12 June 2013 Last updated at 19:21 ET
A gay island community
created by Italy's Fascists
By Alan Johnston
BBC News, Italy
Seventy-five years ago in Fascist Italy, a group of gay men were
labelled "degenerate", expelled from their homes and interned
on an island. They were held under a prison regime - but some
found life in the country's first openly gay community a
liberating experience.
Every summer, tourists are drawn to the beauty of a tiny string of
rocky islands in the Adriatic.
But just recently a group of visitors came to the Tremiti archipelago
not so much to enjoy the peace and calm of this remote place as to
remember.
These were gay, lesbian and transgender rights activists.
They had come to hold a small ceremony during which they would
mark a shameful episode that unfolded in the islands more than 70
years ago.
Back in the late 1930s the archipelago played a part in the effort by
Benito Mussolini's Fascists to suppress homosexuality.
Gay men undermined the image that the dictator wanted to project of
Italian manhood.
"Fascism is a virile regime. So the Italians are strong, masculine, and
it's impossible that homosexuality can exist in a Fascist regime," says
professor of history at the University of Bergamo, Lorenzo Benadusi.
So the strategy was to cover up the issue as much as possible.
This evil needs to be attacked and burned at its core”
Mayor of Catania, in Sicily
No discriminatory laws were passed. But a climate was created in
which open manifestations of homosexuality could be vigorously
suppressed.
And one particular police prefect in the Sicilian city of Catania took full
advantage of the official mood.
"We notice that many public dances, beaches and places in the
mountains receive many of these sick men, and that youngsters from
all social classes look for their company," he wrote.
He said he was determined to halt this "spreading of degeneration" in
his city "or at least contain such a sexual aberration that offends
morality and that is disastrous to public health and the improvement
of the race".
He went on: "This evil needs to be attacked and burned at its core."
So in 1938 around 45 men believed to be homosexuals in Catania
were rounded up and consigned to internal exile.
They eventually found themselves about 600km away on the island of
San Domino, in the Tremitis.
The 2008 graphic novel In Italia Sono Tutti Maschi tells the story of gay
people exiled under fascism
The whole episode has been largely forgotten.
It's thought that nobody who endured this punishment is still alive
today, and there are few detailed accounts of what went on there.
But in their book, The Island and the City, researchers Gianfranco
Goretti and Tommaso Giartosi talk of dozens of men, most but not all
from Catania, enduring harsh conditions on San Domino.
They would arrive handcuffed, and then be housed in large, spartan
dormitories with no electricity or running water.
Benito Mussolini was born on 29 July 1883 in Predappio
Formed Fascist Party in March 1919
Made himself dictator in 1925, taking the title "Il Duce"
Provided military support to Franco in the Spanish Civil War
Agreed military and political alliance with Germany in 1939
Declared war on Britain and France in June 1940
Overthrown and imprisoned in 1943
Shot on 28 April 1945
"We were curious because they were called 'the girls'," says Carmela
Santoro, an islander who was just a child when the gay exiles began
to arrive.
"We would go and watch them get off the boat... all dressed up in the
summer with white pants - with hats.
"And we would watch in awe - 'Look at that one, how she moves!' But
we had no contact with them."
Another islander, Attilio Carducci, remembers how a bell would ring
out at 8pm every day, when the men were no longer allowed outside.
"They would be locked inside the dormitories, and they were under
the supervision of the police," he says.
"My father always spoke well of them. He never had anything bad to
say about them - and he was the local Fascist representative."
The prisoners knew the exposure of their homosexuality would have
caused shame and anguish for their families back home in deeply
conservative towns and villages.
Some of that mood is captured in a letter from the son of a Sicilian
peasant, who had been training to be a priest when he was rounded
up.
Begging the judicial authorities to let him go home he wrote:
"Imagine, Your Honour, the grief of my beloved father. What a
dishonour for him!
"Internal exile for five years.
"It makes me mad just to think about it."
The prisoner, identified only as Orazio L, pleaded for a chance to be
allowed to leave the island and "serve the Fatherland" in the army.
"To become a soldier, and then return to the seminary to live in
retirement, is the only way in which I could repair the scandal and
dishonour to my family," he wrote.
But some of the few accounts given by former exiles make clear that
life was not all bad on San Domino.
It seems that the day-to-day prison regime was comparatively
relaxed.
We did theatre, and we could dress as women there and
no-one would say anything”
Giuseppe B
San Domino inmate
Unwittingly, the Fascists had created a corner of Italy where you were
expected to be openly gay.
For the first time in their lives, the men were in a place where they
could be themselves - free of the stigma that normally surrounded
them in devoutly Catholic 1930s Italy.
What this meant to the exiles was explained in a rare interview with a
San Domino veteran, named only as Giuseppe B - published many
years ago in the gay magazine, Babilonia - who said that in a way the
men were better off on the island.
"In those days if you were a femminella [a slang Italian word for a gay
man] you couldn't even leave your home, or make yourself noticed the police would arrest you," he said of his home town near Naples.
"On the island, on the other hand, we would celebrate our Saint's
days or the arrival of someone new... We did theatre, and we could
dress as women there and no-one would say anything."
And he said that of course, there was romance, and even fights over
lovers.
Some prisoners wept, Giuseppe said, when the outbreak of World
War II in 1939 led to the end of the internal exile regime on San
Domino, and the men were returned to a kind of house arrest in the
places where they came from.
A number of gay men were interned along with political prisoners on
other small islands, such as Ustica and Lampedusa, but San Domino
was the only one where all the exiles were gay.
It is deeply ironic that in the Italy of that time, they could find a degree
of freedom only on a prison island.
The party of gay and lesbian rights activists who gathered on the
archipelago the other day put down a plaque in memory of the exiles.
It will be a permanent reminder of Mussolini's persecution of
homosexuals.
"This is necessary, because nobody speaks of what happened in
those years," said one of the activists, Ivan Scalfarotto, a Member of
Parliament.
And the suffering hasn't ended for Italy's gay community, he says.
They are no longer shackled and shipped off to islands - but even
now they are not regarded as "class A" citizens.
There is still no real social stigma attached to homophobia in Italy,
Scalfarotto says, and the state doesn't extend legal rights of any kind
to gay or lesbian couples.
Their struggle for equality goes on.