Massimo Milani on fighting for LGBTQ+ rights in Italy: ‘Now that we are out, we will not go back’ (EXCLUSIVE)

In Italy, Massimo Milani is considered an LGBTQ+ icon as the co-founder of Arcigay, the country’s largest nationwide LGBTQ+ rights organisation. They set it up in 1980 with their husband Gino Campanella and others in Palermo, Sicily. The aim was to combat hostility from the homophobic political left and the Catholic Church, as well as to counteract social invisibility and violence against LGBTQ+ people – specifically, the homophobic shooting of two young men, Giorgio Agatino Giammona and Antonio Galatola, in Giarre, Sicily, in October 1980. 

The story of Massimo Milani, honouree of the PEUGEOT Attitude PRIDE Awards Europe, supported by British Airways, is intrinsically linked to Campanella and the Arcigay movement; you cannot talk about one without the other. Their story starts with “love at first sight” in Rome, a bond which was cemented when they moved to Palermo in 1978. 

Although there were no laws prohibiting same-sex relations in Italy, it was not something you made public half a century ago, says Milani, now 71 years old. “You could do it, hidden in places we were segregated to, but then you came back and you had to be normal,” they tell me. “Maybe you pretended to have a girlfriend, or you got married. Plenty of gays and lesbians got married in those years to maintain some respectability.”

Love in the shadows

Milani says that before they met, Campanella had been married to a woman, thinking it would “cure his illness”. 

“The Church has had an important role in Italy,” Milani reminds me. “It is hard to escape from such guilt.

“LGBTQ+ rights weren’t even considered; we were just perverts,” they continue. “But now that we are out, we will not go back.” 

Sicily was often stereotyped as old-fashioned, closed-minded and patriarchal, but even during the tumultuous Mafia years, it eventually welcomed and accepted Milani, Campanella and the LGBTQ+ community they built around their shop Quir and through Arcigay. 

“We formed the first chapter of Arcigay in 1980 together with many others,” says Milani. “For the first time, the [political] left took responsibility for the LGBTQ+ issues that it had neglected.”

After becoming a national movement, Arcigay helped establish an awareness campaign around HIV/AIDS and set itself up as a national political force in 1986 by holding its inaugural conference entitled “Homosexuals and the State” inside the Italian Parliament. 

Four decades of activism

Today, the organisation is still a political powerhouse as it combats the current right-wing Italian government’s attempts to curb LGBTQ+ protections, all while maintaining over 70 territorial committees, providing safe gathering spaces, mental health support and anti-bullying education.

While fighting their public battle for the LGBTQ+ community, Milani and Campanella continued to push boundaries on a personal level. In 1993, on the anniversary of the Stonewall riots and with the help of Palermo’s municipal council, they celebrated their love with a symbolic marriage. 

“This had a great impact on Palermo, like a bomb, because no one was expecting it,” reminisces Milani. “Everyone talked about it, I remember the Repubblica national newspaper had it on the front page. It was a symbolic wedding, but people were talking like it was real.”

As well as through Arcigay, the couple have supported the LGBTQ+ community through their shop, Quir, for decades. After moving to Sicily with no money, the couple started creating with their hands. “We were working at home, making belts and bags, and then selling on the pavements like the migrants do now,” explains Milani. The couple opened their first shop in a basement in 1980, and from 1989 ran Palermo’s first gay nightclub for three years. They opened the shop that would become Quir in 1992.

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Massimo’s full interview appears in issue 371 of Attitude magazine, on sale in print and digital now. Order Attitude magazine issue 371 in print now, or in digital on the links below on Apple News+ and the Attitude app.