Italy's Fascist-era "Gay Island" Recalled

Among the 20th Century European fascism's many repellent aspects was its persecution, imprisonment, and murder of those attracted to others of the same sex. Recently, according to a BBC report, a group of gay, lesbian, and transgender rights activists visited Italy's Tremiti Islands to publicly recall the Mussolini regime's banishment of gay men.

The Tremiti Islands, as they appear today.
(photo: wikipedia.com)

These Adriatic islands were, during the Fascist era, essentially a prison to which gay men were exiled. The Tremiti, during that time, were rather inhospitable and about as disconnected from the mainland as Alcatraz is from San Francisco. Many of the Tremiti Island gays were Sicilians who, once publicly fingered for their sexual preference, were ruined and their families forced to endure social disgrace.

The regime used banishment as a psychological tool to isolate and break the spirit of those it considered undesirable. (Carlo Levi's outstanding memoir Christ Stopped at Eboli offers a moving rendition of an intellectual dispatched to a particularly bleak southern Italian mountain town.) Ironically, as the BBC story observed, the creation of an exclusively gay prison population led to a surprising sense of freedom among many of the inmates.

None of the Tremiti prisoners are alive today to relate their experiences. To prevent an act of historical amnesia, Italian LGBT activists visited the islands and placed a plaque to acknowledge the Sicilian gays' shameful exile. The activists also pointed out that the country's gay, lesbian, and transgender communities continue to experience de facto discrimination and stigmatization. In some ways, Italy's LGBT population is still sentenced to live on psychological and social islands, removed from a mainland life. That isolation is just as repugnant now as it was during the height of Benito Mussolini's power.