The creation of Arcigay

The first nucleus of what later became Arcigay was formed in Palermo on December 9, 1980, as ARCI Gay, partly on the emotional wave of a demonstration organized in Giarre for a crime that had occurred about two months earlier. Two young men, Giorgio Agatino Giammona and Antonio Galatola, were killed on October 17 with a bullet each in the head for being gay. It was Antonio's 13-year-old nephew who shot, forced by the two in order to escape the "shame" that their condition as homosexuals procured for themselves and their families.

After Palermo in many other cities in Italy people started to reunite in small groups. Nonetheless, the national association to which everyone referred did not yet exist as an independent entity, but referred to the ARCI association which grouped together various Italian cultural entities and for the first time gave space to issues pertaining to the homosexual world. Among the first leaders of those movements we need to mention Massimo Milani, Gino Campanella and Marco Bisceglia, tha latter being a priest who was already an adherent of so-called liberation theology, a homosexual himself and a forerunner of gay marriage in Italy, having celebrated in 1975 a so-called "union of conscience" religious union between two men. This caused the priest a suspension from his Catholic Church.

In 1982, again in Palermo, a national meeting of ARCI Gay was held, considered the association's first congress in that it was attended by the national leadership of the ARCI; two years later ARCI Gay posed the problem of institutionalizing and stabilizing its presence throughout the country, which led to the first constituent summit held in late 1984.