Fascist concentration camps that would end up being spaces of freedom for gays.
EDITORIAL GAYLES.TV.- We live in turbulent times, the European Union loses one of its pillars with the Brexit. The fear of migratory movements and the crisis of the refugees explodes a bomb from which we still do not know the extent of the damages caused. And in the meantime we close the way for thousands of people who knock at the doors of the old continent fleeing war and desolation to find the doors closed and the ignominy of being crowded in fields that hurt memory with images that some would want to forget. Images and experiences that remind others not so distant and sometimes we do not even know despite being very close.
But not to repeat the mistakes of the story before you have to know it. Today we bring you the story of some little-known facts that affected hundreds of gay people in Italy. Mussolini. For Italian fascism, homosexuality was nothing but a "foreign vice" imported from England and Germany. According to the Duce "Italians are too macho for homosexuals". That was why he ordered to withdraw an article from the penal code that sought to sanction homosexuality as a crime. Accepting it was tantamount to acknowledging its existence, and what was worse, questioned the myth of Italian virility.
It was much better to act outside the law, in silence, harassing, making illegal raids, extorting and beating whenever the sexual option was exhibited. In fact a decree of 1931 authorized "cleaning measures" against those who endangered morals and good manners. So it was to sweep and hide the dust under the carpet or what is the same: hundreds of so-called "Culattoni" they were deported during periods of 5 years to tiny and lost islands of the Italian geography.
The main ones were Lampedusa, San Domino, Favignana and Ustica. Some of them had been used as a prison since the time of the Roman Empire. In the period between 1938 and 1943 hundreds of homosexuals accused of pedophilia were confined in subhuman conditions. Some facts that would later fall into oblivion to be rescued with the recent publication of the book "La città e l'isola" (the city and island) of researchers Gianfranco Gorretti and Tommaso Giartosi, origin of the comic "In Italy they are all males" de Luca de Santis and Sara Colaone.
In most of these islands, homosexuals shared exile or common prisoners as in the case of Favignana or with those whom the fascist regime considered undesirable of all kinds as communists, anarchists, socialists, republicans and even Jehovah's Witnesses. This amalgam was piled up in a real concentration camp in Ustica.
But one of those islands would go down in history because of the peculiarity of hosting only homosexual reclusive population, the island of San Domino. At first a total of 100 inmates were housed in two Spartan barracks without water or electric light. But in spite of the infernal conditions of their confinement, for many it was better than the jail of silence that lived in their cities of origin. Unexpectedly, in San Domino, fascist Italy had created a space in which all those exiles could, for the first time in their life, openly show themselves as they were. Giuseppe B. one of the interns, in an interview to the magazine Babylon stated: "In those days, if you were a femmenella (a word of Italian slang to talk about gay men) You couldn't even leave the house, make yourself noticed; the police arrested you. On the contrary, on the island we celebrated the day of our saints or the arrival of someone new. We did theater and we could dress like women and nobody said anything".
Despite the vigilance of the guards there was more than one romance and they say that when, after the outbreak of World War II, they were returned to their places of origin in a kind of house arrest regime, many of them cried for having to separate from their boyfriends and friends to return to the dark closets of an Italy that condemned and criminalized.
It is paradoxical that we are scandalized by these events while we remain silent to the conditions of absolute precariousness and desolation, to the extortion, blackmail and sexual abuse suffered by those who leave their lives knocking on the doors of a Europe that, too old to remember your own story, you risk having to relive it.
Sources: Public.es
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