The Persecution of Homosexual Men under Fascism

Abstract

Mario Magri, an Italian anti-Fascist, spent most of the last 17 years of his life in Benito Mussolini’s ‘political confinement’ (confino politico) colonies, located on small islands in the Mediterranean and Adriatic Seas.² During the few months of freedom Magri enjoyed between the fall of Fascism (1943) and his execution by the Nazis at the horrific Ardeatine Caves Massacre outside Rome, he wrote about his experiences in Fascist captivity. In his memoir, Magri noted the anomalous presence of a group of homosexual men who had appeared in the confino politico colony on the Tremiti Islands, in the Adriatic, around 1939:

There were about 100 perverts, almost all originating from Catania and other cities in Sicily. These poor devils, among whom there were skilled artisans and even teachers, lived in horrible conditions. They received four lire per day and were crammed into two foetid wooden barracks, surrounded by a metal fence that only allowed a few square metres in which to move around.³

The presence of these men in a penal colony for ‘politically dangerous’ Italians raises several salient questions about the experience of homosexuals under Fascism and about the very nature of Mussolini’s regime.

Keywords

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The term ‘homosexual’, and also the regime’s label ‘pederast’, will be used throughout this chapter to connote men suspected of engaging in same-sex sex acts. It is not at all certain that these men were, or identified themselves as, homosexual.