Abstract
Chapter 8 highlights how in the early 1970s, under the political cloud of the so-called Years of Lead, popular genres like poliziotteschi and gialli, along with more ambitious detective and thriller movies, exploited the association between homosexuality and crime as never before, at precisely the same time attitudes toward homosexuality began to loosen in the press.
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Notes
- 1.
Atti parlamentari, Camera dei Deputati, 6 May 1969, p. 7610.
- 2.
As results from a subfolder entitled Homosexuals, contained in a folder entitled Prostitution in ACS/MIPS, Divisione Polizia Amministrativa e Sociale, folder 620, which collects articles published from 1964 to 1972 spanning from transvestite hustlers to Pasolini’s movies; thus, in the early 1970s law enforcement officers still considered prostitution almost a synonym for homosexuality, and homosexuality per se something to keep under observation.
- 3.
The pampered offspring killer who murders a friend of his father’s, while he is in the company of a trade, in Come cani arrabbiati (1976, Mario Imperoli) is an exception.
- 4.
Italian cinema preferred Pasolinian ragazzi di vita to this category of hustlers—although already well known (see Bertolini 1964: 73)—until the 1970s, when aggressive versions of them were featured in Una magnum Special per Tony Saitta (1976, Alberto De Martino), Quel pomeriggio maledetto (1977, Mario Siciliano) and Labbra di lurido blu (1975, Giulio Petroni), in which an English Pygmalion pederast pays a gang of transvestites to torture his nymphomaniac rival (traumatized by a father fanatical about sodomizing his wife) before she marries his former lover, Marco, whom he had saved from a father who forced him to renounce his homosexuality. Split between an insatiable wife and a man who still wants him, Marco loses his balance and throws himself off a tower, while George and Elli remain at opposite ends of the square (and of the shot) like two gunmen ready for a gunfight in a spaghetti western.
- 5.
The sequence was cut by the censors (MIBAC 57861).
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Giori, M. (2017). Pornography of Death. In: Homosexuality and Italian Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56593-8_8
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