According to the report on the state of rights in Italy, hatred towards the lgbtqia+ community is worsening: beyond the numbers, the firsthand account of Matteo and Stephano.
In Italy, in 2025, more than half of homosexual people (precisely 53 per cent) avoid holding their partner's hand in public and have experienced harassment (51 per cent). Some of them, 10 per cent, have also experienced some form of violence in the last five years. Furthermore, 18 per cent report having undergone conversion practices aimed at changing their sexual orientation or gender identity. These figures are contained in the report on the state of rights in Italy, published just days ago by A Buon Diritto Onlus, which also notes how, on the issue of recognising the rights of lgbtqia+ people, Italy remains firmly in the lower section of the Rainbow Map compiled by Ilga-Europe. The percentage of rights recognised stands at just 25.41 per cent, and Italy ranks thirty-fifth out of 49 monitored countries, having also dropped two places in the ranking over the past year.
Matteo and Stephano know this all too well — two young men who, on New Year's Eve, in a peripheral but not too remote neighbourhood of Rome, were attacked while walking home hand in hand after the celebrations marking the start of the new year: two ordinary guys, suddenly thrust into the spotlight against their will, but who in some way decided to transform that ordeal into an adventure — that of becoming spokespeople for a message against homophobia. Telling everyone, among other things, that any one of us can help change things. "We are normal people, doing ordinary jobs," Matteo says. "I'm a waiter, Stephano is a care worker. But anyone who wants to can do anything, can change things."
Matteo and Stephano were among that 51 per cent who had previously experienced harassment; now they are among that 10 per cent who have suffered violence because of their sexual orientation: "Episodes of homophobia had happened to us before, but never this serious — people would insult us, but any gay man or lesbian is by now used to a lifetime of things that have always been done to us." And yet "we live in a free society, but freedom doesn't go hand in hand with violence: it's wrong to think that freedom then allows you to use violence." Words spoken instinctively, but also backed up by data: the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, in its third survey on protection standards, reports how lgbtqia+ individuals continue to suffer homo-lesbo-bi-transphobic violence motivated by hatred and discrimination; on the web, tweets containing hate speech directed at lgbtqia+ people account for 8.78 per cent of the total negative tweets recorded by the Osservatorio italiano sui diritti Vox, and in 2023 (data for last year are not yet available) 133 episodes of homo-lesbo-bi-transphobia were recorded — a number that obviously does not account for unreported incidents, which are presumably far greater.
In the previous parliament, the debate over the Zan bill against homophobia was fierce — a bill that aimed to introduce aggravating circumstances for attacks of a homo- and transphobic nature, as already exists for attacks of a religious or ethnic nature, for example. Matteo and Stephano's view on the matter is clear: "It's something that should be picked back up and seen through to the end: from what we understand, it takes about a week to pass a law, so it wouldn't even take that long to push through something that genuinely protects human beings against this type of attack and introduces an aggravating circumstance specifically for homophobic ones." Stephano's reasoning to demonstrate that there is a gap in the law today is simple: "I'm not Italian. If I had been attacked on my own, it could have been treated as a racially motivated attack, because I'm not white. But as things stand, there's no aggravating circumstance whatsoever…"
But do young people like Matteo and Stephano trust today's politicians? "As for politics, I don't know," Matteo admits — and again, it is hard to fault him: according to the A Buon Diritto report, "the tone of the political language adopted by the current government cannot be ignored, nor can the clear ideological positioning of the majority, which leaves very little hope in terms of greater recognition of rights for lgbtqia+ people." The climate of hatred and discrimination also emerges clearly from the Barometro dell'Odio compiled by Amnesty International, which had already flagged how, during the election campaign, the current majority did not shy away from hate speech and attacks against gay and trans people. Fortunately, a glimmer of hope and humanity does exist in this story: "The law enforcement officers who are following our case now — the Carabinieri, the police in general — we do trust them," Matteo adds. "We reported it straight away and we found wonderful support from them."
