When the law on same-sex marriage came into force in Spain in the summer of 2005, it was not only the fulfilment of an electoral promise made by the Socialist José Luís Rodríguez Zapatero, but also the affirmation of an entire generation that had grown up with the films of Pedro Almodóvar or the novels of Eduardo Mendicutti, “Una mala noche (la tiene cualquiera)”, which, through the voice of an Andalusian transsexual in Madrid, recounts the grotesque night of the attempted coup d’état of 23 February 1981, when members of the Civil Guard tried to overthrow Spanish democracy. A very effective literary way of saying that the rollback of rights would be paid for by some more than others.
In Spain
Few countries in the world had passed a similar law before Spain, and it was only in 2004, the year in which Zapatero won the elections, that the UN and the EU recognised the International Day against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia, set for 17 May, because on 17 May 1990 the World Health Organisation definitively removed homosexuality from the list of mental illnesses, classifying it as a “natural variant of human behaviour”. Spain had another first, that of having broken the taboo, or rather of having banished the cliché of being a Catholic and intolerant nation, where a certain religious traditionalism would never have allowed certain objectives to be achieved. This law was the stage of a journey that started from a marginal place and brought to the centre of our democracies something that was tolerated as eccentric, but which demanded to be normalised.
In Portugal
Five years later, Portugal also passed a law that, although not identical in all respects, was close to the Spanish model. It was signed in 2010, on the 17th of May, by a very conservative President of the Republic, Aníbal Cavaco Silva, whose party had voted against it, but who could only accept the will of a large parliamentary majority, that of the Portuguese Left, which was then in the majority, although very divided on many issues, but not on this one. Inter-country adoption was left out of the law, precisely for political reasons, as the Spanish immediately realised. A rule that will have to wait until 2016 and the return of the left to power after the euro crisis season, when it seemed that governments had no choice but to put their battered finances back in order.
In Italy
For Italy, with Matteo Renzi as Prime Minister, 2016 is also the year of the “Cirinnà Law”, named after its sponsor, Democratic Party Senator Monica Cirinnà. It does not establish equal marriage, but the possibility of civil union, with all the rights and obligations that this entails. Even in this case, however, the possibility of adopting the couple’s child is excluded. Since then, the Italian situation has not evolved much at the legislative level, leaving gaps that have gradually been filled by case law, recognising adoptions and marriages contracted abroad. Faced with the impossibility of making progress in terms of substantive rights, it has happened more than once in Italy that opposing factions of public opinion have fought for an overly traditionalist advertising of the family or for more punitive legislation against homophobia, as in the case of the ill-fated Zan law, which was not passed by the Senate in 2021. One of the fundamental paradoxes of this law was that it targeted a homophobia that the Italian state itself had not yet managed to completely abandon. A strange idea, the “monopoly of violence”. Nothing is more revolutionary, but also more frightening to reactionary traditionalists, than a generation of children growing up with the boy with two mothers or two fathers as a classmate, especially if he knows how to bake birthday cakes as well as anyone.
Latest news
The more recent news of the circular issued by the Italian Ministry of the Interior last year, through the Prefect, forcing municipalities to stop registering the children of same-sex couples, has once again drawn international attention to the shortcomings of Italian legislation, which is still too often used as an excuse for those who are simply seeking a stable family situation. It must be said that even the progressive front has begun to show some cracks. Giorgia Meloni’s fight against surrogate motherhood, a practice that is often at the root of same-sex adoptions, has found allies not only in the majority of the right, but also in the liberals or in the historic left-wing feminist militancy, with split positions in parliament. A split not unlike that seen in Spain over the controversial ‘trans law’ promoted by the government of Pedro Sánchez and his former minister, Irene Montero.
While we wait for more clarity from the planetary vanguard, which has in any case been able to recognise and guarantee an essential right, there remains the other, more bitter certainty that on this 17th of May, too, many clouds will darken the skies of nations that still punish homosexuality, albeit with different nuances depending on the time zone: from Russia (without love) to Orbán’s Hungary, which imposes cellophane covers on books that would seduce young people, to the death penalty planned and confirmed by the Constitutional Court in Uganda.
