The ARCIGAY “La Rocca” club of Cremona organizes for Sunday, November 24, 2002 An evening of debate entitled "ARCIGAY Vs. ARCILESBICA. Knowing the past, understanding the present, imagining the future.".
They will intervene Aurelio Mancuso, National Secretary of ARCIGAY, and Cristina Gramolini, National President of Arcilesbica. Mr. Paolo Gualandris, editor-in-chief of the daily newspaper La Provincia, will coordinate and moderate the debate.
The idea of comparing the two main national organizations for the defense of gay rights arose from the need to educate those of us who, like many of us, are new to the field. The reality of national organizations is sometimes distant and intangible, except through tools like the internet, which few have access to.
Furthermore, some of us still feel the need to fully understand the motivations that led ArciLesbica to establish itself as an entity independent of ArciGay, and what results this evolution has led to over the six years since its inception.
The first ArciGay club was founded in Palermo in 1980, following the protests sparked by the Giarre tragedy, where two young men committed suicide because their relationship was being ridiculed throughout the country. The first major national meeting of ARCI Gay took place in Palermo in 1982, attended by ARCI national leaders: this meeting is still considered the Association's first national congress.
In 1984, the movement began a discussion about the need to build and strengthen a significant national presence. This discussion led to the unification of nearly all existing Italian gay groups into the national Arcigay, which, at its national assembly in March 1985, decided to transform itself into a fully-fledged national organization. The association established its national headquarters in Bologna.
In November 1989, three hundred lesbian members of Arcigay met in Verona: it was the first major national gathering of gay women who decided to engage in politics, a movement that had until then been considered a male domain par excellence by lesbianism, which was essentially separatist. This decision led to the creation of Arcigay Donna at the association's fourth national congress, held in February 1990, and to the election of a woman as National Secretary.
At the following Congress in Rimini, in April 1994, the association changed its name to Arcigay Arcilesbica, becoming the only Italian association whose Statute provides for the election of the governing bodies on the basis of a 50% quota for each of the two sexes.
The seventh national congress of Arcigay, held in Rimini in October 1996, established the association's division into Arcigay and Arcilesbica, which emerged as the first non-separatist national lesbian association in Italy. ArciLesbica was born because of the increasingly pressing need to act politically within an autonomous, visibly lesbian space, outside the confines of an often overly neutral gay politics. The urgent need that drove this change was to build an organization that could become a tool for concrete intervention in Italian political and social life, to neutralize any attempt at discrimination against lesbians, to oppose widespread prejudice, to achieve social justice in terms of rights, and to unite, but also to dialogue and negotiate with central and local institutions. This choice was therefore based on the affirmation of the principle of self-determination and the desire to represent lesbianism in today's society. In this sense, ArciLesbica was certainly born in a context of great difficulty, due to the resistance and profound mistrust, coming not only from the gay movement, but also from the lesbian one, with which it had to confront itself in the early years of its existence.
It remains to be seen what the different ideologies that animate the lesbian and gay movements today are; what are the areas on which the associations are fighting on the front lines; what are their objectives; and, consequently, the meaning, as well as the value, of the fragmentation of the LGBT (gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender) movement into multiple distinct groups and associations.
Different and incomprehensible, however, is the separatist tendency that is unfortunately often found in the LGBT movement, where each association seems to seek its own space for action to the exclusion of others, perceived as a threat to its visibility.
We therefore hope that this meeting will foster a climate of greater friendship and encourage the associations to implement their cooperation proposals.
Furthermore, we hope that engaging with authoritative representatives of the Italian LGBT movement will help us identify new paths to pursue in the shared struggle to defend individual freedoms and protect rights—elementary democratic principles that still need to be achieved.