Founder and president of the territorial committee of the Province of Imperia is the Italian mathematician Marco Antei.

[2] The first nucleus of what later became Arcigay was formed in Palermo on 9 December 1980, as ARCI Gay, partly on the emotional wave of a demonstration organized in Giarre for a crime that had occurred about two months earlier.

Two young men, Giorgio Agatino Giammona and Antonio Galatola, were killed on 17 October with a bullet each in the head for being gay.

It was Antonio's 13-year-old nephew who shot, forced by the two in order to escape the "shame" that their condition as homosexuals procured for themselves and their families.

Among the first leaders of those movements, we need to mention Massimo Milani, Gino Campanella and Marco Bisceglia, the latter being a priest who was already an adherent of so-called liberation theology, a homosexual himself and a forerunner of gay marriage in Italy, having celebrated in 1975 a so-called "union of conscience" religious union between two men.