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ABSTRACT
Homosexuality was both silenced and persecuted during Mussolini’s regime. The multifaceted silencing of homosexuality has contributed to the ongoing difficulty of gathering and preserving testimonies which remember this persecution. This article explores two contemporary semi-fictional testimonial works which grapple with this silencing and remember queer people in Fascist Italy: the graphic novel In Italia sono tutti maschi by Luca de Santis and Sara Colaone (2008), and the short film The Red Tree (2018) by Paul Rowley and De Santis. These works rely on elements of survivors’ testimonies but simultaneously refer to cross-cultural and trans-historical events, including the AIDS crisis and gun violence. Spurred by queer and anti-canonical methodologies, I tease out the layers of memory that these works bring forth. Whilst they may draw criticism for their ‘relativisation’ of the Holocaust, these works implicate the twenty-first-century reader in remembrance.
Acknowledgments
I thank Gabriella Romano, Gianni Zardini, and Paul Rowley for their support and their help with retrieving material for this article. I dedicate this article to my Italian teachers.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Giulio Russo, ‘Introduzione’, in Le ragioni di un silenzio: La persecuzione degli omosessuali durante il nazismo e il fascismo, ed. by Circolo Pink (Verona: Ombre Corte, 2002), pp. 9–12 (p. 10).
2 Lorenzo Benadusi, Il nemico dell’uomo nuovo: L’omosessualità nell’esperimento totalitario fascista (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2005), p. ix.
3 Gabriella Romano, The Pathologization of Homosexuality in Fascist Italy: The Case of ‘G’ (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), p. 20.
4 Ibid., p. 2.
5 Benadusi, p. 126. Romano’s research on the conditions of confinement in psychiatric institutions evidences the persecution of queer people in the late 1920s. Cf. Romano, Pathologization.
6 Dario Petrosino, ‘Traditori della stirpe. Il razzismo contro gli omosessuali nella stampa del fascismo’, in Studi sul razzismo italiano, ed. by Alberto Burgio and Luciano Casali (Bologna: Clueb, 1996), pp. 89–107 (p. 101).
7 Ibid., p. 103; Piero Garofalo, Elizabeth Leake, and Dana Renga, Internal Exile in Fascist Italy History and Representations of Confino (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019), p. 178.
8 Cf. Giovanni Dall’Orto, ‘Ci furono femmenelle che piangevano, quando venimmo via dalle Tremiti’, Babilonia, 50 (1987), pp. 26–28 <http://www.giovannidallorto.com/saggistoria/fascismo/peppinella.html#1a> [accessed 19 October 2023]; Gianfranco Goretti and Tommaso Giartosio, La città e l’isola: omosessuali al confino nell’Italia fascista (Rome: Donzelli, 2006), p. 5; Danilo Ceirani and Pierluigi Rocchetti, L’Amore pregiudicato: Donne e omosessuali sotto il fascismo (Latina: Il Levante Libreria Editrice, 2015), p. 49.
9 Cf. Benadusi, pp. 67–68, 75; Petrosino, pp. 89–107.
10 Roland Barthes connected the terms ‘invisibility’ and ‘silence’. ‘Silere’ is more than mere verbal silence and appears closer to a sense of ‘invisibility’ or ‘invisibilisation’. Cf. Roland Barthes, The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collège de France (1977–1978), trans. by Rosalind E. Krauss and Denis Hollier (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), p. 23.
11 Gabriella Romano, ‘Talking about Silence’, EUI Working Papers. European University Institute (2020), pp. 1–11 (p. 5).
12 Benadusi, p. x.
13 ‘Proposta di assegnazione al confino di polizia’ in Dall’Orto, ‘Ci furono femmenelli’; Benadusi, p. 9.
14 For this article, I rely on the 2019 edition of In Italia: Sara Colaone and Luca de Santis, In Italia sono tutti maschi (Rome: Oblomov, 2019) and on The Red Tree, dir. by Paul Rowley (Still Films, 2018).
15 The article focuses on representations of homosexual men and folk with ambiguous gender characteristics. For studies of lesbians under the fascist regime, see Nerina Milletti and Luisa Passerini, Fuori della norma: storie lesbiche nell’Italia della prima metà del Novecento (Turin: Rosenberg and Sellier, 2007); see also Chapter 1: ‘La questione femminile sotto il fascismo’ and Chapter 4: ‘Gli omosessuali al confino’ in Ceirani and Rocchetti.
16 Jennifer Evans, ‘Why Queer German History?’, in German History, 34.3 (2016): 371–84 (p. 371).
17 My reading of the intertextual elements at play In Italia and The Red Tree reflects my own subjective stance – I follow Wieviorka, Geoffrey Hartman, and LaCapra who have highlighted the subjectivity of scholars working on Holocaust testimonies. The role of the historian is highlighted by Wieviorka. Cf. Annette Wieviorka, ‘“I” in the Plural: A New Writing of History’, trans. by Jane Kuntz, in Being Contemporary: French Literature, Culture and Politics Today, ed. by Lia Brozgal and Sara Kippur (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 213–29 (pp. 214–15). See also Geoffrey H. Hartman, The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 9.
18 Dominick LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 35.
19 Klaus Müller, ‘Introduction’, in Heinz Heger, The Men with the Pink Triangle: The True, Life-and-Death Story of Homosexuals in the Nazi Death Camps, trans. by David Fernbach (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2023), pp 1–12.
20 Florence Tamagne opens her 700-page study Histoire de l’homosexualité with this question. Cf. Florence Tamagne, Histoire de l’homosexualité en Europe: Berlin, Londres, Paris, 1919–1939 (Paris: Seuil, 2000), pp. 7–8. See also Benadusi, p. 23.
21 Giovanni Dall’Orto, emails to Orsolya Katalin Petocz, January–March 2021; Gigi Malaroda, conversation with Orsolya Katalin Petocz, 4 February 2022.
22 Leah DeVun, ‘Mapping the Borders of Sex’, in Trans Historical: Gender Plurality before the Modern, ed. by Greta LaFleur, Masha Raskolnikov, and Anna Kłosowska (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press), pp. 27–41 (p. 30).
23 Cf. Queer Italia: Same-Sex Desire in Italian Literature and Film, ed. by Gary P. Cestaro (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Marco Pustianaz, ‘Qualche domanda (sul) queer in Italia’, Italian Studies, 65.2 (2010): 263–77; Charlotte Ross, Julia Heim, and S.A. Smythe, ‘Queer Italian Studies: Critical Reflections from the Field’, Italian Studies, 74.4 (2019): 397–412.
24 Maya De Leo, Queer: Storia culturale della comunità LGBT+ (Turin: Einaudi, 2021), pp. vii–ix.
25 Ceirani and Rocchetti, p. 51.
26 Goretti and Giartosio, Città, pp. viii–ix.
27 Ceirani and Rocchetti, pp. 49–50.
28 For a legal definition see Black’s Law Dictionary, ed. by Bryan A. Garner (St Paul, MN: West, 2009), p. 1613. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub’s work is a starting point for the meeting of the psychoanalytic, historical, and literary studies perspectives. Cf. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (London: Routledge, 1992).
29 Annette Wieviorka, L’Ère du témoin (Paris: Plon, 1998), p. 118.
30 Ibid., p. 14.
31 Ibid., pp. 79, 84, 118.
32 Cf. Marianne Hirsch, ‘Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory’, in Visual Culture and the Holocaust, ed. by Barbie Zelizer (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001). In Deborah Jenson’s words, ‘the universality of mediation’ has become a common ground in studies of pieces dedicated to the writing of the self, whether testimony, (auto)biography, or other. Beyond the Slave Narrative: Politics, Sex, and Manuscripts in the Haitian Revolution (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011), p. 25.
33 Baci Rubati, dir. by Fabrizio Laurenti and Gabriella Romano (Istituto Luce Cinecittà, 2019).
34 Wieviorka, L’Ère, p. 95.
35 Hartman, Longest Shadow, p. 5.
36 Ibid., p. 54.
37 After touching on Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Hartman draws on Paul Célan and writes ‘Most of the time, however, transmissibility and truth move into opposition. So, Paul Célan’s untransparent work seeks in the absent community – even among the murdered – a “you” to address. “Speaks truth who speaks shadow”’. ‘Introduction: Darkness Visible’, in Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory, ed. by Geoffrey Hartman (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), pp. 1–22 (p. 21).
38 Cf. Alison Landsberg, ‘America, the Holocaust, and the Mass Culture of Memory: Toward a Radical Politics of Empathy’, New German Critique, 71 (1997), 63–86 (p. 68).
39 Landsberg, ‘America’, p. 73.
40 Cf. Ibid.; Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory the Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), p. 33.
41 Lorenzo Di Paola, L’inafferrabile medium: Una cartografia delle teorie del fumetto dagli anni venti a oggi (Naples: Alessandro Polidoro Editore, 2019), pp. 53, 17.
42 Coulton Waugh, The Comics (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1947), p. 6.
43 Helmut Kipphan, Handbook of Print Media: Technologies and Production Methods (Berlin: Springer, 2001), p. 85.
44 Tommaso Giartosio and Gianfranco Goretti, ‘Una storia da raccontare’, in Colaone and De Santis, pp. 165–166 (p. 166).
45 Richard Levy, Antisemitism: A Historical Encyclopaedia of Prejudice and Persecution (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2005), pp. 779–80.
46 Cf. Erik N. Jensen, ‘The Pink Triangle and Political Consciousness: Gays, Lesbians, and the Memory of Nazi Persecution’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 11.1/2 (2002), 319–49; Jake W. Newsome, Pink Triangle Legacies: Coming Out in the Shadow of the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2022).
47 Paul Rowley, conversation with Orsolya Katalin Petocz, 11 February 2021. Cf. ‘About Paul’ (2021), in Still Films <https://www.stillfilms.org/paul/> [accessed 19 October 2023].
48 Paul Rowley, conversation with Orsolya Katalin Petocz, 6 October 2021.
49 Gays Against Guns, dir. by Paul Rowley (Still Films, 2024).
50 Cf. Anna Cafolla, ‘Orlando to Turn Pulse Nightclub into a Memorial’, Dazed, 9 November 2016 <https://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/33645/1/orlando-to-turn-pulse-nightclub-into-a-memorial> [accessed 19 October 2023].
51 Rowley, 6 October 2021.
52 Rowley, Gays Against Guns.
53 Michael Rothberg, ‘Lived Multidirectionality: “Historikerstreit 2.0” and the Politics of Holocaust Memory’, in Memory Studies, 15.6 (2022), 1316–29 (p. 1324).
54 Giartosio and Goretti, ‘Una storia’, p. 166.
55 Entry for ‘Transfer’, in Online Etymology Dictionary <https://www.etymonline.com/word/transfer> [accessed 19 October 2023]. Cf. Alison Landsberg, Engaging the Past: Mass Culture and the Production of Historical Knowledge (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2015), Chapters 3–4.
56 Robert S. C. Gordon, ‘Rings of Saturn: Fellini Rosi’, in Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies, Issue on Gianfranco Rosi, 10.3 (2022), 449–74 (p. 457).
57 Gordon, pp. 469–71.
58 Cf. Mario Tirino and Lorenzo Di Paola, ‘Chris Ware and the Construction of the Rhizomatic Space’, Between (Cagliari), 8.15 (2018), 1–23.
59 Jan Baetens, ‘From Black & White to Color and Back: What Does It Mean (not) to Use Color?’, College Literature, 38.3 (2011), 111–28 (p. 126).
60 Jan Baetens, ‘Of Graphic Novels and Minor Cultures: The Fréon Collective’, Yale French Studies, 114 (2008), 95–115 (p. 114).
61 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 2003 [1964]), p. 119.
62 Cf. David Batchelor, Chromophobia (London: Reaktion Books, 2000).
63 Rowley, 6 October 2021.
64 Cf. Andrea Pini, Quando eravamo froci: Gli omosessuali nell’Italia di una volta (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 2011), Chapter 2.
65 Goretti and Giartosio, Città, p. 10.
66 Mark Adnum, ‘The Fascinating Tale of Fascist Italy’s All-Gay Island Paradise’, Huffpost, 16 August 2013 <https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-fascinating-tale-of-fascist-italys-all-gay-island-paradise_b_3762301> [accessed 19 October 2023]. Cf. Garofalo, Leake, and Renga, p. 1; see also Chapter 1 of the same volume.
67 Ceirani and Rocchetti, p. 52. On the living conditions in ‘confino’ see Benadusi, Chapter 4: ‘La repressione della pederastia’.
68 The Red Tree mentions the Pulse shooting and a homophobic murder in Syria. Cf. James Rush, ‘Images emerge of “gay” man “thrown from building by Isis militants before he is stoned to death after surviving fall’, Independent, 3 February 2015 <https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/images-emerge-of-gay-man-thrown-from-building-by-isis-militants-before-he-is-stoned-to-death-after-surviving-fall-10019743.html> [accessed 19 October 2023].
69 Rowley, Gays Against Guns.
70 Hartman elaborates on the notion of ‘relativization’ in his comments on Häns-Jürgen Syberberg’s Hitler. Hartman, ‘Introduction: Darkness Visible’, in Holocaust Remembrance, (pp. 3–4). See also Hartman, Longest Shadow, pp. 93–96. The term ‘Americanisation’ is used by Alvin H. Rosenfeld. Cf. Alvin H. Rosenfeld, ‘The Americanization of the Holocaust’, in Thinking about the Holocaust: After Half a Century, ed. by Alvin H. Rosenfeld (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997), pp. 119–50. Wieviorka elaborates on the concept of ‘Americanisation’. Wieviorka, L’Ère, pp. 150–60.
71 Annette Levy-Willard, ‘Interview: La Shoah par 39,000 voix. Initiée par Spielberg, une fondation a interviewée tous les rescapés’, Libération, 12 January 1998 <https://www.liberation.fr/culture/1998/01/12/la-shoah-par-39-000-voixinitiee-par-spielberg-une-fondation-a-interviewe-tous-les-rescapes_544687/> [accessed 19 October 2023], my translation.
72 Ibid.
73 In Rosenfeld, p. 129. Cf. Wieviorka, L’Ère, pp. 148, 157–58.
74 Cf. Yehuda Bauer, in Rosenfeld, p. 122.
75 Goretti and Giartosio, Città, pp. 16–42.
76 Ceirani and Rocchetti, p. 50.
77 Romano, Pathologization, p. 8.
78 Cf. Michael Rothberg, The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators. Cultural Memory in the Present (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019), pp. 1–8.
79 Petrosino, ‘Traditori’, p. 89.
80 Annette Wieviorka, ‘On Testimony’, in Holocaust Remembrance, pp. 23–32 (p. 26).
81 Goretti and Giartosio, Città, p. 10.
82 Emma Wilson, Love, Mortality and the Moving Image (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 5–6. Cf. Lucy Bollington, ‘Death and Life through the Tourist’s Gaze: Reflections on Gianfranco Rosi’s Boatman’, in Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies, 10.3, Issue on Gianfranco Rosi (2022), 407–19 (p. 409).
83 Cf. Susan Sontag who argues that ‘the dead are “supremely uninterested in the living” – they do not seek our gaze’, Judith Butler, ‘Photography, War, Outrage’, in PMLA, 120.3 (2005), 822–27 (p. 826).
84 Rothberg, Implicated Subject, pp. 1–8.
85 Ibid., p. 11.
86 Rothberg, ‘Lived Multidirectionality’, p. 1321.
87 Garofalo, Leake, and Renga, p. 4.
88 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. by Richard Howard (London: Vintage Books, 1981), p. 113; Paul Rowley, 6 October 2021.
89 Hillary Chute, ‘“The Shadow of a Past Time”: History and Graphic Representation in Maus’, in Twentieth Century Literature, 52.2 (2006), 199–230 (p. 215).
90 Ibid.
91 Butler, p. 826. The discussion draws on Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003).
92 Butler.
93 This is a reference to the title of Rowley’s talk given at the University of Cambridge Queer Cultures Symposium and Seminar Series: ‘Queer Remembrance/Resistance: A Conversation with Filmmaker Paul Rowley’, (12 November 2021).
94 Goretti and Giartosio, Città, p. ix.