-sex marriage rights. Such a route to legitimacy has been problematized by Neary (2016) and others, given its homonormative underpinnings; yet, it was ultimately a successful path for securing marriage equality.

4. See references: “Pope Francis: Who am I to judge gay people?” (2013).

5. It is said that the massive 2013 “Manif pour Tous” backlash to France’s legalization of same-sex marriage spawned the original “Les Veilleurs Debout” (Nucci, 2014), which mobilized the Italian iteration described here. Both factions of the Sentinels can be classified under the larger “anti-gender movement” that has spread across Europe since the early 2000s. It includes widespread populist efforts of the “Global Right Wing” (Paternotte & Kuhar, 2018) that have targeted educational policies (Kuhar & Zobec, 2017) and civil liberties that affirm LGBTQ+ identity (Lavizzari & Prearo, 2019).