Palermo, Saturday, July 1, 2017: the keynote speaker at an Italian studies conference announced that the city’s annual Gay Pride Procession was stepping off about a mile away in the Centro Storico. I squirmed through the rest of the talk until I could book out of the room to join the fun. I followed the parade as it snaked around the historic center, a riotously fun party with music and dancing, and throngs of people singing along. Toward the end I saw a group of people wearing t-shirts printed with the word “Stonewall,” all together carrying a giant rainbow parachute. I introduced myself to them as someone who lives near the original Stonewall Inn, the pub on Christopher Street in New York City, site of the demonstrations in the summer of 1969 that gave rise to the great world political movement for human rights for LGBTQ people. I asked permission to take photos of the Stonewall group at Palermo Pride to share with friends in New York, from Stonewall to Stonewall.
In 2018, as I planned a return trip to
Sicily, I discovered that the people I had seen at Palermo Pride all belonged
to a human rights group in Siracusa called Stonewall, fighting for gay,
lesbian, transgender, and bisexual rights, building community, raising
awareness, and nourishing respect. I
sent a message and had the great privilege of speaking with three of their
leaders, their Vice President, Tiziana Biondi, a volunteer Rosalba Lateano, and
their President Alessandro Bottaro Fontana, about their jubilant cultural
events and trenchant advocacy. Stonewall
represents love as a coherent political strategy against discrimination and
oppression.
Biondi and Lateano spoke with warmth and animation of the annual cycle of meetings and events that punctuate the annual Stonewall calendar. We met over almond granitas and brioches in a café not far from Siracusa’s Greek Theater, one of the largest in the Greek world, built in the 5th century BCE, rebuilt in the 3rd century BCE, and renovated again in the Augustan period. Biondi is an activist with vitality and vision, whose social media pages are filled with advocacy for intersectional human rights causes. Most recently Biondi and her colleagues at Stonewall campaigned for the law against discrimination against LGBTQ people, the DDL Zan, which was brutally shelved by the Italian Senate in October 2021. Viral images of right-wing senators’ applauding the blocking of the bill were met with protests and social media posts by diverse celebrities. Stonewall’s activism does not stop at LGBTQ causes. When in 2019, the right-wing Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini closed the Italian ports to refugees and left boatloads of refugees perilously stranded aboard ship in the waters visible from Siracusa, Biondi and fellow members of Stonewall joined the protests on the shore with bright banners and flags at a spot that could be seen by the refugees aboard ship. The consistent thread of love in the political message of Stonewall’s local activism engages with national and transnational intersectional social justice.
Perhaps even more meaningful is Biondi’s
generosity in sharing her own photos of her own experience of the daily life of
a loving same-sex couple, photos that function as an intimate sign of hope for
young people who might otherwise find nowhere else to turn in a small city for
real-life images in sync with their own feelings and desires. Biondi lives with her wife Carmen Bellone and
their photogenic mutt Tea. In Italy,
courts recognize same-sex marriages only if effectuated in other European
jurisdictions in which same-sex marriage is legal. In Italy, same-sex couples can join legally
only in civil partnerships, which Biondi and Bellone celebrated in 2016. Biondi and Bellone live near their much
doted-upon nephews whom they enjoy taking on excursions. The warmth of Biondi’s constant social media
presence helps to builds local community as a means of political activism.
Bottaro is a gifted educator who specializes in children with diverse developmental functioning. As we strolled through the gleaming Sicilian baroque of Siracusa’s Ortigia island, he told me the story of a young boy with autism who communicated only through a complex system of visual images organized in a book created especially for him. This young boy generally refused to be touched but was so happy to see that Bottaro had returned as his teacher on the first day of summer camp that he walked backward into his teacher’s arms for a gentle embrace. As my stroll with Bottaro continued toward the waterfront, we ran into two leaders of the local chapter of Amnesty International who greeted him warmly.
Stonewall promotes a monthly drop-in
“OpenSpace” meeting, hosted by two therapists, especially for young
people. Stonewall also recently promoted
a group for the families of LGBTQ youth.
They’ve organized film series, staged demonstrations to raise awareness
of LGBTQ causes, painted a civic bench in rainbow colors, hosted public book
presentations, convened public lectures, and danced at every Pride parade in
the region, all with irresistible esprit
de corps.
Every autumn, the leadership of Siracusa’s Stonewall, including Biondi and Bottaro, attend the large intersectional conference on diversity in education called Educare alle differenze (roughly translated, Educating For Diversity), dedicated to ideating educational solutions that aim for the prevention of violence against women, bullying, and stereotypes of gender, homophobia, and racism.
If you follow Siracusa’s Stonewall on social media, then you also follow annual cycles of intersectional LGBT+ public events, such as the Giacinto Cultural Festival in Noto every August. The 2021 festival included a talk by the activist Maria Laura Annibali, who at the age of 75 in the year 2017 held a wedding ceremony to marry her longtime partner, Lidia Merlo, at the stunning Eremo delle Carceri, in a steep forest gorge on Monte Subasio, in Umbria, four kilometers above the brilliant town of Assisi. The church is built on a site where Saint Francis and his monks came for contemplation in between caring for the poor. Conducting the religious wedding ceremony of Annibali and Merlo there was Roberto Tavazzi, who had left the Catholic Church with the dawning of his awareness of his own gay identity, but continues his ministry, defined in terms of connecting to God. The women had already celebrated a civil union four years earlier, after more than a decade of keeping their relationship secret out of fear of opprobrium and discrimination. The women were featured in an H&M ad campaign of June 2021 called Beyond the Rainbow.
Surrounding the annual Giacinto Festival is Noto’s opulent Baroque architecture with stylistic coherence conceived as the city was entirely rebuilt after the earthquake of 1693. The stone of the buildings shimmers in honey tones in the right light, and that shimmering has been the setting of many films, perhaps most famously Antonioni’s l’Avventura, where the parallel lines of windows framed by variegated and slightly undulating Baroque chiaroscuro are a structural foil to the taught drama of the cool heroine’s search without end.
Central to Stonewall’s approach to social justice is delivering a focused and constant message of love as a powerful tool in the fight against institutionalized cruelty, discrimination, and oppression.