So thank you once more for being here we shall continue after the outstanding presentation by with the keynote speaker Stephanie Endlich and this panel discussion has three speakers even though they are just one because they have prepared these into three into one presentation with the three researchers we have with us Camille Kaszewski from Poland Ricardo Bulgarelli from Italy and then Moses Fernandez Cano from Madrid in Spain. They are all researchers at the European University Institute one of the most prestigious research centres in Europe, in Firenze in Italy and they will tell us how the LGBTQ community in these three countries have fought for their rights throughout the 20th century but they will also focus on the way we remember these struggles and the way that these communities and their achievements are remembered. We will also talk about the terms the terminology that we've been using when preparing when designing the agenda for this conference and this was a long-standing discussion with the researchers but also with the Catalan government supporting these meeting and we will tell you why we have chosen for the LGBTQ plus or LGBTI plus whether you are incorporating the Q or the I this is something that we will talk about later on maybe opening up the floor for discussion and I hope that the three researchers here also tell us about the title on this panel discussion Shantayi State and this is a title taken from one of the iconic stages statements by a queer figure that's from RuPaul's and so the three researchers that we have here with us have chosen this topic as a as a not to the queer world so I'll hand it over to Camille. Hello I will stand if it will not disturb you it's much easier for me to focus and also to observe the presentation. So we will talk about remembering and memories in in three European countries for those that are not familiar with the title Shantayi you stay it refers as Oriole mentioned before to one of the most famous TV shows where contestants drag queens fight for the title of the best drag queen every episode at the end of the episode the jury that consists of let's say queer celebrities decides who of the contestants should go home and who should stay and of course it's a big tension the person that is lucky to stay here's from the head of the jury Shantayi you stay and it came kind of became a very symbolic iconic moment for us it seemed very interesting because it's a moment that can be a metaphor of a situation where queer community itself decides who we can memorize or who we pay attention to and who we kind of drop in our narratives so it's not the decision of the mainstream or the majority but of the community itself and I think this topic will appear several times I wanted to ask you in the beginning do you know starting my presentation about Poland or queer history in Poland do you know when Poland decriminalized homosexual acts in what year or do you have a guess what would you what would be your intuition in 1932 Poland was the second country in 20th century after the Soviet Union that the criminalized homosexual acts was quite a pioneer this is this man is the head of the Commission that decided to decriminalize actually the decision was taken already in the early 20s but they were other more controversial issues for them to discuss so it took around 10 years before the criminal code that you can see on the left entered into force we decided to start with kind of very short overview of European history of queer from perspective that I think we are not so familiar with usually we are presented with a map of Europe that tells a narrative of marriage equality or civil partnerships and this narrative is very familiar and I think very often presents not such a challenging story where we have several pioneers among them Spain also I think but also Denmark Holland the countries that started and then of course the ugly sister called Eastern Europe however when we think about the criminalization of homosexual acts in Europe I think this narrative presents us with something much more challenging and especially challenging our imagination of of different parts of the of the continent when we look in the beginning of the 20th century and of course the political map as we know was completely different we had actually two systems the one consisting of so-called like let's say Southern Europe that was based of Napoleonic codes that traditionally didn't criminalize homosexual acts as such although sometimes people especially men were persecuted based on other reasons vagabondism or indecent behavior let's say however they were not targeted as as a group and then the other part of Europe that was targeting actually this group what was mentioned before by by Stephanie the paragraph 175 in Germany paragraph 129 in Austria for example and they were then were also this actually two examples in Europe Austria and Sweden that criminalized homosexual acts between women which was quite unique and this is still a controversy why and what was the reason then what happens around after the first world war what I call the first wave of the criminalization and here is the actually this is the proper map Soviet Union or Soviet Russia starts this trend in 1917 then in 1932 Poland the criminalized homosexual acts the next year with actually the same legal provisions Denmark in 1942 Switzerland in 1944 Sweden around the in the in the 30s still Estonia as well that is often forgotten and Iceland and it happens actually this process kind of ends by the end of the second world war paradoxically it starts in German speaking area where the activism was unsuccessful it came very close to the criminalization in Germany in Weimar Republic at the end of the 1920s beginning of 30s and of course the Hitler came to power and all the idea collapsed however it very much influenced other countries such activists like Magnus Hirschfeld traveled several times for example to Estonia to lobby for the change of the law they had also influence on the change of law especially in Denmark but also in Poland what happens next is named just a year after Poland the criminalized homosexuality with the tightening grip of power in Soviet Union the Soviet Union recriminalizes homosexuality then of course with the territorial expansion the law is expanded to Estonia in the after the second world war also Spain and Portugal actually and this kind of more liberal tradition and as far as I know in 1954 Francoist Spain criminalizes homosexuality as well and then we have something that I call the second wave of the criminalization and it happens in between mostly mid sixties and and eighties 83 Portugal is the country that decriminalizes homosexuals again 79 Spain there is this wave especially in the 60s and 80s and 70s only partially related to so-called sexual revolution in countries like United Kingdom and Germany however the countries on the other side of the iron curtain especially Czechoslovakia and the time Hungary and Bulgaria are a bit earlier so for example Eastern Germany the criminalized homosexual acts a year before Western Germany interestingly yes among the those that were lagging behind were Austria in 1971 72 men's before I mentioned Norway this all is happening around 30 years after the criminalization of homosexuality in Poland and then in the 1990s with the collapse of Cold War system and we have this what I call the third wave of the criminalization with all the new countries but also Ireland as far as I remember 1994 or Liechtenstein which is a small addition so actually when we look at this map we can see that it is a kind of a different narrative that we usually have when we talk about marriage equality that is kind of across this iron cart across the iron cart and across a lot of concepts that we have about Europe so coming focusing a bit on Poland and I know that it may seem a far away topic and maybe some some of you have never heard anything about history of query in Poland so just to shortly mark or signal the timeline the the term homosexuality in Poland emerges in 1893 and is quite smoothly just translated from German by a Polish student of Kraft Ebbing famous founder of sexology commonly perceived today as a founder of sexology so his student is just introducing the term in Polish but already in 1917 1915 1917 we have first novels short stories that actually show written by queer people and presenting queer desire in a firmative way then we have interwar period when Poland gains independence between 1918 1939 and for example in 1923 there is quite a scandal in Warsaw related to a lesbian doctor one of first physicians in physicians in Poland and she during the trial she openly claims that being a lesbian is not offensive it's not denigrating for a woman and in 1932 as I mentioned there is the the criminalization then we have the period of course of the second world war pink triangles a big different topic on its own and what happens after the second world war is of course the time of communism what in official narratives especially in Polish history graph he is never mentioned but what is very typical as I think believe I believe with my queer eye I look at Polish history there were certain very similarities it features that really made made conservative Catholic right-wing site of political spectrum very similar to to the communist regime and one of them was basically being very prurient so talking or showing publicly any kind of non-normative behaviors was not accepted we have to remember that in 1920s in Warsaw they were they were men in drag we have a movie quite a famous movie from 1930s with basically with a drag queen we had transgender sex workers in the streets they all disappear in mid 30s and they actually don't reappear until the end of the communist time and in the 1983 there is a there is an attempt to start a movement again in Poland there is an activist actually an immigrant in Austria in Vienna who publish who writes prepares a magazine in his home in Vienna copies it and distributes illegally in Poland and this is the beginning of the of kind of this new wave of queer movement in 1980s we have an action operation of the police that was made to a movie recently by net on Netflix called Hyacinth went police on state scale tries to register or homosexuals but then it's the end of the communism it was probably also related to the starting AJV crisis but it's it hasn't been basically researched what happened during the operation and I put has a symbolic date this date 1920 last presidential election in Poland went it was the first I think for the first time so explicitly and openly deployed homophobia as a political tool to win elections added also galvanized to the queer community or LGBT community in Poland so to make it short we don't have much time I wanted to when thinking about commemorating and about memory what Stephanie was talking about a before I was thinking they are three kind of ways the queer community Poland refers to the past one is commemorating victims of persecution that's what we very much talked about in the context of monuments right especially the pink triangles the second world war then the other stream is very often by the queer community treated as something opposite of not showing martyrology and not showing suffering but rather showing an affirmative narrative that would focus on recovering forgotten stories or basically outing very famous personalities in Poland from the past that's why I put it this pride pack there and then third way is this of course fighting for rights and citizens and citizenship and belonging trying sometimes to being to gain legitimacy and respectability through for example performing attachment to the nation to the state and to the values of the majority and the right wing answer and since the last actually yes since the fall of the commies we can say the answer from the majority and from the government to this kind of strategies is either ignoring or silencing they're often presenting whenever this the queer subjects try to say we are part of the nation or the country actually the answer from the other no it's a foreign and very typical motive is saying that it's something that comes from the West the Western invention I think this was partially your question before something that is imposed on Poland so I very shortly show we as as Stephanie Endlich mentioned before apart from this tormented story of the rainbow in Warsaw which has its continuation now the debate is going to rebuild it again in a different form and it's kind of a grassroots movement they are no monuments in the public and they are not really this this this put it I don't know I know some activists in Poland obviously and this never appears as a topic I think also the assumption is that it's too too difficult and not the most important thing now when they are no rights or for example legal protection but one of the ways of commemorating is this mostly grassroots steal movement of of memorizing commemorating the history and in this case is the his for example this is the book that was published last year they homosexuals during the Second World War the title is they it has been actually a few days ago nominated to the most prestigious literally prize in Poland which was kind of a surprise however this is there are other examples of kind of entering the public opinion public memory another way is it as I mentioned before is recovering forgotten silence or queer stories queer lives the picture that you have here is a Yaroslav Iwashevich he was one of the most important writers in Poland of the second of the 20th century some claim that actually allegedly the most important the most important the most prolific writer he had a wife we know now from the letters that she was also sometimes into women they had children they were a loving couple he had also relations with men with many men during his life and actually the objective queer very I think very well describes life of Yaroslav Iwashevich so several years ago some publications starting basically writing about it openly part of this was pictures that were found of Yankee Iwashevich made taken by his friends showing actually quite a vivid life of homosexual or community let's say in the 1920s and 30s in Poland and this is this other kind of focus in memorizing not on the suffering but on that's kind of a affirmative way of showing actually many famous people in Polish history were actually queer these are the other examples it's a very popular book homo biografia homo biographies these are very short biographies collected of like really most important Polish public figures in the 20th century all got a cartridge the Nobel Prize winner I think two three years ago commented here on the top I think Yaroslav Iwashevich now finally in the Kevin can say finally so the book when when the book was published but this is again an idea of showing they we've been part of the nation or the part of Polish culture here is another book by a friend actually about the doctor the the female doctor that was accused of being lesbian as I said before it's her first the her first kind of biography or the writing about the trial and the third thing that I said is this kind of trying to being included in the nation I think this is a picture taken a year ago during a pride in Kraków what I noticed and was very striking for me it was not the only flag of this kind they were several flags which integrated polish flag with with the rainbow flag by kind of as a way of saying we are part of this country we belong to the country and of course by many people it was conservative by many conservatives it was perceived as an attack or actually desecrating of polish flag however a lot of LGBT people in Poland are also very attached to nationalism we have to remember and at the end I wanted to show two case studies to show how this playing with memory or using memory as a political tool and and the fight for queer rights is used one is this most famous so what happened most famous one when the clashes happened the fights in the streets riots in the night in the in 2020 in Warsaw there was a kind of a long preludium to this events in total between 2019 and 2020 a peculiar idea was born in some I don't know even where in some conservative circles to proclaim a singular small communities and most municipalities in country as LGBT free zones soon around 100 almost 100 community communities declared themselves LGBT free zones as you can see on the map some of them especially I think the green ones are those that actually either withdrew later or they kind of resigned from the idea so it was also not so obvious sometimes they were debated and there were no enough votes in the in the communities but many of them the red ones actually that the the initiatives were successful so the sentiment was kind of declared and it was used by the current president of Poland during his last campaign presidential campaign when he was basically very unsure of winning he was kind of losing in the polls and he deployed then the LGBT homophobia anti-LGBT homophobic speech thinking that he was smart but it was of course something that heavens hasn't been used in Europe on that scale I think since Second World War and I think most of people or we try to believe that we are aware that you don't use these things for political purposes but he did and he succeeded he won he won the election with a lot of famously he said for example LGBT isn't LGBT people are not people they are they are an ideology and it was and it galvanized this protests and started the protests that happened the picture that I had earlier of the woman with the flag this is from the protests and part of this protest was like several days of kind of riots and protesting in the streets blocking several places but what happened in I think August 2020 there was a turn in Polish movement activism in Poland which always has been actually Pacific as most of Europe as Austria for example there was they've never been a stonewall right in Europe this is American this is an American story but what happened is there's a group of young activists they said they don't they don't believe anymore in this peaceful thing this doesn't work this didn't bring anything in Poland and they started kind of more provocative actions and one of them was taking rainbow flags and putting them in Warsaw in the most important attaching them to the most important symbolic monuments so it was kind of a changing a bit the monument makeshift makeshift sculpture let's say and one of them was putting them on Jesus with the cross which is highly as highly symbolic place in Warsaw it is in front of the church where there is a heart of Frédéric Chopin which was smuggled by his sister after his death in the 19th century so the very important for the culture of the country but also it was destroyed by the Nazis during the Warsaw uprising the church and this picture is actually super famous I think oh every child sees it in the school of like fallen sculpture of Jesus destroyed by Nazis so desecrated in front of the of the destroyed church after the Warsaw uprising in 1944 so what the activists did they claim the statue and attach the flag and to add several other documents monuments in Warsaw and there was a response from the from the government so I think the next day even or the second the prime minister said it was the secretion of the sculpture he published picture of himself praying in front of the I think kneeling in front of the of Jesus and he put he left the like the candle you can see that that's prime minister on the right from the sculpture he left a candle with like official candle of the of the government and then the here are the activists that I mentioned they're fairly young people and transgender leader actually non-binary person very challenging for for for the for the society and for the for the conservative what they did as a response they stole the candle and they carried it to the bridge in the middle of Warsaw when a year ago transgender person committed suicide and posted everywhere which of course the media then took over and reposted almost everywhere and they wrote you idiot you should put the candle here and this is the person this is Milo and this transgender person that committed suicide jumping from the bridge into the Vistula River in 1919 I think it was winter so also the water was ice cold you know it's Poland everything is quite harsh also the winter and unfortunately of course the the person died but level letter when she explained her frustration with with with the system but actually with with psychologist doctors therapists could try to fix her and that's the that's the candle it's written you know there is a flag there is a coat of arms it's written the prime minister so they took the scandal and symbolically put it in the place where they believed and I believe that should be and that's another way of very similar way of intervening into the public space here is Maria Konopnicka another famous writer don't be surprised it's not only an impression like a lot of Polish public figures and a lot of Polish literature was written by queer people some people claim too much further than any literature in Europe so Maria Konopnicka is a very famous nationalist writer like very important for this patriotic early 20th century discourse of Polish nationalism but she also had a partner they lived like like in a marriage we have correspondence between them of the loving couple of course that was not even a time where terms like homosexual were used so we don't know if how they perceived themselves however we know they live together they until they death and yeah there was a couple so what some activists do and it's not only with Maria Konopnicka they put for example flags or here coloring the some putting somewhere rainbow symbols around this monuments and there is always a response from above so for example this is very early actually this is 2022 polish parliament proclaimed the year 2022 the year of Maria Konopnicka of course not mentioning at all any connection to queer or rainbow symbols of our LGBT rights but rather of course using Polish flag and quite kind of trying to bring her back to the nationalist heterosexual narrative and that's it I think I'm afraid I went a bit over time I hope we can of course discuss if you have any questions I'm sorry if it was a bit scattered I had to make hard decisions and especially I think when since Stefanie Endlich was talking about monuments I was thinking that we have also these monuments or ways of memorizing as you could see here that are kind of makeshift they appear disappear people write things on the walls and sometimes they are more much more challenging and challenged and much more provocative than monuments that have been decided by the community because for example obviously like in this case putting a flag attaching to the Jesus was extremely powerful powerful act I can only present in the margin that it doesn't seem it was as provocative as we could thought because the transgender activist Margot she wrote I think her dissertation or even PhD dissertation I'm not so sure now maybe master dissertation about Catholicism and she always claims she's a deeply believing Catholic at the same time fighting for LGBT rights I hope you liked it thank you very much and now I give my voice to so can you hear me I think so you can hear me in the room yeah okay so I will apologize because I'm lazier than Camille so I will remain seated I hope you don't mind and I will start my presentation with a picture that probably all of you know or if you don't know it's from Barcelona is really well known and is one of the big memories of the struggles in the Spanish state fighting for the sexual elevation movements but my presentation won't focus on this history and actually I will move quite away from this perspective on sexual elevation movements because my perspective on my approach to queer history is quite different I I say my title in building the ordinary the importance of everyday stories in collective memory because and I will get a little personal here I grew up in a southeastern province in Albacete then I moved to Valencia when I was 18 years old to study history then I did my master thesis here in Barcelona and during the six years of history studies nobody mentioned in any class anything about LGBTQ history I just remember in my master thesis one seminar about democratic transition in Spain and they mentioned that LGBTQ struggles was just a part of the transition movements and they don't actually regard to the specific issues that LGBTQ communities were suffering under Francoist regime but first I want to start with a little story so the 21st of December of 1957 in Madrid in Plaza Mayor that is one of the main historical landmarks in the city right now maybe well known because one major a few years ago recommended people to have a cafe con leche in Plaza Mayor maybe do you know the city for that well a group of 20 to 25 years old men were having fun it was 11 pm you can imagine the winter in Madrid is quite cold so the police noticed that they were actually having like this party in the streets of Madrid in a historical landmark and it's not like now that it's full of restaurants and bars and it's full of tourists in that moment actually was one of the main points for men hustlers and for actually prostitution solicitations so it was not the historical monument it is today it was more a place for bagos imaleantes so this group was detained by the police and one of the of the young men was arrested were arrested prosecuted and get to the Dirección General de Seguridad in Puerto del Sol the current govern of Madrid is used to be the security center where gay people was arrested and when they were actually processing this guy they discovered that he has some pictures and these pictures are actually those I saw in you I blur the face because I want to keep the anonymity of this guy but this story is telling us something that actually we cannot know and we won't never know because one of the pictures the first one seems this guy with a flower and if you don't have the blur image actually he was having makeup in the other picture we can see the same guy dancing with another guy on the third picture so maybe just two friends in the bridge maybe something else or I want to do with this so usually when we think about a history of LGBTQ communities or queer communities we think about the history of sexual liberation movements and this is really important because this is the history of how actually we fight against some decriminalizations and criminalizations in different parts of Europe and the world and we commemorate these struggles but sometimes this approach also obligates or forgets about other aspects of our queer memory for example one of different approaches is working on queer memories through local histories local histories could seem like narrow in the sense that we are focusing on a specific city in a specific place like Madrid, Barcelona, New York and one of the first examples of this was Gay New York in 1994 was one of the main books regarding a specific place then we have other examples like queer London in 2005 but we have personally other examples like we would have best but we have works like this about all the cities like Berlin we have even more works on London with different perspectives different stories and for example about Barcelona we have the book Los Antisociales of Joffrey Huart it's not based just in Barcelona it compares Paris and Barcelona but it includes a lot of places and these books even if they of course tangled with the history of repression the history of legal frameworks they also work with the quotidian because local history history from below not just from the administration and from justice system from also from a daily basis so from the quotidian perspective of queer people whether using oral archives or traditional archives used from the idea of the quotidian rebuilds experiences and stories that traditionally remain outside the history story the the historiographic narrative if we try to find the history of queer people in history books we will probably find maybe a mention to the LGBTQ struggles in the 70s and this is really important but we hardly find any mention of actually how queer people lived before these struggles and there is a problem here that we can discuss later is that sometimes these historical historical approaches are thought from a teleological point of view what I mean with this we know what happened already we know that in the 70s there was a historical political movement that fight for our freedom and that we get some rights and we are still fighting for more rights and we are fighting against some ideas that are coming back from the past but people in 62 of 57 like this guy I saw you in the picture they didn't know that in the 70s they will have a liberation movement and they were still queer people and they were still having queer lives queer sex queer intimacies and queer memories that are also important because it's part of our common history and it's part of our community so therefore putting the focus on these histories of these stories the quotidian histories makes visible the invisible the ignored realities but also helps us to problematize the monolithic discourses on the allegedly invisibility or non-presence of queer people in the public space in the streets of our cities and also brings out other issues such as class or migration usually if you take a random history book they don't mention queer people it's like suddenly in the 70s we rise up we fight for our rights but before that it seems that we were invisible we were nowhere in the cities and it just takes one minute to talk with an elder from our community and you will discover how many places how many struggles how many daily fights they had in their daily lives before these 70s uprisings and one more methodological and conceptual importance issue for me is that queer lives always occupy a public space queer people we don't have in history actually the right to have a privacy to have private life because society and even ourselves scrutinize everything we do so our bodies our lives are always public lives so either at home either at streets we are public bodies and it means that streets public venues cities but also home belongs to the domesticity of queer people so when we talk about queer histories we should have to talk about this queer domesticity in a broad sense that takes both the private and the public since we even have the right to have a private space for ourselves because even either families either the state even the police forces they were always scrutinizing and looking for what we do how we do and how we belong where my research focus obviously in Spain and I do the local history of Madrid because for me it's easier to understand the sources in Spanish so it's why I work on Madrid and because actually we lack in the Spanish state of local histories we hardly know anything about even Barcelona that is maybe the most known of the cities but recently there are a lot of people working across the Spanish state to recover this memory and I think this is kind of echoing what we were discussing previously in the discussions about what kind of objects what kind of much a reality we can have to recover because of course we know the legal framework we know and we know these are the two main laws that actually affected the lives and the daily experiences of queer people but it doesn't mean that before 1954 there were no prosecution of queer people of course they were prosecuted under so many others like public scandal or yes we cannot think that before Franco there was not homophobia of course homophobia was something quite real and I want to take two other cases two other examples to show you how actually local history can provide a lot of reference to different topics that go beyond the legal framework that even if it's important and of course these sources I get from the files that are under delay the valos imaleantes in Madrid so I use the legal sources but with a point of view of the quotidian and the daily lives so this fair case actually is really really complex but I will bring you some points that I think they're interested this is file 5576 and file 104 is the same case one of the files is for one of the people involved and the other file is for the other people involved actually this is one of the cases of two women that I found so it's a case of female homosexuality and I think this case not just because it's one case about lesbianism condemned under the lay of valos imaleantes that sometimes we think that as it was mentioned before that there is like a whole about history of female sex female to female sex we find different aspects for example I have a quote from this file starting to touch her everywhere and kissing her in the lips behaving like a man having sex with a woman this contains pages and pages and pages and when I say pages is that actually you can wrote a book just about this case because the doctors and the judges they really were trying to understand how two women were having sex they really were surprised that woman were having sex they could not even imagine so part of the file is not actually to accuse them is to prove how actually they have sex because if there is a lack of penis here and we're talking about this female it's not about transgender female they thought okay we cannot accuse them because there is a lack of penis so there is no sort of me there is no actually sexual intercourse but at the end there is a psychiatric forensic report on one of the women the older one involved in this situation that apparently was menly he was short stature more rude the way she behaves is more menly so finally they decided that this woman should be prosecuted because maybe she induced the other woman who was a female younger woman and maybe she's the big team we have one person to blame but she was only blamed under the basis that he was menly so to be considered as someone who be persecuted there was like gender bias so this approximation to local history is having a lot of information for us how actually Francoism regime considered gender and gender binarism and actually is challenged the idea of a woman being menly means that it's a woman or not and they have these kind of discussions already in the 60s but also is talking us about how actually the idea of being the monthly part of a lesbian relationship could have other consequences different than to the other because if we follow the case the older woman the menly woman was actually condemned and she has to pay a bill and has to go through through jail while the other woman that finally said that she was actually just mad and she was attracted by the money of the elder so it was not her fault it was just a moment of I don't know how to say because she used a specific word moment of video but apparently this moment of forget stays for at least two to three years having sex with that woman so I think and maybe it's not a moment off but of course she was fighting for her life she was fighting for her freedom so we cannot actually condemn this person for trying to get free but also this story is telling us much more because one of the things when we talk about in the case of the Spanish state is that we usually focus on Madrid and Barcelona I myself I'm doing my PhD on Madrid but none of these women were from Madrid the younger woman was actually from Galicia and the older woman was from Malaga and actually the story of the older woman was quite interesting she was born in La Jaron sorry is Granada the province of Granada but she moves quite young to Malaga and in Malaga she tried to become anan but she was expelled by the monastery uh with all the two women there is a letter from the bishop of Mal I think from the bishop of Malaga talking about this situation and they didn't mention why they were expelled from the monastery but apparently there was some strange behaviors between the three of them and then they moved to actually to Barcelona they live here there are no much records on what they did in Barcelona and finally they moved back to Madrid and in Madrid they opened a boarding house a hostel for uh John ladies and this uh boarding house was in the city center really close to the actual parliament of Spain uh in Carrada San Jerónimo and for so many years it was a place for ladies what it happens there we don't know but maybe a closer look to the local history of Madrid will reveal how a lot of lesbian women coming from different parts of Spain were having connections there or not because one uh this case started when when this lady from Galicia moved to Madrid started living there and apparently after a few months living there the the older woman from La Jaron start to have more intimacy with them and the older lady uh pays for a really rich room and they start going to actually to La Jaron for holidays and people in La Jaron start gossiping above them because apparently they were having late sex all the time sexual parties orgies so this is talking about migration and different directions because we usually think about rural spaces going to the big cities but in this case we have of course someone who goes from La Jaron to Malaga to Barcelona then to Madrid but from Madrid they usually go on holidays to La Jaron and in La Jaron a rural space they were actually having quite a lot of sex apparently according to the files and my last case uh that also brings a lot of topics to discuss is a really complex topic uh uh a student medicine student from Canary Islands moved to Madrid to get his PhD in medicine and first because he was arrested several times through the 60s the first time he was arrested because he was having sex uh with different men but he was arrested in many in many times in history and actually his file is more or less this uh this big so you can also spend like a whole book talking about this guy but uh it also lets us talk about the connection between different cities for example this guy was involved with a different with another guy who was from Barcelona uh this guy from Barcelona was rejected by his family so he decided to move to Madrid but he was going and back all the time from Madrid and Barcelona so it talks about actually the connection between two different big cities and how people move looking for some spaces of freedom because of course Barcelona in these years could be a space for freedom but if your family actually rejects you it means that you can you have to find different ways and we can track the the way of this guy that moves not just to Madrid he goes all around Spain looking for different spaces of freedom he was arrested different times and finally sometimes we find this guy in Madrid where he's arrested and having connections uh with him and one thing that surprised me is that this file contains several letters hand writing letters of the guy from Canary Islands writing to the guy to the family of the guy from Barcelona asking the parents of this guy from Barcelona to reject another guy apparently the guy who was from Barcelona has different boyfriends uh and the guy from Canary Island was apparently one of these boyfriends and he was jealous of the other so this guy asked the family in Barcelona please could you tell your son that uh he he would be better with me of course he doesn't use a word boyfriend but you can see from the words that they have emotional connection but this case even become more interesting uh because in the middle of the 60s the guy from Canary Islands is again arrested and uh is in this case is involved with another guy in Madrid and they have a connection and they are interrogated they have like a long long interrogation file and they talk about who they know in Madrid who is also queer the police was trying to get information about about other queer people and they mentioned a german guy and the story of this german guy is actually quite interesting i have in the beginning of the declaration of the german for reasons of anonymity i keep the name out uh but you can read here declaration of the detainee in 1954 he left western Germany because he had been charged with homosexuality twice he went to Switzerland he spent more than one year and he was arrested by the swiss police and then he goes through France down to Spain where he enters illegally in 1956 through the mountains he went to Madrid to be a founding partner a way to actually recognize who is this person but cita en la calle de serrano street we have a person from western germany coming to spain in the 50s looking for freedom it's something that when i was reading it it was really hard to understand but we have to understand that in that moment actually homosexuality was also persecuted in western germany in a really different way and they're really different but if he remains in germany he would be in jail so why he decided to come to spain not because the situation in spain was better no of course not it's not nothing related to that but there was a sort of kind of privilege that we can find in the files of local histories that are related to class and are related also of region you can find how hardly ever working class people from working class neighborhoods in spain or in the cities of spain were already condemned and they went to jail they have to pay really extremely fees or if they were not condemned they pay us to get freedom but in the case of many people from western europe or even north americans that live in madrid or cities such as barcelona their regime decided to have a different look on them of course if they were caught in a sexual intercourse with another man or another woman they were also condemned but they usually were not condemned in the same way that the people from the spanish state this is talking also about how actually spain in this moment especially from the sixties became a popular destiny for sexual intercourse there are places such as torremolinos or sitches that became really important for northern europeans coming to the spanish francoese regime looking for the orientalization of south queer bodies and also because they they found somehow spaces for these sexual intercourse it doesn't mean that the francoese regime was a space of liberation of course not it's quite the opposite using this strategy of allowing people from other countries all the realities having spaces of freedom actually was reinforcing the idea that homosexuality was something from abroad so the french the germans they are queers they are outside the spanish nation is actually a macho nation so we have not to think and take these stories of people coming from other countries as an example of liberation or of course not it's quite the opposite it was actually a quite clever strategy to reinforce the idea of spain as something unique spain as something that is the christian vanguard and it is something to keep actually the idea of spain is different that we know that manuel fraga used really cleverly to become and to change the idea of a dictatorial regime in the face of the european western countries so this is just two examples and with the example with the pictures from plaza mayor is just three different examples of how quick can approach these stories if you see i never mentioned the sexual liberation movements in spain i never mentioned the legal framework i just mentioned different aspects of people living their lives struggling fighting and of course having lives because queer people was not just hiding at home they were having lives they were having sex they were having families they were having friends and it's something that we also have to recover and when we think about public space and when we think about memory and how recover memory i think we should pay also attention to these aspects because the of course the sexual liberation movement is a major issue in our history but if we forget the history of the daily life of the cotidian we are also giving the historical narratives what they want that they will oblige us from history and that we are not actually part of the common history of the social life of every city and with that i finish thank you so let's move to the memories of the sexual liberation movement and today i will present the result the memory of an event we organized in the last april as a working group we are three members of a working group the working group is working on queer and feminist studies and we as phd researcher researchers working on queer different queer and histories we organized this event which was entitled making lgbt plus memories and histories and the idea for this event came from the fact that this year 2022 was the first year in which the italian lgbt history month was established and april was the the choice april was the result of a choice of the organization of the lgbt history month why april april is the month in which in 1972 do you hear me okay in 1972 one of the first italian homosexual movement organized a protest against a congress of sexologists in sarremo which is a very small city in the north of italy the idea was to question this choice to trying to to look at the actors at the at the ways in which this choice was the result of the production of a collective memory on this event in 1972 beside this we noticed a a big public interest in in lgbt and queer memories in italy and so we tried to organize a public discussion in florens together with the school normale superiore in which we gather different actors involved in the production of collective memories and histories to discuss the choice of this month as lgbt plus history month in in italy and to see how the different experiences of queer memories and histories can dialogue and also producing tensions between them so our understanding of memories is some and histories as well is something which is the result of different actors who can dialogue in different times and places and who in through their discussions they produced defined different times and performed as well different understandings of memories so we gather in this event in this public discussion open to the public in florens four four main actors we can say there are other actors of of course but we gather four four type of actors as history and sociologist sociology researchers as two two different with different perspectives on on queer history then there was there were two local lgbt plus associations active in florens which have local archives so they they are also engaged in in producing a sort of space of memory space of sources then there were three activists from the 70s but they they they are active now with a different type of activism focused on the the commemoration focused on the production of exhibitions museums archives on the history of the italy italy in the 70s queer italy in the 70s then there was the audience which was composed mainly by activists and people interested in in in queer history I would like to focus on on the tree on the three activists involved because I think it is a crucial element to to take into account you can see the three names the three activists were characterized by different backgrounds in terms of gender biography provenance and this is a crucial element to understand how their views on their activism was defined and performed according to their subjectivity and to their experiences in activism because a crucial element to to take into account is that compared to the other two presentation is we is that we are talking now about the history of activism the the history of lgbt politics mainly in the 70s angelo pezzana was the first one was one of the the founders of the one of the first um homosexual movement in italy which was called fuori and was active between 1971 and 1981 and he was the leader of the of the group active in torino in the north of italy and it was the leaders throughout all the the the entire history of the movement then since the 80s he he was engaged in in in collecting and producing creating an archive of the the activity of the movement in order to to promote also a a cultural history of homosexuality in italy he founded a a foundation which is called the fundazione sandro penna fuori with the aim of having an archive but also to promote the civil rights history of of the the movement he was also um he he's uh the the the author of two autobiographies in which he um he linked um his experience to uh the history of the of the movement porpo marcasiano um was the second the second activist um he she was active in different movement and small groups in italy um since the the the the second half of the 70s we can say and um she she also um uh became engaged in the movimento identitat trans uh which in the 80s was called movimento um italiano transessuali which is a big difference between the two the two definitions and uh now she's part of the city council of the the city of bologna in italy and uh um she also author of of different books in which um she she um links uh her autobiography uh to the trans experience as a sort of uh fee rouge as a sort of a way to understand and to observe uh the uh queer history in italy the last speaker was um narina milletti uh she's a um a feminist and lesbian activist and since the the end of the 70s uh in florens i i i forgot porpo marcasiano was mainly active in bologna and narina milletti in florens and angelo pezzana in torino um narina milletti uh was part of the lesbians groups uh separatist lesbian groups in in uh in florens since the end of the of the 70s but then uh she uh she became a an historian so she's very engaged in producing um the uh books um articles on lgbt and specifically lesbian history um in in italy we can see that all three all the three are uh interested in promoting um researching or um uh discovering uh queer history in italy and this is the reason why we we choose these names in in our in our panel um i would like to uh to to present now their relationship with with history uh as i mentioned before in the the event was organized by two kind of researcher uh historians and sociologists um so we we we try to to uh frame our questions in in um in a way that we we linked past and present uh in in starting from an understanding of memories as a sort of um way to to understand how past and present uh present are not um linearly connected but um are connected in a sort of network and um back and forward way um i i already mentioned the this is a photo from sarremo from the protest at the center of our um event but um true uh the the question about sarremo to uh to the three activists we we were able to understand their different relationship with uh with history um we we we simply asked to um what uh what were uh what was their relationship with uh with history and the history of sarremo and they framed their their answers in a in a way um um link to their experience experiences in um in political activism not only in the 70s but in the in the following decades angelo pezzana framed is is the only one uh who who was present in in sarremo who was active in sarremo who was uh um directly engaged in the in the protest and uh he framed but he framed his um his answer in a way um that we can understand how the the the his following activism the the the protest in sarremo was framed the the aim was a revolutionary aim so the 40 at the beginning in from the 1971 to 1974 was a revolutionary movement but in the in the in the answer of angelo pezzana the revolutionary um history of the movement was uh hide um was something uh not mentioned uh because the movement after 1974 uh merged in in the partito radicale was a civil rights uh party and and so this protest was the history of this protest was framed according to the uh to the history of of uh to the to the following history of the 40s so the the reformist and civil rights model which the 40 had and uh since the 1974 we can say on the opposite we can we can say how narina milletti who is um who were who was part of of um lesbian separatist uh movement framed his his uh interest in history in queer history as a sort of um direct engagement in doing justice with history in looking for um lesbian experiences within the 40 who was which was a movement uh in which lesbians were were active but they were they were marginalized in some ways and we can say through the the the um the words of narina milletti that the um he's doing his practice of history and his um telling of memories um are framed according to to this aim of doing history to to uh um to make visible lesbian to make visible marginalized experiences the linear uh account of angelo pezzana who was a leader um was challenged also by porpora marcasiano um who in in her uh history of activism in her experiences uh passed through different experiences of uh cultural political and um political activism and so we we can we can um we can so through we can see uh we could see through uh in her words how the the uh this um passes through different micro communities to different places in italy she she uh comes from the south of italy and then uh when when she was uh uh i think 30 um she moved in the north and passing through different different type of activism and these experiences um framed also um her way of telling memories um so they they uh she she uh um urge a a model of history not based on a linear and um objective um uh framework but in a type of history made of different narratives um to to to make an example angelo pezzana uh claimed that uh history is made of fact and so uh he claimed that um the the the history of the protest in sarremo uh which was at the center of our our um question was made only by uh by few people and not uh and there are lots of narratives on that on that on that protest that are not not true that are false but uh in uh opposite to this type of narrative based on on on fact on on an objective understanding of history there are the other two nerina milletti who who had a sort of engagement in in producing history and porpora marcasciano who uh told that uh who said that uh history is made of different narratives uh in an ongoing debate in an ongoing um understanding um i oh sorry okay um i i would try to to be um sure um the the the the interesting thing is that uh we can through the the dialogue with the audience uh we were able to uh to see uh the way in which the the the the activism in our right they're an activist who who are active in in florence now um framed their understanding of of the of the history of the queer history they um asked lots of questions to uh to the the activism uh asking um the um uh with terms like non-binary like uh terms who are linked which are linked to to our our our days and the uh all the three activists performed a sort of of distance between them and the new generation this is the reason why i i quote generations because they um uh framed their narratives in a sort of distance with a sense of distance between them and and the protest that are not able they are not able to understand now so this is a crucial element to understand in another way is another example is linked to the notion of community uh lots of people asked um um how they uh conceived uh the the notion of community and um through the the the the answers of the three activists we were able to understand that the notion of community is not uh is not um the the the the the the the the same in which now is produced as sort of lgbt communities they angelo persana refers to community as a movement nirgna milletti refers to um to community as uh as a sort of micro um existential uh place where people are friend and and a very small small understanding of community and purple marcashano referred to community as a as a as a place of practices place of struggles with services especially linked to the trans experiences um this is only a a a small explanation of of how uh i understand i understand i i am able to to frame this this kind of dialogue between histories memories and subjectivities and i i think that a queer approach could be the only way to to challenge a linear um a linear way to to frame spaces a normative way to frame temporalities um through the dialogue between uh activists ancient activists activists researchers um we were able to to see how the different chronologies uh are framed by by different actors but also how memory is performed as and perceived as a as a site of struggle there's a site to to strengthen um political and political aim of the of the of uh of uh of uh movements that are now now engaged in in lgbt history and also tensions around vocabularies vocabularies are used performed conceived in different ways according to subjectivities and um collective memories are able to to uh to to change the meanings and then um i already mentioned the political aims are framed always through history specialities and in the same way um to to be to be uh short uh i would say that italy we can not frame a um italian queer history but we can frame a plural uh um italian queer history uh from the big cities to the local one as moises said for spain um but uh through the three experiences uh we we heard in in our public discussion we were able to to um uh understand how the the italy is not something perceived as an as a as a framework in as a as a space of action but uh spaces micro spaces uh networks uh international networks were the places of activism and then the the last uh the last slide is linked to the fact that um in producing histories in producing in producing memories we we we must be uh aware that the the the voices we are able to to to hear are influenced by uh intersectionality and power and then all these elements uh dialogue in in a sort of ongoing ongoing discussion in in which uh uh uh uh leaders uh uh people who participated in movements uh researchers activists um are always engaged and are always um in a in a steady dialogue and it's a sort of um power is something linked not only to um to one of of the actors uh involved but to uh is spread between between different different um actors and intersectionality is something to to to to take into into account to understand um why uh queer history, algebraic history, lesbian history, transgender history, gay history uh are time and again defined uh in in different ways in in many times uh opposite ways but uh this is something that we we have to be to be um to be aware and the public discussion I I'm talking I'm talking about is an example of that and for thank you I would like to to quote only an example made by uh Porpo Marcasiano one of the activists uh she told us that um when Silvia Rivera one of the most famous um activists in Stonewall uh came to to Italy she she told to to to her that she was not the first one to to flying a battle against polis but the second one to to to uh to show how history and icons uh chronologies and uh um I don't know narratives are time and again something that are um something that depended depends on on the the the the source of the voice not on not on the on the narratives that are produced but not only are only an objective history but something that is always always uh um to be discussed to be to be performed in different ways thank you thank you thank you very much the three of them we have some five minutes for questions and thank you because these have been three examples that in my mind give us quite a good overview on things that could be translated elsewhere in Europe but also elsewhere in the world because with these micro stories they have given us quite a pluralistic view so thank you thank you for relating the past and the present thank you for linking history and memories memories through historical research archives literature that now we can go over through so I'll give the floor to the audience for some questions before we break of Ricardo's presentation uh where he between the actors you made a difference between the researchers the historical and sociological researchers and the activists like where do you draw the line uh do you consider yourself to be an activist do you consider yourself to be activists where do you draw the line between the researchers and the activists in that sense yeah thank you for the questions I think it's a crucial one because uh I I I framed the the um my my my uh my scheme of the of the discussion in this way but I think that there are wouldn't subjectivity there are people who are uh intersected by different engagement so uh academic research can be uh activism and activism can be uh academic research uh and I think the the crucial element to to to uh to observe is the fact that only through dialogues through the dialogue between different actors so um opening academy academia and uh on the one side and uh being uh uh open to to other views on on history from the the activism side could be a a crucial way to understand how memories histories can be framed and reframe timing again it's but there is no a a definitive and uh objective way to to to frame the division between activism and researcher good afternoon I would like to talk about the three presentations in that related precisely on intersectionality I would like to bear in mind harry milk that precisely after castra after the ghetto he said we need to involve with the society we need to engage with the society otherwise we will always be isolated and so here the catalan association movement is against the ghetto and against being considered a community unlike some other places in spain where they rather live in their own areas and happiness so um maybe in your presentations I miss you know also mostly and the one from poland is in for instance I'm the the hiv and I felt like in the tv show it's a scene how the the hiv was something that was really important you know asking for equal marriage was not something that was found there back in the 68 or in stonewall there was no claim for marriage between same sex partner and that that was something as a was brought as the people who are dying and the ones that were left had no rights on the the partners dying and that was quite an impact on us and the gay people and then on trans community in 2007 along with the triangle foundation we organized the conference and 2007 trans were asking for the hormone healthcare treatment also in surgery treatments there they were not on non-binary things so there's been an evolution on that regard here and also on the history of spain I need to refer to Armando Flubia he was the one that he being in a specific social status and he having this possibility for resilience with the homosexual spanish movement against what was passed in the spanish law so this shows that there is an interconnection between european countries because it was back then andre brody and marco d in france and then foire in foire in italy these were the three interconnected links and that was stemming mostly from the gay community and lesbians I think it would be interesting to look at the spanish mangalese and his research on the so-called red and lesbian women because it was difficult for him to understand them so I just wanted to point at that and here in barcelona by the way in 1930s shai genet he enriched himself with the criolla and the rascals and the crooks on the barrigino district here in barcelona thank you hi I liked all of your lectures a lot I found them all very interesting though I have a bit of an observation about the one on poland I really liked it I'm so glad that the lgbt community in poland is active and more combative than ever but I think you were referring to the the trans person who killed themselves with she her pronouns when I think I looked it up they mainly use they them so just that careful with the misgendering yes thank you there is also the problem of translation in polish you don't you would not use them or they because you just don't however polish has different pronouns because there is also no utrum as in german but no utrum is something that you can use to animal as well so there is this problem or a challenge in language and also in translating but thank you for bringing it also the thing is that the person used is chose for themselves named me law I think right which is similarly to actually spanish and italian you can recognize very often after the name the gender those ending with a are usually female names and with a consonant like my name camell are male names with all that would be a name for a for a child or for an animal or for something that's not living and some people offer but why am I explaining it is that there is there are possibilities in language that are still being explored and it is challenging when we talk about them and of course maybe in english I should refer to the person them thank you just when I think I'll respond to your comment no because I was with our man in December and we have a long discussion is just of course we maybe I didn't manage to to claim this of course this is really important is just that my presentation wanted to focus outside the sexual liberation movements because of course it's part of the narrative but is that we have to enlarge this narrative because otherwise we will lose people because one problem when we focus on sexual liberation movements is this issue of language the mall the movement at the beginning was a gay liberation movement that in that moment in history we have to understand that actually gay includes things that are not related to gay right now gay right now refers to male to male sexual desire etc while in that moment in history gay could refer actually to the to the in the sense of queer communities that we understand now from the english perspective so I think that the approach to the local not just focusing on the movements that of course in my work I introduce all these names and of course they deserve more than than ever to be recognized but also and this is maybe a personal point of view we also have to pay attention to those people who were not able to participate in the 70s because they were not anymore there but they were queer too and they deserve to be recognized historicize and we have to give them the spacing history that they deserve because for example one of the persons I have in my research he died in 65 so he never knew the sexual liberation movements but he was a gay man he was prosecuted more than 20 times in Madrid and I think telling his history is also making an end in history I don't know how to say in English sorry is that they deserve to be acknowledged too and it doesn't go against the history of sexual liberation movements it's just they complement and enlarge the view of histories that's my comment only about about terminology the words we use in my presentation I use homosexual movement because the 40 did not use gay they explain the first issues of their magazine what what did mean gay because they did know did know gay is a word they did not use that and so it's interesting to to use and about networks I think that we have to frame net spaces and categories of spaces not according to the normative categories of local national international transnational but according to the connection which people was were engaged in so it's it's I I totally agree with you okay thank you very much to all of you let's be back at half past three to watch the film okay we will have Thomas Reider the film is great freedom and Thomas Reider is the script writer of the film and he will respond to your questions after the screening and the next session will be the second panel from the local to the global perspective lesbians in Catalonia this evening and hopefully you will all be there too enjoy your lunch and the film