Franco Grillini

Franco Grillini (born 14 March 1955) is an Italian politician and Italy's most prominent gay rights activist.

He was born in Pianoro, Province of Bologna. During the 1970s, he took part in student political movements. He attended the University of Bologna, graduating in 1979 with a degree in education, and subsequently became a psychologist, psychotherapist, and journalist. He was 27 years old and engaged to a woman when he came out.

Grillini entered politics in the 1970s with the Proletarian Unity Party; in 1985 he ran as a Communist Party candidate in the province of Bologna. From 1991 to 2001 he held continuous membership of the Ministry of Health’s “National Council for the Fight against AIDS”. He was elected for the first time to the Council of the Province of Bologna in 1990, and subsequently re-elected in 1995 and 1999. In 1999 he was named president of the Italian Ministry for Equal Opportunities’ “Commission for the Rights and Equal Opportunities of Homosexual People”. Following the dissolution of the Communist Party, he joined the Democratic Party of the Left, which later became Democrats of the Left. He was first elected to the Italian Parliament in 2001, and re-elected in 2006. In 2007, he left his party, refusing to join the Democratic Party, and joined the Democratic Left movement.

Among the legislation Grillini has proposed is a civil union law similar to the French PACS and adding sexual orientation and gender identity to the anti-discrimination article of the Constitution of Italy.

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