Rights in everyone’s lives. Pietro Turano: “Politics does not listen, I would like it at my workshop at RepIdee”

“If I could invite someone to listen to my Town Hall I would ask the Prime Minister to attend. It is important that those who have a role of representation like that can be around people and listen, without the need to speak. Too often politics is present. , speaks and does not listen. Sometimes it would be nice if they did “.

Pietro Turanoborn in 1996, is spokesperson for the Gay Center and national Arcigay councilor, on 17 June he will be the protagonist of one of the workshops of Repubblica delle Idee 2022 at the Sala degli Atti in Bologna.

Any construction site on the future should start from an analysis of the present, what is the status of rights in Italy today?
Thanks to the Gay Help Line, the toll-free number of the Roma Capitale services to which it is possible to send reports and requests for support, we can photograph the situation of homophobia in Italy. But a green line is not enough, we need a law that allows us to analyze the problem, how specific it is and how it is expressed in reality. Ignoring it, making everything fall under the great hat of violence without realizing that there are matrices behind it, means not understanding the problem. The picture is serious: 42% of violence occurs in the family, 35% of workers suffer discrimination. Italy is in 33rd place out of 49 European countries for the protection of the rights of LGBT + people.

Does the homophobia law continue to be the urgency for the future?
It is very important but it was also thirty years ago, Italy is thirty years behind on this matter. The dramatic thing is that politics is far behind the country. With the sinking of the Zan bill under the applause of the Senate we have seen it: while the country had been asking for that law in seventy Italian squares for two years, in the Chamber they rejected it with applause. Being able to deal with people horizontally as it will be in the Republic of Ideas with the Town Hall means creating an equal discussion with people, participating, in order not to risk – even we who do activism – of remaining closed to interacting with the institutions. We must remain tied to the questions that the whole country is asking and to the answers that the country seeks.

The referendum that has just been held was a failure, while the questions that were most dear to the Italians (considering the number of signatures), namely the one on the end of life and the one on cannabis, were rejected by the Constitutional Court.
It is another proof of the distance between politics and civil society. A distance that creates sorrow. When a country finds itself in the streets to ask for referendums, which is a constitutional right, to express itself directly with a tool that is wonderful, these requests are continually ignored. On the other hand, we saw the organization of a referendum where most people didn’t even understand what they were talking about. There is a lack of communication. There are at least two referendums that have been requested with more than the necessary signatures and yet we are still talking about them among a few.

Are there issues in the LGBT + world that have been proposed for a referendum?
A collection of signatures was recently launched for a referendum on egalitarian marriage, in Italy the referendums are abrogative and therefore something that is not foreseen cannot be proposed. That referendum was a stimulus to ask for the cancellation of some words and elements of the law on civil unions so as to equate it to marriage. Politics would have pushed to establish the existence of two identical institutions with the hope of making them the same. It is a complicated process, it should not go through a referendum but through a bill on equal marriage. Too bad that this too is another of those requests that have been made for thirty years.

Roma Pride has just ended, to which The Republic participated as the first Italian newspaper to take to the streets for rights. How was this Pride?
Nice and attended but the best thing is that there is a Pride wave that lasts from June until September. Every year the Pride grows especially in the small provinces and only in Lazio we will do two in the coming weeks: on 25th in Albano and on 9th July in Viterbo. This too is a response to the inaction of politics, it is a wave that sweeps the whole country for three and a half months.

Will your Town Hall also talk about this?
The first point is to understand together what we are talking about when we talk about rights and to do it with an intersectional approach, that is to understand that talking about rights means facing the lives of all and all of us and that our identities are a crossing of pieces, not a single one. easily identifiable thing. We will start from the question of LGBT + rights but with the idea of ​​opening up the question even more by making people work on their lives and asking them to mix on topics they know less. There will be an exchange, with a request to put yourself in other people’s shoes. We will also talk about the laws we need; of language – being a festival organized by a newspaper – to understand which words to use to carry on our battles and where we are in information and communication. With me there will be Gabriele Segre, an expert activist both in LGBT + and against skill who has been working for some time on these workshops at par.