A few weeks after third edition of Ragusa Pridewhich this year will take place on the days of 28 and 29 June in Marina di Ragusathe organizing committee makes the event platform public. “This is the flower”, the slogan chosen for the 2024 editionimmediately summarizes the anti-fascist spirit that informs the entire political manifesto and punctuates the various points of the document.
THIS IS THE FLOWER!
RAGUSA PRIDE 2024 POSTER
We are a multifaceted, multifaceted, irreducible community.
We are everywhere, always.
We are women, migrants, fags, unemployed, precarious workers, anti-fascists, trans*, lesbians, elderly people, drag queens, queers, people coming out for the first time, people at Pride for the first time, racialized people, homosexuals, brothers, sisters, sex workers , transfeminists, people with disabilities, men, rainbow families and parents of homosexual children, asexual people, drag kings, young people, intersex, bisexuals, gender-fluid, a-gender, activists, antispeciesists, mothers, people who practice unconventional sexualities, poor, HIV-involved, aromantic, non-binary people…
THIS IS THE FLOWER!
We are anyone who finds ourselves on the margins of society and we fight to affirm our existence, to take back what is ours, what we deserve. Let’s fight for them to be effectively recognized by all rightswhich are still effectively denied today in defiance of the principle of equality.
There are so many of us that it is not possible to make a complete list or describe us fully. We are multiple, non-conforming, and in Pride we recognize ourselves because we claim the uniqueness and equal dignity of each individual, starting from an idea: diversity is the condition of all living beings and is therefore what most unites us with beyond any label or belonging.
We are different but similar: we are an “affinity of hammers”. We stumble upon each other. We witness the work that the other is doing, and we recognize ourselves in that work. Let’s talk, let’s rise up. An affinity of hammers is our future.
We want to break down the dominant narrative that speaks for us and about us. We demand that the ways in which we define ourselves and talk about ourselves, as well as the way in which we present ourselves and express ourselves, are not overdetermined.
We rebel against preconceived patterns because we oppose our own to the presumed inevitability of History irreducible struggle.
THIS IS THE FLOWER!
We are in Manhattan in the 1960s, and police raids on gay bars occur regularly. The dynamic is always the same: the police enter, create confusion, beat those who work there and those who frequent the clubs, and in this way they push people out of the bars, so, once on the street, they can arrest them for “ostentatiousness”. They scream, threaten and beat with the same violence with which today they repress the young people who demonstrate in our squares to claim the right to a more just, supportive and sustainable world.
At dawn on June 28, 1969, however, things go differently at the Stonewall Inn. Sylvia Rivera is the first to throw a heeled shoe at a police officer who was prodding her with a truncheon. The patrons and customers rebel against the abuses of the uniforms and that revolt will go down in history as the “Stonewall riots”, considered the moment of the beginning of the battle for civil rights.
It was the month of June, and since then June has become Pride month, that is, proof that history changes even by being seen, told, and flaunted!
“The first time was revolt”, like the first Ragusa Pride, but the third time is no joke either. On June 29, 2024, 55 years after the Stonewall riots, we will take to the streets with the third Ragusa Pride to show off.
Regimes have always preferred the invisible, and this is still the case today. With the matter of invisibility we have an open game; there are those who would like to continue pretending that we don’t exist.
We flaunt with pride the richness of our diversity against any attempt to conform to the hetero-cis-normative model imposed by patriarchy.
We flaunt our non-conforming bodies, our free sexual identities, because the personal is political and sexuality is revolutionary, as feminism has taught us, which recognizes every self-determination of bodies and wills has made its most significant founding value.
We courageously display our anti-fascist feathers and our red poppies, a symbol of resistance and partisan struggle. Just as nationalist and authoritarian regimes multiply their attempts to build an enemy, for the purposes of propaganda that brings collective memory back to the lowest and darkest moment in our history, we demand, with all the determination and pride of which we are capable , the fundamental soul anti-fascist of our struggle.
THIS IS THE FLOWER!
We resist those who deny the rights of families homoaffective in favor of the traditional family, culpably omitting that the traditional family is too often the cradle of gender violence. The killer has the keys to the house, we should have learned this by now.
We demand new family models that are not only based on blood ties, but on soul and election ties.
In a historical moment in which the already precarious achievements of young people in the paths of gender affirmation are being called into question, as is happening with the inspections at the Careggi Hospital in Florence, we demand the self-determination of everyone and the freedom to live and express ourselves without having to undergo constant brainwashing attempts regarding “wrong” bodies: no body is wrong, every body is valid!
We are trans* and we are proud of it!
THIS IS THE FLOWER!
Our red poppy against all fascism.
Today more than ever we believe it is essential to observe reality through the lens ofintersectionalityan indispensable tool for recognizing different forms of oppression, for identifying common points, creating alliances, sharing struggles, becoming a community.
We are close and in solidarity with the Palestinian sisters and brothers, victims of decades of oppression and today of a genocide denied by the Western community, which continues to consider those lives and deaths as second-class. Their resistance is also ours.
We also shout loudly “Cease fire immediately!”. “Free free Palestine!”.
THIS IS THE FLOWER!
A flower that never stops blooming despite the aridity of today’s Italy, which has fallen to 36th place out of 49 countries in the 2024 Rainbow Map for equality and protection of LGBTQIA+ people, lower than Orban’s Hungary.
With this third edition of Ragusa Pride we are bringing forward precise and concrete ideas claimsso that Pride does not end on a particular day or in a purely formal membership, but puts deep roots in the ground and launches its high branches towards the sky.
First of all, we ask the mayors of the municipalities that sponsored Pride to establish the municipal register for the recognition of the name and gender of electionas well as to be courageous and in solidarity with our struggles, disapplying the circular from the Ministry of the Interior which prohibits transcription of birth certificates of children of same-parent couples born abroad.
We also ask school leaders and managers and all public administrations to adopt regulations in their areas for the recognition of Career Aliases.
These are clear and unambiguous signals of a political will to recognize our existence and our civil rights. The degree of democracy and livability of a city is measured by the acceptance of these requests.
We are Ragusa Pride and with many voices we shout: this is the flower!
May this June 29, 2024 be a day of celebration, pride, struggle and love for everyone.
