Abstract
Chapter 2 shows how after the war the imposition of a silence on homosexuality—pursued both by catholics and by the majority of laic culture as part of a general effort to restore morality—affected cinema even when representations were in line with the proscription of homosexuality itself. Nonetheless, censorship soon allowed a limited range of stereotyped characters, commonly connected with the world of popular theater. Furthermore, unlike Fascism, the Republic could not censor news: as a consequence, the first cultural narrative about homosexuality that circulated broadly was that which was connected to crime—doomed to influence movies and their audiences for many years to come.
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Notes
- 1.
Nowell-Smith sees a problem in this interpretation, because Spagnolo betrays Gino (2003: 23–24): others have thought the same (see for example Micciché 1990: 169; Rondolino 2003: 132), because of the disquieting shadows we see through the glass of the door which prevents the audience from hearing Spagnolo’s interrogation by the police. However, not only does he refuse to collaborate in all the screenplays (IG unit 10, files 1, 3–4, 6–8 and MNC sub-series Soggetti e sceneggiature, 11–12), also in the film he rejects any help from the policeman. It is made clear that he is forced to go to the police, and the interrogation does not influence the events: afterward, the policeman still surveils Gino and the inquiry is resolved only by the testimony of two drivers.
- 2.
Landy (2008: 191–197), for example, still ignores homosexuality when analyzing Visconti’s image, differently from what she does with Pasolini.
- 3.
Letter dated 30 June 1942, MNC, sub-series Corrispondenza, 13, 2 (my emphasis).
- 4.
- 5.
P. Tuozzi, quoted in Dall’Orto (1988).
- 6.
If publicly exposed, homosexuality could end a political career, as happened to monarchist Vincenzo Cicerone, prosecuted in 1951 for threatening his former lover, after he had decided to leave him and marry. The case was widely covered by the newspapers.
- 7.
This was most notably the case for Leopoldo Zurlo and Carmine Senise, chief of theatre censorship and of police, respectively, who managed to live more uxorio with Mussolini’s approval (Benadusi 2012: 276–279).
- 8.
General Secretariat for Morality, report of 30 September 1946, ISACEM box 16.
- 9.
Allusions to sex were a regular part of the recipe of these Italian versions of the variety show and the revue (the avanspettacolo was instead a shorter type of revue typically preceding the projection of a movie).
- 10.
An effort defined as ‘enormous’ in the report of 31 January 1953 (ISACEM box 17).
- 11.
See also the case of Christ’s nudity investigated by Steinberg (1997).
- 12.
See Della Maggiore and Subini (2017) on the consequences of these premises on the relationship between Catholics and cinema.
- 13.
Published in 1961 in Informazioni 4 (1): 6.
- 14.
As in the case of Famiglia e civiltà, the journal of AC’s Fronte della Famiglia. See for example Flarer (1951) and the reviews published against Kinsey’s reports, considered ‘a sad and bulky mountain of indecencies’ equal to pornography and an ‘expression of individuals obviously abnormal’ (Ajassa 1952: 37).
- 15.
This is not to claim that homosexuality was invented in the nineteenth century, a notion widely debated by historians, but simply that ‘the medicalization of the sexually peculiar’ (Foucault 1990: 44) was a crucial root of the narrative under scrutiny.
- 16.
I borrow for simplicity the anglophone jargon of the time (see Friedman 2003). Reay (2010) has shown how the American hustling scene was then organized around a very similar paradigm. In Italian the most common terms were battoni for hustlers, ragazzi di vita (after the title of Pasolini’s first published novel) for trades and mantenuti for kept boys.
- 17.
When Pasolini was prosecuted in 1949, he quoted Gide to explain his behavior to the police officers, who could understand it only as the corruption of minors. Similarly, when the most outspoken sustainer of pederasty, Ettore Mariotti (an above-suspicion fascist theoretician of racism, now professor at the University of Naples), published La neofilia (1952), opposing it to homosexuality (which he despised), he was sentenced for obscenity (Armano 2014: 101–114).
- 18.
Arbasino’s L’Anonimo Lombardo (1959) is the exception that proves the rule with its love story between two college students which openly disqualifies the pederastic model: ‘Tenderness for the little kid of Death in Venice did not prevail, and even less that for Gide’s little Arabs: come back after military service and a little bit of sport, kids’ (2009: 470).
- 19.
Atti parlamentari, Senato della Repubblica, 19 November 1952, pp. 37101–37103. Art. 181 of Regio Decreto 18 June 1931, n. 773, remained in force unchanged until 1956. This peak was also the consequence of both Interpol’s directives and Cold War pressures, which resulted in the continuation of the practice of keeping files on homosexuals until the 1980s (see Petrosino 2017). Moreover, to extend police powers was the most common strategy developed by the ‘clerical regime’ to bypass political and juridical restrictions of the clerical influence (Barbanti 1992).
- 20.
A physician compared homosexuality to an epidemic (Dreyfus 1953: 641); a canon law scholar explained that it was a sin against the sixth commandment and a crime against decency, both of particular gravity because ‘the act is perpetrated subverting the order of nature designed by God’ (d’Avack 1953: 681); a jurist claimed it was always a source of criminality and damage, both individual (because it ‘psychically degrades the one who is affected by it’) and social (since it ‘harms procreation’ and then ‘damages the race’), making a plea for criminalization (Messina 1953: 676); a communist lawyer, Giuseppe Sotgiu, although against criminalization, defined homosexuality as ‘pathological’ and ‘immoral’ (1953: 678); one year later he was toppled by a scandal involving a boy who used to have sex with Sotgiu’s wife in front of him and—according to his own testimony, quoted by several newspapers—with Sotgiu himself.
- 21.
Quoted in Argentieri (1974: 76).
- 22.
For example, the release of the Italian version of Elia Kazan’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) was delayed for years because of the bad reputation of Williams’ play. In order to decide what to do, censor Giovanni De Tomasi organized a private projection for Monsignor Albino Galletto, director of the Ente dello Spettacolo (responsible for the CCC), taking the print to him by cab, as he himself wrote Andreotti on 25 February 1954 (in ASILS box 1072), only to discover that the movie was more decent than expected, simply because Kazan had already compromised with the Hays Code, also removing homosexuality from the story (see Jeff and Simmons 1990: 172–184).
- 23.
Prot. n. 10.17358/12985.
- 24.
See ACS/PCM 2.3.6./32227. Two subfolders relate to the prohibition on importing the French magazine Paris-Hollywood (which since 1947 was exploiting American actresses and dozens of anonymous models as cover pin-ups) and on clandestine projections of porn movies.
- 25.
See ACS/MTT 971.
- 26.
Hand-written note dated 25 July 1949, ACS/MTT 716.
- 27.
Report of 30 June 1952, ISACEM box 17.
- 28.
Report of 15 February 1953, ISACEM box 17.
- 29.
MIBAC 932.
- 30.
MIBAC 3676.
- 31.
Without this scene it was impossible to understand the implication of a subsequent sequence in which the guardian offers the same prisoner a bottle of water, which he refuses despite made thirsty by the hard labour (fig. 2.1).
- 32.
MIBAC 11012.
- 33.
ACS/MTC 1754. Pierino was replaced by a slightly effeminate character who can be seen for just a moment together with two women.
- 34.
My italics.
- 35.
Revealing also is the friction between Andreotti and AC when the former replied to the umpteenth lamentation about the inefficiency of censorship against varietà by returning the accusation to the sender, since ‘the incriminated works were represented in several cities without anyone protesting or deploring them’, a ‘bad symptom’, according to Andreotti, of the failure of AC’s ‘subsidiary surveillance’ (report dated 31 October 1951, ISACEM box 17).
- 36.
MIBAC 5403.
- 37.
ACS/MTC 2017.
- 38.
ACS/MTC 1680.
- 39.
ACS/MTC 1062.
- 40.
Censors requested that this line be changed into ‘I’d like to speak to you’ (MIBAC 16044).
- 41.
MIBAC 15005.
- 42.
ACS/MTC 853.
- 43.
Reviewing the screenplay of the version directed by Carlo Lizzani in 1954, the reviser noticed with satisfaction that, ‘from a moral point of view’, ‘the scenes incriminated in Visconti’s text have disappeared’ (ACS/MTC 1168). This clearly included the reduction of the part of the Signora and the disappearance of her lesbianism, central to Pratolini’s plot and hinted at by Visconti (whose screenplay is in IG unit 15).
- 44.
See ACS/MTT 3594.
- 45.
See ACS/MTT 11435.
- 46.
- 47.
See the documents in ACS/MIPS, Divisione affari riservati, 1948–1950, box 9, folder z123; 1951–1953, box 115 and box 112, folder z84; 1954–1956, box 89, folder z1.
- 48.
ACS/MIPS, Divisione affari riservati, 1951–1953, box 112, folder z84.
- 49.
As noted also in a paper from March, perhaps to rectify a previous report dated 9 January in which Visconti was said to have taken part in a congress in Wien with his wife (both the documents are ibid.).
- 50.
The same was claimed also by Preda 1960a.
- 51.
ACS/MTC 443.
- 52.
ACS/MTC 718.
- 53.
MIBAC 4155.
- 54.
MIBAC 30847. A different version of the film was eventually granted a certificate two years later, with the new title Processo a porte chiuse.
- 55.
Based on the double meaning of the verb battere (‘to beat’ but also ‘to prostitute oneself’).
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Giori, M. (2017). Silence. In: Homosexuality and Italian Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56593-8_2
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