In our society of numbers, everything is counted, from the average cup of coffee consumed to the number of passengers boarding at Calcutta airport every day, but no one knows precisely how many gays exist on the face of the earth. No less than 101 TP3T of the population, according to an often repeated estimate, which has its distant origins in the report drawn up by Alfred Kinsey in the 1940s. Even more: 11% for homosexual activists, according to a survey published in 1999 by Sarah Lambert in the Canadian Press, and various other authors. No, far fewer, further sources retort: around 1% in France, the United Kingdom, Norway, Denmark; 2.7% among men, 1.3% among American women, according to research published in the mid-1990s. No, the exact percentage of homosexuals in the entire Western world is close to 6%, states a study released in Germany in 2001; but another German study puts it at 5%, while in Italy Eurispes estimates that gays reach the figure of one and a half million people, approximately 4% of the population. The difference of ten percentage points between the minimum and the maximum estimate is not at all small: since at the dawn of the third millennium we have become 6 billion and 700 million to inhabit this world, it means an area of uncertainty that involves 670 million people. This means we know very little, very little indeed, about those who experience their sexuality differently from the majority of their schoolmates or office colleagues. This is due to our own disinterest, of course; but above all because the homosexual condition is still perceived as a shame, a dishonor best kept secret. And in fact, in Italy – according to a study conducted by Barbagli and Colombo in 2001 – only one in three fathers (and 43% of mothers) knows for certain whether they have a gay child.
The news constantly reports discrimination, both small and large. In Germany, almost all insurance companies refuse life insurance policies to homosexual couples, or otherwise require them to undergo AIDS testing. In January 2001, Nokia had to apologize for excluding gay couples from a Christmas promotion. In the spring of the same year, Paola and Manuela, two lesbians living in Castelnuovo Don Bosco, were fired simultaneously because of their relationship. In July, Senator Bucciero, to express his complete dissent about the "organization of Bari of a Gay Pride parade, declared that homosexuals make him vomit, receiving in return a complaint from the Center for Theological Studies in Milan. But in fact, religion itself (and its many churches) contributes significantly to the image of homosexuality as a sin or a vice. The Anglican religion, which in June 2002 reacted harshly to the idea of appointing Rowan Williams (in favor of gay ordination) as the new Archbishop of Canterbury. The Catholic religion, no less opposed to the priesthood of anyone who displays even a mere homosexual tendency, as the Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship officially declared (on May 16, 2002).
Prejudice, intolerance, reprobation They never remain without impact on the lives of those who fall victim to them. According to a 1989 report prepared for the US Department of Health and Human Services, one-third of young people who take their own lives each year are homosexuals, and they attempt suicide two to three times more often than their heterosexual peers. This percentage nearly tripled from 1965 to 1988, and it is the leading cause of death among young gay men in the United States. Italian statistics are telling. According to a 1991 ISPES study, 61% of gay men have attempted suicide at least once, and many more have considered it: a third of homosexual men and a quarter of lesbians.
Among those who have really done it, it deserves a memory Alfredo Ormando, a Sicilian intellectual, who set himself on fire in front of St. Peter's on January 13, 1998, to denounce the attitude of the ecclesiastical hierarchy toward homosexuality. Gays are just as often killed by the executioner as by their own hand. This happens in Islamic countries, where homosexuality is considered an aberration, a blasphemy, a virus spread by Western culture. Where the Koran condemns them to death, and in fact in Yemen, Iran, and Chechnya the Sharia criminal code provides for capital punishment, as well as in Afghanistan during the Taliban regime (who killed them by collapsing a stone wall on them), or in Saudi Arabia (there on April 16, 2000, a court sentenced nine young men to 2,600 lashes each for "sexual deviance"), in Malaysia (whose laws carry 20 years in prison), and in Egypt (which in 2001 put 52 homosexuals on trial, and subsequently convicted 23). It happens in the Caribbean, where laws prohibiting sodomy are a legacy of the colonial period, and throughout Latin America: in Bogotá alone, death squads killed 19 gay and transgender people in less than three months (in 1999). In Black Africa, where Uganda's President Museveni (also in 1999) ordered the arrest of all homosexuals, and where, most recently, Zimbabwe's President Mugabe, in the summer of 2002, instructed his spies to compile a blacklist of homosexual ministers and senior officials. But it doesn't only happen in exotic and distant lands.
The hunt for gays It is, in fact, a sport popular throughout the world, even in the West. Except that in our latitudes it's a private executioner, rather than a public one. And the story is much longer than a sheet of paper. In London, May 1, 1999, was celebrated with a bomb in a gay bar on Old Compton Street. In Berlin, in July 2002, 3,000 copies of a music CD calling for the killing of all homosexuals were printed. In Italy, 111 gay men were killed from 1990 to 2001 (28 in Rome alone). In Turin, on June 25, 2002, five young gay men were beaten with iron fists, while passersby remained indifferent.
Not that the West lacks a set of rules to defend gays, their rights, and against any form of discrimination: one can cite, for example, the resolutions approved by the European Parliament on 8 February 1994 and 17 September 1998; again in Europe, the framework directive launched by the Commission in November 2001; or in Italy the first regional law, the Tuscan one of August 2002. This, however, is not always true, nor everywhere. Although sodomy was removed from the list of crimes at the time of the French Revolutionary Constituent Assembly (in 1791), in the United States it remains illegal in Texas, Kansas, and Oklahoma, even if committed within the confines of private homes. No more and no less than in Great Britain, where at the dawn of the third millennium the law still existed that punished two men for kissing in public or having sex in a hotel room with imprisonment, and only in June 2002 did the Minister of the Interior (amid protests from the right) declare that it was time to repeal it.
In Italy, on the other hand, there are no blatantly discriminatory laws against homosexuals; but there are also no laws capable of repressing the unequal treatment of which they are victims, of punishing hatred towards them. 'March 8, 1999, Arcigay takes up pen and paper to report to the minister the presence of homosexuality in the list of mental illnesses. The Court of Cassation (in a ruling dated April 26, 2000) deemed homosexuality a form of "psychic incapacity" to marry. In Padua (in July 2002), the Carabinieri fined a transsexual for "cross-dressing in a public place," reviving an old, never-repealed provision of the 1931 Consolidated Law on Public Safety. Finally, he was denied the most basic of rights: the right to start a family. In Italy, gays cannot marry, unlike in Denmark (the first country to recognize same-sex unions, in 1989), Norway (whose Finance Minister, Per-Kristian Foss, married his partner in January 2002), Germany, and the Netherlands. They cannot divorce, as happened to a gay couple before a court in Lower Saxony in June 2002. Nor can they adopt a child, although this desire is shared by gay couples (59%) and lesbians (47%). Nor can they enter into a contract that establishes reciprocal rights and obligations for homosexual couples, along the lines of the PACS (Civil Solidarity Pact), approved in France by the National Assembly on October 13, 1999, and subsequently imitated in Finland, Sweden, Portugal, Australia, and other countries. This means that a cohabiting homosexual is not entitled to a survivor's pension; he cannot inherit except by will; he is not entitled to maintenance when his union breaks up; and he cannot care for his partner in hospital without the permission of his relatives.
How can the wound be healed? Perhaps the medicine can come from the market. In the US, a study by the Simmons Market Research Bureau revealed that 21% of gays have an income of more than $100,000 a year, while 28% reaches $50,000; that 60% occupy medium-high level positions; that 48% have a university degree; that 61% take at least one trip abroad a year; and that, in short, gays consume better and more so than heterosexuals, if only because they don't have children to raise. Hence the rush to offer them advertising, products, and tailor-made websites, with the result—for example—that at the 2001 Atlanta Gay Pride Parade, brands like the Blockbuster video chain, Budweiser beer, Coca-Cola, American Airlines, and American Express jostled for sponsorship. But after all, there's nothing new under the sun: in the courts, freedom is bought by paying bail, and so much the worse for those with empty wallets.
