The march was part of EL*C’s fourth annual conference
BY JADE WILSON, IMAGE BY GETTY
The last time Louise* was in Rome, she wasn’t out as a lesbian to anyone in her life. This time, she was standing in a crowd of hundreds of lesbians, attending Italy’s first-ever “dyke march”.
“The last time I was in Rome, it was with my Catholic parents. This was my second visit to Rome, now out to myself and to others, and this was pure magic. It kind of helps me reconcile with the past,” she said.
The march took place during Lesbian Visibility Week, and it was fitting, too, that it took place on 26 April, the day after Liberation Day in Italy, which commemorates the efforts of the anti-fascist resistance to liberate the country from Nazi occupation and fascist rule at the end of World War II in 1945.
“It was incredible. I’ve never been with so many lesbians. Also, because of my age – I’m 40 – I’ve encountered queer spaces late in life, often feeling late to live through certain stuff because people are generally younger at parties,” she said.
But the age diversity was “incredible” and “very reassuring,” Louise added.
Louise had never attended a dyke march anywhere, and felt it was “great to have a space of lesbians that is trans-inclusive also”.
Louise, who did not want to publish her surname as she’s still not out at her workplace, was attending the march as part of the Eurocentral-Asian Lesbian Community’s fourth annual conference.
The EL*C is an international network of NGOs, groups and individuals that strives to help coordinate, train, give resources, and advocate for lesbian civil society.
The group organised the conference to be in Italy this year against the backdrop of a rollback of some of the rights of LGBTQIA in Italy (and elsewhere in Europe).
In Italy specifically, lesbian rights have been under attack, including the removal of lesbian mothers from their children’s birth certificates in 2023, under new legislation passed by the “traditional family-first” government of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.
The measure means that only the biological parent of a child can be named on a birth certificate. Surrogacy is also illegal in Italy, and gay marriage has not yet been legalized.
Human Rights Watch has described the measure as among the “mounting attack” on lesbian parents in Italy, where lesbian couples also cannot access fertility treatment.
“To bring together 700 lesbians from 55 countries is a way of strengthening the exchange and creation of lesbian projects that will be able to protect our rights and in several countries democracy in itself,” Silvia Casalino, who helped organise the ELC conference and dyke march, said.
“With the emerging authoritarian national governments and in the EU too, civil societies are in great danger and we should start really thinking about how to resist this trend,” she told DIVA.
For Casalino, who grew up as a lesbian in Italy during the 1990s, seeing young people arrive at the square “holding hands, happy, scared and excited, was a total joy for me” she said.
Casalino felt that lesbians are “always fighting for the others” but often feel “a bit alone when it comes to the fight for our own rights”.
The current government in Italy was “making choices that are bringing Italy and minorities rights back, so for me it’s a fascist trend,” she said.
“Abortion rights, migrant struggles, trans inclusion and lesbian mothers are among the issues we have to keep always in our mind and take to the streets and organize in networks to fight back”.
That’s why it was “absolutely the right moment to organise the first dyke march in Italy,” Casalino added.
*Names have been changed.
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