(Notizie Radicali, July 1972, from "Marco Pannella, Writings and Discourses, 1959-1980", Gammalibri, January 1982)At our headquarters in Via di Torre Argentina 18, we have donated office space to the recently constituted democratic homosexual movement called FUORI. We have already reported the fact. These comrades use the offices on Tuesday evenings for their meetings and as a mailing address. They have held a press conference during which they presented their monthly magazine. As could have been foreseen, this has provoked numerous reactions. Christian Democratic respectability has unleashed its favourite weapons: censure and disinformation. The Fascist or right-wing variety has, consonant with its particular culture and type of civility, resorted to insult and racism.
An interesting note is that those who disapprove this move are not bothering so much to illustrate and contest FUORI's programs, reasonings and propositions, as to hit at the Radical Party and its battles for civil rights. In the (right-wing) magazine Il Borghese , in particular, they emphasised that on the same premises area housed or welcomed leagues and movements that fight in favour of divorce, the rights of conscientious objectors, civil rights and - now - homosexuality. On the very same days Lo Specchio recalled that the Students Movement too, during the days of its greatest difficulties, could only count on the space and technical services of the Radical Party.
Inasmuch as we also received a few protests from friends of the Radical Party or of our battle for the same problem, this seems to us an excellent occasion to express some observations of a general nature on our position and our effective responsibility.
To us it seems inexact to say that we are "in favour" of divorce, of abortion, of the pill, and so on. We are opposed to the present system that has historically asserted the right of one class to the privilege of abortion, of divorce, of contraception, of disposing of one's body freely and on one's own responsibility, while one claims the right to send those who are not part of the privileged class before a court or to jail on the basis of their income and political power.
With the Sacra Rota and its lightening divorces, or divorces abroad, the indissolubility of marriage has been and will be (if the "Fortuna-Basilini Law" is passed) a laughable lie for and of the wealthy and power-holding classes - just as are the voluntary abortion in a clinic or the buying and use of contraceptives, or the consumption of even the most fashionable and "heaviest" drugs. While for the larger part of the common citizens, especially the proletarianized lower middle classes and the proletariat, the anti-permissive, authoritarian position has historically meant the non-right to free and responsible parenthood, to the destruction of body and spirit that it comports for which can testify the millions of marriage outlaws, the millions of women obliged to have clandestine divorces,
the millions of children entrusted to the likes of Pagliuche, Celestini, the accomplice-friars of Aliotta, the OMNI, the Flaviane Venturi nuns and so on. (All people and groups involved in orphan scandals,ed.)
Not many years ago, along with Gigi De Marchi and the usual Radical commandos, we risked lynching because at Aster we went to St. Peter's Square, filled with hundreds of the faithful, carrying posters on which were written, among other things, "No to abortions, Yes to the pill". Useless. After several months Pope Paul again signed his named to the order consigning new generations of innocents to an inhuman existence.
Sometime later we owed our first denunciations to those attempts to get sex education that now, with the parody that has become of them, make the fortune of the Edizioni Paoline, the Famiglila Cristiana and similar beneficent and sacred societies.
Each time, for decades now, we were attacked and vilified as depraved corrupters.
Five years ago we went asking the public opinion what was obscene about in the placards that we wore: was it in the very beautiful photographs of female nudes taken from seized magazines, or not rather in the horrid scenes of war and torture published all over the world by all the press? We were hit by the usual denunciations, but the judges took our part. We succeeded in holding a meeting on sexual liberty that took place before many hundreds of people, mostly young. Professors who at the university would have spoken mostly to their assistants, were eagerly listened to and created, together with us, a rich and tense debate. On this occasion too we were vilified by the clerical press. The Braibanti case came up, an episode still unclear to many in its technical aspects, but clear enough ny now in substance. A youth and a man condemned to prison to the insane asylum because they had chosen to live in poverty, in conflict with the values and the institutions of the majority, and suspected of homosexual relati
ons.
This too was one of our battles for liberty, tolerance justice and truth. Therefore let no one ask u to be prudent, calculating, tactful or even simply cautious considering the inevitable price of these things in a society such as ours for anyone who wants to be able to face himself in the mirror of public and private life.
For now, we are grateful to FUORI because they help us better to understand and to fulfil our function. We hope that they will be able to say as much , sooner or later, to us Radicals. If we are still around by then.
But whether or not FUORI works, whether or not it reveals itself even to most people for what it is - a revolutionary movement which is also moral (and thus also a moral revolution for whoever participates in it) quite apart from the question of the space and the services which we also furnish to them - the objectives of the struggle of a lay group to live its sexuality is necessarily ours.
Because it is really not a question of either homo- or hetero- but of sexuality plain and simple.
It is always well to be clear and aware about the fight against the class racism of those who delude themselves into believing that for economic, cultural and social advantages, which are no merit of theirs, they have solved the essential problems of life and human happiness.
The homosexuality of the court, of kings, of aristocratic and bourgeois circles; the favourites of the pseudo-cultural industry, of the cinema, of "art"; the Oscar Wildes of the provinces who run no risk - these are only the inescapable and illuminating face of a type of society and class which we reject. As we do all its other faces.
And finally, do not come and tell us that the problem doesn't exist in tolerant Italy but only in the "civil" Anglo-Saxon world.
Only on the juridical level, it is true. Because a country that has been dominated for centuries by a mono-sexual community such as the Church of Rome, such as the papal and clerical power,
has never had tolerance for anything but brothels. This only means that Protestant puritanism, in its moral exigencies, has sinned for excesses of violence and delirium, but it was the face of deep and authentic moral tensions and obsessions. Which we too must have the clarity and the courage to sustain at the risk of error and guilt.
And of aggression, which is the least of it.
Movements for personal liberty are developing throughout the world today (and in Italy they are being born) which brush against old taboos all the more powerful for having been condemned historically by science and morality. They are constituted by political minorities (that is, with claims that necessarily involve the "order" of the entire "city"), social minorities that rightly or wrongly consider themselves discriminated against, oppressed, massacred for their ideas, their race, their specific natural characteristics.
After three quarters of a century since the Freudian revolution, after more than a quarter of a century since the analyses and
theories of Reich, when by now all science has begun to locate the origins of unhappiness and terrible social and human suffering in sexual repression, the mass movements of women's liberation, of modern youthful protest, of homosexual groups, are trying to propose a public and civil debate, a conscious choice of policies and attitudes, public and private, that are in direct correlation with the cultural advances which are unquestionable because they also give rise to concrete and organised
civilisation.
Thus a new political debate is born. More precisely it is a political alternative, clear-sighted and tied to the concrete problems and drama of the times, of the society and of individuals. This is not the place to discuss these premises and these considerations. Obviously we do not know whether the members of FUORI will be able to give themselves and, above all, us
the contribution of truth, of dialogue, of understanding and of growth that we can expect of them. But as Radicals we certainly have neither the right nor the desire nor any reason to discriminate between this movement and all the other groups, parties, movements and leagues to whom we have been of service consciously and in principle - in all possible ways: by the use of our offices, our equipment, our name, heritage and prestige as well as the adversities and hatreds that we have accumulated in years of intransigent and rigorous democratic activity, lay and libertarian. Less than ever if we consider that once again this dirty and hypocritical regime has struck at us with the excuse of
our acting "reprehensively" just because we have proposed that it be prohibited to prohibit all things that live. It is asserted, defended by them as a "class" privilege, a privilege of the few. Just because we continue to think that there is no human responsibility and growth except where one comes "out" with one's own truth, open to dialogue, to the light of the sun, trusting and respectful of "the different guys" who are always "the others".
