Bologna, June 27, 2014 – Ten Italian cities will be joined on Saturday, June 28, by the Pride Wave, the LGBT movement's national demonstration celebrating Pride Day, the day of the Stonewall riots that sparked the rise of gay, lesbian, and transgender people in 1969. Alghero, Bologna, Catania, Lecce, Milan, Naples, Palermo, Perugia, Turin, and Venice will be the hubs of a network of marches that will simultaneously bring tens of thousands of people into the streets. "Once again," says Flavio Romani, president of Arcigay, "we are demonstrating to free an entire segment of the population from the marginalization into which a state that does not recognize their rights pushes them daily. Pride is the day of the year when we can reverse a perspective, reaffirming the dignity of identities, demands, relationships, and lifestyles excluded from the political horizon, from institutional paradigms, and often even from the imaginations of the mass media." Among the demands that the Pride Wave will bring to the streets is the recognition of same-sex unions: "Renzi has promised to discuss a law recognizing same-sex unions by September," Romani recalls. "The announcement itself," he continues, "has all the hallmarks of a déjà vu, both in its method and in the substance of the proposal: the same institution was put forward two years ago by Pierluigi Bersani, and even then we were protesting the backwardness of a proposal that failed to achieve the goal of equality and thrust our country into a debate that most European countries faced ten or fifteen years ago. The goal," the president of Arcigay makes clear, "is and remains for us equal marriage, that is, the complete elimination of discrimination between homosexual and heterosexual couples and the full recognition of all rights, for both. Renzi is effectively stuck on the positions that other leaders have already advanced: now let him demonstrate what his 'new direction' consists of, and let us count the steps forward his party is capable of making on the path to the recognition of civil rights. The real change, in this country, would be to see an insufficient bill enter Parliament and discover it enriched at the end of the debate in the parliamentary elections." classrooms. The shock of the law against homotransphobia is still very recent: we have already experienced the nosedive that transformed a bill against discrimination and hate crimes into an ambiguous and ineffective text, constructed with the logic of mediation between parties, forgetting the objectives and citizens to be protected. And in fact that text, despite the increasingly frequent cases of homotransphobia reported by the media, has completely stalled its parliamentary process. To change direction, then, we must first contradict these precedents, so we send Renzi a message: take one more shot, embrace equality." The message to the Prime Minister and Secretary of the Democratic Party will be sent by distributing a fake selfie, created by Condividilove and immersing the Prime Minister in the Pride crowd.
