Gay men arrested for 'kissing' outside Colosseum

Italy's gay activists said on July 29 that they would organize a sit-in "with collective kissing" at the Colosseum to protest against the arrest of two men, for what police described as an "oral relationship." They risk being tried for public indecency, punishable by up to two years in jail. Government politicians deplored the arrests as exemplifying a rising tide of harassment of gay people in Italy. But a carabinieri spokesman insisted the officers had merely applied the law. The equal opportunities minister in Romano Prodi's center-left government warned of a growing number of "homophobic acts of violence, vandalism and discrimination," some organized by the far-right. Health minister Livia Turco called the Rome arrests "excessive" and she hoped the two men would get an apology. But a representative of the conservative Christian Democrats said the government was seeking to promote "the exclusion from the law of the gay caste." The chairman of the party, Rocco Buttiglione, whose views on gays cost him a seat on the European commission, said it wanted "to overturn at all costs the fundamental values of the nation." A carabinieri spokesman insisted the "true discrimination would have been not to arrest [the two men]." An extract from the official report to prosecutors, published by the daily Corriere della Sera, said they "had their trousers and underpants down." But Fabrizio Marrazzo of the Gay Helpline said: "The Carabinieri can say what they like. Roberto and Michele insist it was just a kiss."