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Undressing the Other

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Homosexuality and Italian Cinema

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Abstract

Chapter 4 deals with the return of repressed homosexuality, in the late 1950s, initially in erotic terms. It shows how both the anxiety and the curiosity generated by homosexuality initially focused on two very different but intertwined and widely discussed forms of display of the undressed male body: the ambiguous spectacle of men passing for women in a series of burlesque movies which gave birth to a wave of so-called shockumentaries and the hypermasculine fusto in beach comedies and peplum.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Sentence of acquittal, 19 October 1966, handwritten, Court of Catania, MIBAC 53787.

  2. 2.

    The film itself was widely publicized as ‘the spectacle of spectacles’; that is, a ‘relocated’ form of varietà (De Berti 2016).

  3. 3.

    CB, box CP26, folder 144.

  4. 4.

    Lo Specchio, for example, between April and May published a report in three parts on the ‘Italy that is having fun’, including the nightclubs frequented by homosexuals (Castellacci 1958: 12).

  5. 5.

    ACS/MTC 38453.

  6. 6.

    Gino Gavuzzo, Risposta al questionario 20 gennaio 1960, 2 February 1960 (ISACEM box 38). See also the report of December 1959 (ISACEM box 20).

  7. 7.

    See the consequent consultations between Tupini, the Chief of Police, and the Minister of Internal Affairs Antonio Segni in January and February 1960 in ACS/MIG 17083.

  8. 8.

    Treatments are preserved in CB, box CP26, folder 144, the synopsis in ACS/MTC 2807.

  9. 9.

    MIBAC 41780.

  10. 10.

    MIBAC 34334.

  11. 11.

    The scene did not pass censorship (MIBAC 33683).

  12. 12.

    That same year Mauro Bolognini directed a costume variation, Madamoiselle de Maupin (1966), adapted from Gautier’s novel about a noblewoman who travels around the world disguised as a boy, causing a Casanova and a captain to fall in love with her, even if they think she is a man. Censors prohibited the film to minors because of ‘the very situation of a woman who, disguised as a man, comes into contact with some men, as well as […] the continuous reference to homosexual relationships’ (MIBAC 46320).

  13. 13.

    MIBAC 44572.

  14. 14.

    A journalist referred to how directors were swamped with letters from aspiring actors, many of whom ‘think they have to attach many pictures, mostly the ones belonging to the category of forzuti or Hercules in the embryo stage’ (g.b. 1962), and already Fallaci (1958: 36) had pointed out that they could at best ‘play themselves’.

  15. 15.

    Gossip column in the issue of 4 January 1959, p. XIX.

  16. 16.

    Another term for fusto.

  17. 17.

    In 1957 the first Italian magazine, Cultura fisica, was added to them.

  18. 18.

    Gino Gavuzzo, Risposta al questionario 20 gennaio 1960, 2 February 1960 (ISACEM box 38).

  19. 19.

    According to actor Paolo Poli, already men ‘cruising’ in movie theaters in the 1940s used to ‘call themselves after actresses famous under the regime’ (in Pini 2011: 292).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Milan, Milan, Italy

    Mauro Giori

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  1. Mauro Giori
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Correspondence to Mauro Giori .

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Giori, M. (2017). Undressing the Other. In: Homosexuality and Italian Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56593-8_4

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