A Guantanamo for gays

In my novel, The Green Rose, the central character, a lesbian female, dreams of escaping into an island, modelled along the lines of the Greek island of Lesbos, where she can enjoy her romantic trysts with women freely, fearlessly.

There are real islands like Fire Island in New York, similar to the one in my heroine's dream. But Fire Island has a wholly pleasant history of coming into being as a place where gays and lesbians go to chill out.

The islands off Italy's Tremitti Archipelago, a popular abode for gays, lesbians and the transgendered, have, on the other hand, a very dark and violent history.

The islands were once upon a time conceived as an internal exile, a sort of prison camp, for Italy's gay males during Benito Mussolini's Fascist regime in the late 1930s. 

The Fascists, like their German counterpart, the Nazis, considered homosexuality as a crime; both ideologies envisioned creating a race of males that would be complete in its "virility," thus the presence of effeminate males--gay males were thought of as such in wartime Europe--was seen as diluting the virility of the race. 

In 1938, a police prefect on the Sicilian Islands of Catania took Mussolini's anti-gay edict to heart, rounded up around 45 males accused of being homosexuals and banished them to the island of San Domino, in the Tremitis.

Gay men were interned with other political prisoners in small islands throughout Italy, but San Domino was the only island where all exiles were gay males.