Franco Grillini: “Homophobia is the daughter of misogyny”

It is not the only field in which to act. “The taboo on sex in Italy is still so strong that it is the only one of the few countries in Europe where there is no sex education in schools. You breathe homophobia as you breathe hatred of women. We fought against the idea that males shouldn’t show emotion, that they shouldn’t be fragile. It was a world of castration, the male was halved, cut in half of his emotional life to match a model ».

It is toxic machismo that Grillini, a refusal he also sees in the revolution of these days, that of gender fluid. “The boys, who refuse to identify with murderous machismo, treat themselves as their friends. Male homosexuals, even a few decades ago, were referred to as traitors to the pack, they betrayed his fate. The homosexual male was a failed woman, the homosexual woman was a failed male, this was still thought forty years ago ».

In the film there is a lot of the most difficult period of the fight against AIDS. “I dealt with it in the terrible time when it was a death sentence. I insisted a lot that there were those years in the film in which we were real substitutes for the state that did nothing. We were four cats who went all over Italy to hold assemblies where there were 7-8-900 people at a time. The fear was like the current one for Covid, with the difference that it could be found in public ».

Franco Grilli witnessed the entire journey, but he doesn’t feel like a monument. «When the municipality gave me the Golden Neptune, the mayor of Bologna said that the monumentalization had begun. I said: “If they make me a statue, I authorize you to tear it down as of now”. The thing I care about is that now you have the perception of the changes they have induced. Don’t be afraid of a head-on collision, I keep saying, because as long as he stays on his word it is good for us. I am a twentieth century gay, but curious because I like to see change».

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