Clearly, Lippi needs to take an eye-opening trip to Milan.

There’s a gay soccer team there, competing weekly in an amateur league. The players’ sexuality doesn’t affect how they play. The ball, after all, is round for everyone.

Last season, Nuova Kaos Milano finished a creditable fourth in its league of 16 teams, not bad considering their opponents frequently try harder against them to avoid the “dishonor” of losing to gay players, says Nuova Kaos defender Klaus Heusslein.

“Here, people think, ‘They have to share the same changing room. Who knows what might happen if they have gays in the locker room? They might attack people,’” says Heusslein, a 48-year-old German who lives and works in Milan.

“In Italy, it will take another 100 years to get rid of these misconceptions.”

How depressing.

It’s a terrible blemish on soccer that homophobia remains so rife in the sport. As long as there are no openly gay players in the English Premier League and elsewhere at the top of the game, the shiny gloss bought by soccer’s wealth – in new stadiums, multimillionaire players and such like – is nothing but cheap veneer.

That players have their own perfume and fashion lines but still don’t feel safe enough to be able to say that they are gay is a damning indictment on the sport. The smoke-filled backrooms may have vanished, but archaic mentalities remain. That was proved by the hooliganism that scarred an English League Cup match between West Ham and Millwall this week, where several hundred people confronted each other and hurled bottles and bricks at police officers. Those likely were the same kind of so-called fans who have taunted players with racist and homophobic abuse.

True, soccer is not alone in being behind the times. Institutional intolerance in many sports has meant that far too few top-level athletes have felt comfortable saying they are gay. All the more reason, therefore, why the world’s most popular sport should take the lead. Peddling outdated views, as Lippi did this week, does soccer no favors. His comments were particularly unseemly given recent violence that has targeted gays in Rome.

Lippi, in a video interview with the Internet-broadcast program KlausCondicio, said he would advise gay players to stay in the closet. Because of the huge amount of attention that soccer gets in Italy, a gay soccer couple would create scandal if they came out, he argued.

“If a player came to me and confessed his homosexuality, I’d advise him not to express it, because it would create problems and could be exploited,” he said. “I don’t think it would be possible in football to have a relationship of this type. Maybe it already exists, I don’t know.”

Somewhere in Italy, perhaps in the national team he coaches or in the Serie A sides that Lippi once managed or played for, secretly gay players must have been shaking their heads.

Heusslein, the openly gay amateur, certainly did.

“It’s just repeating the same old stereotypes,” he said. “He’s either blind or he’s stupid.”

“He should ask himself what really would be the problem if he had gays on his team. Would that change his capacity to play, would it change his skills?” Heusslein asked. “People should see what they are doing on the field, not what they doing in their own bedrooms.”

According to British gay-rights campaigners, mentalities are only moderately more enlightened in the Premier League. The chanting of homophobic abuse by fans has been banned, on paper at least, at grounds since the start of the 2007-2008 season, and police this year charged 11 men who hurled abuse at former England defender Sol Campbell.

Nevertheless, the only top British player to date to have gone public was Justin Fashanu. The former Nottingham Forest and Norwich City striker hanged himself in 1998, fearful that because he was gay he wouldn’t get a fair trial in the United States on sexual assault charges.

Activist Peter Tatchell, a friend of Fashanu’s, says he knows of several gay players in the Premier League who want to come out but dare not because they are concerned that their clubs and sponsors wouldn’t support them. This despite the fact that Tatchell believes British soccer has progressed sufficiently since Fashanu’s death for gay players to be able to go public.

“They’d get a rough ride from some teammates and some fans for a while, but eventually it would calm down and most people would accept them,” he says. “They’d also get quite a lot of support and admiration from liberal-minded fans.”

That day, when it comes, will be a moment to celebrate because it will show that soccer is becoming the all-inclusive sport it professes to be. As a leader in the sport, Lippi should be a force for such progress, not standing in its way.

(Rome) Gay rights groups charged Wednesday that Italy’s state television censored Ang Lee’s “Brokeback Mountain” when it aired the Oscar-winning movie by cutting scenes of gay sex.

Activists protested that RAI TV would never have dropped similar scenes had they involved a heterosexual couple, and politicians called for the incident to be discussed in parliament. RAI said it had aired the cut version by mistake.

“Brokeback Mountain” is a cowboy romance about two ranch-hand buddies who start an affair when they meet on the fictional mountain in the 1960s. The 2005 movie won three Oscars, including the best director award for Lee, as well as the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.

RAI’s second channel aired the film late Monday cutting out a sex scene and a sequence showing a kiss between the lead characters, played by the late Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal.

“I don’t believe it was an oversight, I believe it was preventive censorship,” said gay rights advocate and former lawmaker Vladimir Luxuria. In an interview with La Repubblica daily, Luxuria said cutting the key scenes was “like showing the Mona Lisa without its head.”

RAI said in a statement the film had arrived from the distributor already cut so that it could be shown in prime time. When it was decided to air it late at night, no one checked for the uncut version, it said. RAI pledged to show the complete movie soon.

Some commentators and politicians were not satisfied, saying the cuts would not have been justified even if the film had been aired earlier.

“It is grotesque that RAI censored scenes that have the same content as those seen in most prime-time movies,” Benedetto Della Vedova, a conservative lawmaker, was quoted as saying by the Corriere della Sera newspaper. Luigi Vimercati, a center-left lawmaker, told Corriere he would take up the issue in parliament.

In overwhelmingly Roman Catholic Italy, skimpily dressed women are a fixture on many TV programs, while scenes of sex and violence in movies are generally left untouched.

Massimo Gramellini, a top commentator for La Stampa daily, wrote in a front-page editorial: “I would like to understand why a kiss between two gays … should offend our sensibilities more than scenes of heterosexual sex or bloodthirsty violence.”

Benedict is known for his vocal opposition to LGBT rights and same-sex marriage. Guzzanti was appearing at an anti-politics rally in Rome last July.

It is a criminal offense in Italy to “offend the honor” of the Pope or the Italian president, under a Fascist-era law.

The Rome city prosecutor, Giovanni Ferrara, asked Federal Justice Minister Angelino Alfano for permission to start criminal proceedings against Guzzanti. Ferrara said that Guzzanti’s comments went beyond satire.

If convicted, Guzzanti could have been imprisoned for up to five years.

“I decided not to authorize it, knowing well the stature and capacity of the Pope for forgiveness,” Justice Minister Angelino Alfano said Friday.

The Vatican appears to agree with Alfano. “The Justice Minister’s decision was wise,” Vatican spokesperson Father Federico Lombardi told Ansa news agency.

“The Pope’s authority is far too superior to be dented [by the comments] and, in his magnanimity, he considers the case closed.”

Guzzanti is no stranger to controversy. She recently caused a storm by suggesting that Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s equal opportunities minister Mara Carfagna – who had previously worked as a topless model – got her job in exchange for performing oral sex on the Italian Premier.

Fabrizio Caiazza, 33, won the “Sex Factor” online contest organized by the British gay website Gaydarnation, beating out 46,000 contenders from 162 countries and winning a $20,000 prize.

In his submission, Caiazza posed in his police uniform. A spokesperson for the Milan police said Caiazza did not seek permission to appear in the uniform or to enter the contest. The traffic cop is under investigation for bringing “discredit to the force.” If convicted, he could be sanctioned, fined or fired.

Milan’s deputy mayor, Riccardo De Corato, said Caiazza will likely receive a slap on the wrist.

But Caiazza says the entire investigation is tainted with homophobia and will result in gay officers staying in the closet out of fear.

“Many policemen don’t come out because of the enmity they would face from colleagues and the isolation they would be put in by superiors,” he told Britain’s Observer newspaper.

The investigation has prompted the formation of Italy’s first organization for LGBT cops, called Polis Aperta.

The group will hold its first meeting on Sept. 26 and organizer Nicola Cicchitti says dozens of gay cops will come out publicly at the meeting.

“We’re coming out against creeping discrimination,” Cicchitti told the Observer, adding that the organization already has about 200 members.

Cicchitti said the group will seek official recognition from the government.

The idea won the backing of Vladimir Luxuria, a transgender former member of the Italian parliament.

(Rome) A court in Sicily has ordered the Italian government to pay 100,000 euros ($160,000) to man who was failed on his driving test because he is gay.

Danilo Giuffrida was told he would have to take the test over again when the licensing examiner discovered that Giuffrida was gay even though the 27-year old had made no errors during the test.

Several years ago Giuffrida told doctors he was gay during a medical examination for military service. That information was then passed on the Ministry of Defense which in turn released it to other government departments including the Transport Ministry.

Italy requires one year of military service. At the time homosexuality was grounds for rejection by the army.

After he took the driving test to renew his license he was told he would have to repeat the test or have his license suspended on the grounds of his “sexual identity disturbance”.

The second time he also passed the test but was told he would receive only a one-year renewal, rather than the usual 10 years again on the excuse he is gay.

Giuffrida went to court.

“It was the first time I’d ever felt different,” he told the Italian media. “I’ve never had that problem before at home or outside.”

The court ruled that Giuffrida’s constitutional rights had been violated and that homosexuality could not be considered a “mental illness”. It awarded Giuffrida damages and costs totaling !00,000 euros.

His lawyer said he believed the verdict was the first time the Italian government has been found guilty of discrimination on the grounds of sexuality.