Inside the MEET Digital Culture Center in Milan, four Italian LGBTQ+ advocacy groups have created a space where LGBTQ+ Olympians, fans, and allies can safely come together.

Continuing a longstanding athletic tradition, Milan’s Olympics Pride House was established to shed light on the lack of LGBTQ+ rights in the games’ host country of Italy.

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“We are not really known to be the most openly LGBT-friendly country,” Pride House Project Manager Joseph Naklé told the Washington Blade. “That’s why it was really important for the community.”

Naklé said the organizations involved – Milano Pride, Pride Sport Milano, Arcigay, and CIG Arcigay Milano – “want to use the Olympic games because there is a big media attention, and we want to use this media attention to raise the voice.”

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The Pride House is hosting “talks and roundtables every night,” Naklé said, as well as movie screenings, speaker events, and an Out and Proud night featuring seven LGBTQ+ Olympic athletes.

The concept of the Pride House arose from the idea of traditional Olympics hospitality houses. The first one opened its doors to LGBTQ+ athletes in the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver and Whistler, according to Pride House International.

Italy has been cracking down on LGBTQ+ rights since far-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni took power. The leader of the far-right Brothers of Italy party and Italy’s first woman prime minister, Meloni was elected in late 2022 after making anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric a cornerstone of her campaign. She opposed adoption by same-sex couples as well as marriage equality, calling civil unions “good enough” for LGBTQ+ couples.

The government then started cracking down on the rights of LGBTQ+ parents and began stripping those who are not genetically related of their legal rights. But in May, Italy’s top court ruled that the same-sex partners of women who conceive via in vitro fertilization (IVF) have the right to be legally recognized as their children’s parents.

However, the ruling did not extend the right to IVF treatment to single women or women in same-sex relationships. Under Italian law, only married heterosexual couples have the right to access medically assisted reproduction treatments like IVF. The court’s ruling only applies to women who seek IVF treatment abroad.

While same-sex civil unions have been legal in Italy since 2016, same-sex couples do not have the right to adopt, thanks in part to opposition from the Catholic Church. Surrogacy remains illegal as well, and restrictions preventing the adoption of “stepchildren” by nonbiological parents present major hurdles for gay fathers seeking to adopt children conceived via surrogacy abroad.

However, as Agence France-Presse reported, a court in northern Italy also ruled in May in favor of a nonbiological father’s right to adopt his child conceived abroad via surrogacy.

Italy also does not recognize same-sex couples’ marriages, but discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in employment is banned in the country. Similar protections do not exist for trans people, but a court ruled in 2023 that anti-trans discrimination is a form of sex-based discrimination.

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