The 2023 Pride season has recently concluded, having once again captured public attention this year and brought a powerful wave of resistance to state violence and the reactionary policies of this government to the streets. The power of this wave is now recognized, both by those on the left who harness it as a source of consensus and a pressure strategy, and by those on the right who oppose it and use it as a pretext to reiterate the formal and substantive exclusion of gender and sexuality from the public sphere.
From recognition comes a political power that the LGBTQIA+ movement (especially the organizations that through that recognition have become institutions and points of reference) cannot ignore and cannot manage as a merely ritualistic act, building a neutral platform to welcome and celebrate that power or, alternatively, a radical space for the pure expression of dissent and opposition, divorced from the contexts in which that power is exercised. The political relevance of Pride events is dangerously diminished in both cases.
This season, opposing visions of struggle have clashed, with a clarity that is not new to queer politics but is certainly noteworthy. In some cases, the confrontation has taken on violent overtones, threatening to engulf the political messages brought to the streets in an internal conflict that weakens and crushes our ability to speak out. We call it an internal conflict, aware that this too is a positioning, because this conflict would not be such, not in the forms it has expressed this year, if, on the other hand, a certain vision of struggle were not considered as different, as external to the movement: assimilated by the establishment, party politics, and capital on the one hand, born of non-queer political traditions and a proponent of revolutionary and therefore violent practices on the other.
Acknowledging the existence of this difference and deciding to address it doesn't mean choosing to erase one's identity, but rather going beyond a purely identity-based approach and working to build a street presence, in a demonstration involving tens of thousands of people, that is safer for everyone and capable of conveying all concerns.
To think, however, that this conflict is simply destined to exist and that all one can do—whether attempting to invisibilize it, to leave it out, or making it the crux of one's political identity—is an approach that is beginning to show clear limitations. This is demonstrated by the clash that erupted on August 6th, at the start of the march, between the Rimini Pride organizing committee and the Pride Off segment. At London Pride, Just Stop Oil activists blocked the Coca-Cola float to protest the polluting production of large corporations. In Florence, the critical stance of some of the opposing factions is open to interpretation as a threat to public safety, prompting police intervention. We cannot delude ourselves into thinking we are dealing with a marginal and marginalizable phenomenon, but we must acknowledge the complex contradictions of the models we have established for ourselves.
In a national political landscape of crisis and regression in civil and social rights, faced with a political class attempting to manage the crisis by imposing an economic model of merit and sacrifice and a monolithic, familist, white, and fiercely patriarchal cultural model, our political responsibility is to find paths, however complex, of dialogue and alliance, of care and recognition, of synthesis and not of divergence. Not with a view to erasing differences, leveling demands, and pacifying conflict, but rather to strategically strengthen our resistance and counterattack.
In October, the government will approve the Varchi bill, effectively establishing the universal crime of homoparenting and criminalizing a model of relationships and care. This is the same government that tore up the basic income, destroying the plans of many marginalized people to escape poverty, that approved the Cutro bill to repel migration, and promoted agreements with Tunisian dictator Kais Sayed. A government that, subjugated by the cultural guidance of an obscurantist NGO like ProVita e Famiglia, promises to attack alias careers and thus the possibility for trans people to exist socially. A government engaged in homophobic, lesbo, and transphobic crusades that, the data demonstrate, go even further than the beliefs of its own electoral base, and pursue a very specific and highly visible international strategy, which we have been denouncing for years.
We are in an unprecedented political moment, in which, as an association and an institution, aware of both our limitations and our power, we have no ready answers. Instead, we choose to dedicate our efforts to seeking and building spaces for dialogue and discussion, always evolving and always exposed to the possibility of failure. In the hot autumn that awaits us, approaching the anniversary of the first year of Meloni's government, we feel the urgency to contribute to building a strong and incisive common voice, one that transcends divisions, making them fertile spaces for discussion and rethinking the existing order.
With this in mind, we announce that this year we will be committed to opening spaces for discussion on the theme of Pride, both within our association and in communication with other organizations. We will make available the privileged relationships that Cassero has been able to build over the years and the resources of physical and political spaces that, far from belonging to us, are and remain the community's.
The article Press release 08/21/2023 comes from Keep.
