Italy’s LGBT Movement and Interest Groups

The Italian LGBTQI+ movement emerged in the 1970s in the context of the 1968 and post-1968 protests. Its history is characterized by a discontinuous trajectory, marked by several key moments of internal divisions and conflicts, related to political events, such as the alliance with the Radical Party, in the mid-1970s, or the approval of the same-sex Civil Unions Bill, in 2016. In the history of the Italian LGBTQI+ movement, three moments in particular can be identified that have led from the first revolutionary homosexual front (FUORI), an anti-institutional one, to the foundation of a structured and organized, and then institutionalized, movement both at a local and national level: 1974–1985, a founding moment; 1996–2000, a re-founding moment; 2016–2018, a reconfiguration moment. An intra-comparative diachronic analysis, within the Italian national context, shows how confrontations between different meanings and projects of what an “LGBTQI+ movement” is and has to be have led Italian activists to shape specific social movement organizations and practices.