“Would you mind if we sat down? If I stay standing for too long, I feel dizzy,” Angelo Pezzana asks calmly, and with a smile. It’s a weekday in October and he’s just turned 81. Despite his fatigue (the consequence of a recent illness), he moves with a composure and an elegance, emphasised by his smart suit, that seem immutable.
We meet at a museum hosting an exhibition dedicated to the movement that he founded, where he has just filmed part of a documentary about this history. He talks slowly and quietly, weighing each word but still conveying the energy of his vivid memories. What he’s lived through, and what he’s done, would be hard for anyone to forget.
In the early 1970s, gay Italians began to raise their voices and start participating openly in public life thanks to Pezzana’s activism and his creation: FUORI!. The first national LGBT rights movement in this conservative Catholic country.
