Chieti, October 13, 2013 – Once again, Abruzzo's politicians triumph over reality, and once again, those who pay the price, for now only symbolically, are LGBTQ+ people from the province of Chieti, Abruzzo, Italy, and even Russia. After the substantial silence of Italian institutions—with the exception of the City of Milan, which deservedly suspended the twinning with St. Petersburg—following the anti-gay law passed and fatally implemented in Russia, the City of Ortona leaves us dismayed by its inability to assess what to do. And so, the entire city council, unanimously, hands the city's mayor the mandate to complete the twinning with the Russian city of Volgograd, with a reason that expresses complete ignorance: "history must not repeat itself." We also agree that the events of World War II must be remembered: and precisely for this reason, it is worth remembering that more than 100,000 homosexuals of various nationalities were victims of Nazi-Fascist (and other) delirium, a fact that is shamefully forgotten in Italy when "remembering" the Holocaust and World War II. If this is true, this twinning has a clear meaning: not only a complicit silence regarding what happens to LGBT people in Russia, but also a clear endorsement of anti-gay persecution.
After Forza Nuova's homophobic posters last year—which were followed by silence from all of Abruzzo's political circles—we must once again recognize that Ortona is not a city for gays.
Claudio Minetti
President of Arcigay Chieti
Sylvia Rivera
