Re: yeah, everyone is a queer. LOL. No, I don't want to shake your hand.
Dammi un bacio....
Italians play gay to avoid army service
Sophie Arie in Rome
Wednesday February 25, 2004
The Guardian
It is not the sort of trick you would expect the stereotypical Italian male to pull.
But when it comes to dodging the draft, machismo goes out of the window.
Exploiting a provision which bars gays from military service, more than 150 men are thought to have paid two doctors for certificates diagnosing them as suffering from "sexual anxieties" and being "incompatible" with the stress of living together in dormitories and using communal bathrooms.
Doctors at Padua military hospital rumbled the scam when they noticed the unusual number of gay men coming from a small area in northern Italy in the Alto Adige region, near the Austrian border.
A police investigation found that several of them had girlfriends or wives.
Marianna Tschoell, 60, was arrested for putting them in touch with two doctors, Roberto Mandredi, 64, and Domenico Bossio, 38, who are being investigated for allegedly writing the certificates for EUR3,000 (£2,000) each.
Investigators fear that it may be one of many scams used by men who, despite deep prejudice against gays, are pretending to come out rather than spend the obligatory 10 months in the army, the carabinieri or the civil police.
Genuine gays appear to have more compunction about using the provision, seeing it as discriminatory.
Arcigay, the main gay rights movement in Italy, said that only about 200 gays used it each year, while 15,000 got through their military service keeping their sexual orientation a secret.
Italian military conscripts have to undergo an attitude test in which they are asked such searching questions as: "do you like flowers", "do you like women" and "have you ever felt yourself attracted to members of your own sex".
It does not appear to work. Arcigay estimates that up to 10% of the men and 20% of the women serving in the armed forces and police are gay.
"Once they come out they are usually forced to resign," its spokesman Fabrizio Marazzo said in Rome.
guardian.co.uk |
