We receive and gladly publish this polite and ironic letter sent to us by a city tourist guide in favor of the presence, on 7 September 2024, of the Lgbtq(rstuvz) demonstration in the city:
On 7 September 2024 the much-heralded Gay Pride arrives in Lucca and as expected the first complaints arrive immediately and this is nothing new. Unfortunately, the fact that in Lucca we tend to generalize even the crudest of thoughts, passing it off as shared by everyone, is also nothing new. And here we are reading flyers with the words “Lucca doesn’t want you!”. But which Lucca? I want Gay Pride and I am proud that Lucca was chosen, as are most of the people I know, as well as the exponents of the movement we created at the time, “Lucca for the Environment”. And instead I have to go around my city and see it infected and infested with these leaflets that also speak in my name, without my having given consent or been consulted. In the article of 15 June 2024 we read the reasons why our city should not host Gay Pride: And here the tourist guide in me, who feeds on the history of Lucca, puts his hands in his hair. Do we want to do a nice historical excursus to see the origins of Lucca? Lucca, understood as a set of settlements, most likely has Etruscan origins. The Etruscans are well-known Catholics, just think there wasn’t Christianity yet and they were already following it… Damn how advanced these Etruscans were! In the 2nd BC Lucca was founded by the Romans as a winter military camp. Indeed, who is more Christian Catholic than the Romans? The Romans like Christians so much that they nail the most important one to a cross and the others they slice up, impale them, pierce them with arrows… Okay… have they made up for it after these Lucchese people? Well, not so much! Lucca was so Catholic that in the mid-1500s, when the word “inquisition” (and be careful, just the word, the inquisitors in the city didn’t even set foot in it) arrived in Lucca, the most influential families of Lucca, producers and traders of silk , they leave the city because they are all Protestants. If you want to use history to support homophobic thoughts, at least study it!
Lucca has always been homophobic, and unfortunately there is no doubt about this, just look at all the various laws and city statutes starting from 1448, but Catholic roots have nothing to do with it. The writer Cesare Garboli explains the reason well in a 2001 article: more than death, Lucca fears scandals, news, changes. One could also refute the idea of the traditional family, but it can all be found in the Bible, which should be read and known, but above all understood, before waving it as a flag bearer of retrograde ideas! I conclude by saying that it’s true, some people in Lucca don’t want Gay Pride, but many others do!
