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Enjoying the Darkness

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Homosexuality and Italian Cinema

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Abstract

Chapter 3 explores what filmgoing meant for the Italian homosexual subculture of the 1950s by focusing on discourses and practices which supplied this viewing community with opportunities to escape oppression (in spite of any control and regulation), namely: gossip, alternative readings, the exploitation of film projections as opportunities to manifest a shared sexual identity, and of cinemas as ‘cruising spots’. It also explains why the deeply homophobic ultraconservative culture often adopted similar modes of theoretical discourse and strategies.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Handwritten letter, 30 November 1959, MIBAC 58464. According to the report of Catholic Action’s Secretariat for Morality dated December 1959, after the protest the poster was covered up (ISACEM box 20).

  2. 2.

    MIBAC 58464.

  3. 3.

    Note to the Secretary of State Renzo Helfer, 20 September 1960, MIBAC 32911.

  4. 4.

    Letter dated 8 October 1959, MIBAC 58464.

  5. 5.

    The riskily allusive title that appeared in l’Unità on 25 June 1965 about DC leader Mariano Rumor (‘Rumor’s “Inversions”’) represents an exception which proves the rule and was meant to be a threat.

  6. 6.

    See Cirri (1965), and also Sullo’s allusive pictures published near to those of renowned homosexuals, from Oscar Wilde (January 1961) to Pasolini (13 September and 27 December 1962), not to mention his (also rumored to be homosexual) colleague Mariano Rumor (26 December 1963).

  7. 7.

    See for example the cases of Massimo Girotti (in Alberico 2003: 103), Franco Zeffirelli (1986) and Tomas Milian (2014).

  8. 8.

    For a reading of the subtext of this film, see Billi (2011: 145–151).

  9. 9.

    Pasolini actually switched the cause of impotency from physical (as conceived by writer Vitaliano Brancati) to psychical, as a reaction to bourgeois expectations.

  10. 10.

    Interestingly, he gives the example of Ossessione, further evidence of how its homosexual content was already debated (see also Leto 1955: 8; Aristarco 1957: 344; Turroni 1957: 231).

  11. 11.

    Letter to Alcide De Gasperi, dated 15 December 1945, ACS/MTT 971.

  12. 12.

    Even in the courthouse, on the occasion of the opening speech of the 1961 judicial year, a similar event took place when magistrate Pietro Trombi attacked Visconti (without naming him directly): ‘Between an average and normal man, normal as for intelligence, working capability, sexual drives toward women, and a very pederast, very intelligent, very art expert, I will always shake hands with the former and avoid the latter, as one avoids leprosy!’ According to Candido, an ‘avowed Marxist lawyer’ shouted ‘up with pederasts’ and was complimented by a journalist on this tactical reaction (Torelli 1961: 8).

  13. 13.

    Enrico Baragli, Relazione sulla XXIII Mostra Internazionale d’Arte Cinematografica, 8 October 1962, ACEI.

  14. 14.

    The Spoleto Festival was another constant source of gossip in the years of Gian Carlo Menotti’s direction, even attracting ‘seasonal workers of particular type’ who used to trade during the festival (Cusani 1961). In La raccomandazione, an episode of I mostri (1963), Gassman recommends a young actor because of whom a director in Spoleto, whose love was not returned, committed suicide.

  15. 15.

    See the letters published in La Stampa on 22 and 25 October 1960.

  16. 16.

    The same can be noted about surveys of similar experiences abroad: see for example Sanders (2002) on early British spectatorship and Kuhn (2002: 138–167) on American moviegoers of the 1930s.

  17. 17.

    Report dated 15 November 1960, ISACEM box 20. Before, the Secretariat had recorded only two other episodes in the reports of 15 December 1947 (ISACEM box 16) and 31 October 1951 (ISACEM box 17).

  18. 18.

    Literally ‘ill-bred’, here meaning homosexuals. According to Finaldi (1960d: 16), they even had an expression (‘To have a tea at the Countess’) to mean to go to a cinema of seconda visione to cruise.

  19. 19.

    A later rendition of such events is in Vittorio Caprioli’s Splendori e miserie di Madame Royale (1970), which shows a parish cinema crowded with noisy boys where a homosexual acts go undisturbed despite the presence of the priest, who is absorbed in censoring the movie by putting a broom in front of the projector.

  20. 20.

    In Roma (1972), Fellini similarly shows an ‘old checca’ (as defined in the screenplay) approaching a viewer in a varietà theater in 1943.

  21. 21.

    See for example the interview given to journalist Guerrini (1955) by a heterosexual ‘expert’, full of advice such as ‘The program matters. […] Walt Disney is perfect: I’ve seen Cinderella at least twenty times. Always many nannies with the children of the mistress. Westerns aren’t bad either. But in this case children are older and can notice some action. But who cares?’.

  22. 22.

    Meridiano d’Italia and lo Specchio often claimed to have received hundreds of letters from homosexuals and published dozens of them, selecting mostly those written by readers wasting away from self-hatred, but they did not silence the more resisting ones, occasionally coming from now-forgotten homophile groups.

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  1. University of Milan, Milan, Italy

    Mauro Giori

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  1. Mauro Giori
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Giori, M. (2017). Enjoying the Darkness. In: Homosexuality and Italian Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56593-8_3

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