Remembering the Queer Exiles of San Domino: In Italia sono tutti maschi (2008) and The Red Tree (2018)

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Fascism
• Holocaust
• persecution of homosexuality
• testimony
• graphic novel
• documentary

Homosexuality in Fascist Italy was labelled ‘il vizio d’oltralpe’ in popular discourse, exiled by the Fascist regime from mainland Italy.¹ Homosexuality was exiled in theory and in practice: explicit references to homosexuality were conspicuously omitted from legislation – Lorenzo Benadusi defines this as a ‘strategia dell’occultamento’ adopted by the State.² The 1904 law n.36, which was in effect for the duration of the Italian Fascist regime, made culpable all those who constituted a ‘social problem’ or otherwise created a ‘public scandal’.³ This law ‘could be bent to implement repression of LGBT people under Mussolini’s regime’, and thereby used to sanction internment and exile.⁴ Those who did not fit the model delineated by the State were subject to ‘confino’, that is confinement on islands, and in prisons and psychiatric institutions.⁵ It is via racial laws that anti-queer stances were strengthened in 1938, upon the implementation of the Codice Rocco.⁶ This led to the classification of queer people as political offenders, with the effect that their offences were more seriously reprimanded than before.⁷ Queer people were exiled most notably in the 1938–1941 period, primarily to the Tremiti islands such as San Domino.⁸

Institutional invisibilisation was paradoxically accompanied by medical and cultural discourses around the visible markers of homosexuality,⁹ and public visibility and scandal were the object of persecution. Silence and invisibility became the only possibility for survival and the avoidance of exile.¹⁰ Gabriella Romano notes that these generations ‘had identified silence as part of being gay. Being “discreet” […] ensured survival’: this would later impact the possibility of providing testimony.¹¹ Several factors contributed to the triple process of silencing that impacted those persecuted for homosexuality: the lack of official acknowledgment of the existence of queer people under Mussolini; the post-Fascist era’s cis-heteronormative socio-cultural pressures and their contribution to the self-imposed silence of the victims; the failure – of queer activists among others – to provide (financial) help; and, consequently, the restricted possibilities of undertaking necessary research after the war.

Academic research on the persecution of queer people during the Fascist era in Italy began in the second half of the 1980s.¹² Historian and activist Giovanni Dall’Orto began gathering testimonies in the form of oral history interviews in the mid-80s: he interviewed Giuseppe B. di Vincenzo in 1987. Giuseppe B., from Salerno, was exiled to the island of San Domino: he was sent to ‘confino’ for five years in 1939 at the age of 26, as one of nearly 400 men exiled for homosexuality.¹³ This interview with Giuseppe B. constitutes a building block for later texts that remember persecution. The graphic novel In Italia sono tutti maschi by author Luca de Santis and artist Sara Colaone (2008, republished in 2010 and 2019), and the short film The Red Tree (2018), by (documentary) filmmaker Paul Rowley, with a script written by De Santis, are two works of significance which grapple with this silencing.¹⁴ Both of these works rely on the testimonies of Giuseppe B. as gathered by Dall’Orto and both use details particular to Giuseppe B.’s testimonies. This article will therefore analyse the strategies of remembrance of In Italia and The Red Tree and retrace instances in which Giuseppe B.’s individual story is made visible.¹⁵

My reading of the intertextual elements at play In Italia and The Red Tree is influenced by queer curators and theorists, notably the call by Jennifer Evans to ‘queer German history’: a methodology that works against processes of erasure and canonisation as related to the Holocaust.¹⁶ Spurred on by Evans, I develop a reading that is attentive to detail – perhaps seemingly unimportant historical and formal details – without claiming exhaustiveness or objectivity.¹⁷ Responding to Dominick LaCapra’s imperative to ‘listen to the other’, I amplify the elements of survivor testimonies at play in In Italia and The Red Tree in an attempt to reinforce these works’ ability to bring testimonies into the public realm.¹⁸ In these works, the remembrance of the persecution of homosexuality in Fascist Italy is carried out through the invocation of, and mediation by, transnational, cross-cultural, and trans-temporal events. Events of varied historical and cultural contexts are considered alongside World War II and bring the memory of the persecution of homosexuality closer to the twenty-first-century reader. I tease out the ‘layers of memory’ that enable this remembrance.

These works help remember those persecuted for homosexuality. I highlight the notion of remembrance: Klaus Müller has recently indicated that we cannot affirm that the persecution of homosexuality during World War II was completely unknown until today. Rather, this persecution must be remembered once again, and brought to the fore of public visibility.¹⁹ After an introduction on the concept of ‘testimony’, I work through the role of the media and trans-national production of In Italia and The Red Tree in the transmission of testimonies – I focus on the combined use of historical and fictional material in these works. I then home in on the spatial and temporal ambiguity at play in these works; events of various historical and cultural contexts are invoked. Whilst the risk of the ‘relativisation’, or ‘Americanisation’ of the Holocaust stands, I argue that the simultaneous presence of events of varied temporal and spatial contexts contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the persecution of homosexuality in Fascist Italy: it helps dismantle clichés about the ‘paradise-like’ living-circumstances of exiles – I touch on this below. I conclude by arguing that these works enable the implication of the contemporary reader/viewer precisely by their invocation of multiple events.

Studies of the persecution of homosexuality during the Holocaust note the importance of naming and terminology.²⁰ For the readability of the article, I use ‘queer’ to gesture towards those who deviate from cis-heterosexuality. However, I am mindful of the complexity of the debates around this topic. Historians such as Dall’Orto and Gigi Malaroda note that ‘queer’ would not have been a term used by survivors and they, therefore, consider the term anachronistic:²¹ we must concede that the term ‘queer’, like ‘gay’ and ‘transgender’, is ‘of recent origin’.²² However, scholars such as Gary P. Cestaro and Marco Pustianaz, and, more recently, Charlotte Ross, Julia Heim, and SA Smythe have reflected on and argued for the use of ‘queer’ in Italian Studies.²³ Maya de Leo has similarly argued for the use of ‘queer’ as an umbrella term with an awareness of potential anachronisms and with a resistance to any erasure of differences that the term might invoke.²⁴ I use ‘queer’ for the openness of the term to help mirror the complexity of the persecution of non-cis-heterosexual people in Fascist Italy.

Semi-Fictional Testimonial Works

In Italia recounts the experiences of protagonist Ninella (full name Antonio Angelicola), from his exile to the island of San Domino through to his encounter with his San Domino companion Mimì years after their exile, on Mimì’s deathbed. This narrative is interwoven with that of a documentary filmmaker (Rocco) and his assistant (Nico), who take the seventy-four-year-old Ninella back to San Domino to tape an oral history interview. This metanarrative bookends the story: In Italia opens with Rocco and Nico’s arrival in Salerno to begin a journey with Ninella to San Domino and closes with the group’s arrival to San Domino along with a picture of Ninella framed by a camera. The Salerno-San Domino journey prior to the interview is the space of remembrance: this is where the interviewers get to know Ninella’s story and so does the reader. Focal elements of the narrative include Ninella’s life on the island, his work as a seamster as he makes costumes for his fellow captives and patches the clothing of the island’s guards, and his relationships with Mimì as well as one particular guard with whom he becomes close.

In a narrative comparable to that of In Italia, The Red Tree also depicts a journey to San Domino, from Catania – Catania is alluded to through the mise-en-scène. In Italia and The Red Tree share an author in De Santis. This, along with their common setting, warrants close comparative analysis. Furthermore, their narratives show clear similarities: not unlike In Italia, which portrays seventy-four-year-old Ninella alongside the younger Ninella, The Red Tree juxtaposes images of exiles played by young actors with the voice-over of a narrator who remembers his exile decades after the war. The voice-over is provided by septuagenarian actor Leo Gullotta, who was born in Catania: the voice-over features a Sicilian accent, but remains understandable for a speaker of standard Italian. The Red Tree, as In Italia, places a particular focus on the relationship of the protagonist (unnamed in The Red Tree) and Mimì, whose death is gestured at in the film.

The film and the graphic novel tackle the spaces where the largest number of queer people were exiled. ‘Confino’ was used ‘per colmare un presunto vuoto legislativo’.²⁵ The lack of legislation warranting arrests for homosexuality is mirrored in the depiction of the unexplained sudden arrest of Ninella in In Italia, and in the omission of any depiction of an arrest in The Red Tree. Ninella, in In Italia, is then exiled from his hometown of Salerno, whilst the hometown of The Red Tree’s protagonist is Catania; San Domino was the most prominent place of exile for queer people in the period of 1938–41,²⁶ and Salerno and Catania (alongside Venice and Florence), the places in which queer people were most frequently persecuted.²⁷ Both works are anchored in historical evidence and research. La città e l’isola (2006) by Gianfranco Goretti and Tommaso Giartosio retraces stories of exiles that have disappeared from view. Based on survivors’ testimonies combined with historical analysis, La città e l’isola focusses precisely on arrests in Catania and exiles to San Domino. Goretti and Giartosio contribute to In Italia’s postface with an essay, and images from The Red Tree mirror photographs printed in La città e l’isola as I touch on below. Beyond the work of Goretti and Giartosio, In Italia and The Red Tree are primarily built on the testimonies of survivors of the persecution of homosexuality in Fascist Italy, particularly the testimonies of Giuseppe B. di Vincenzo.

The notion of testimony is widely theorised, whether from a historical, legal, psychoanalytic, or literary perspective, and needs clarification in this instance.²⁸ In my use of the term, I rely primarily on the works of Annette Wieviorka and Geoffrey H. Hartman. As the persecution of homosexuality during World War II cannot be disconnected from Nazi-Fascist racial stances, I rely on theorists who have paved the way in our understanding of testimony but have primarily focused on the Shoah – I hope that different facets of Nazi-Fascist persecutions can speak to one another. Wieviorka’s study of the ‘avènement du témoin’ [advent of the witness] which pivots on the Eichmann trial, brings forth a focus on the individual.²⁹ However, testimony ‘ne vit pas dans une bulle’ [does not live in a bubble], to use Wieviorka’s expression: testimony is always already embedded in a context, and impacted by it.³⁰ Testimony is also often used for particular ends: the individual experiences recounted at the Eichmann trial take on political importance as they enter the public space, through new technologies and media, including television.³¹ Impacted by its context and by the medium with which it is shared, testimony is always already mediated as scholars such as Marianne Hirsch remind us.³²

Both In Italia and The Red Tree are based on the research of Giovanni Dall’Orto and his interviews with queer exiles, including his piece ‘Ci furono femmenelle che piangevano, quando venimmo via dalle Tremiti’ (originally published in 1987 and republished in the 2019 edition of In Italia). The date 1987 is highlighted in In Italia in a subtitle to Dall’Orto’s interview: ‘Intervista a un omosessuale che ha subito il confino durante il periodo fascista, raccolta da Giovanni Dall’Orto nel 1987 e originariamente pubblicata su “Babilonia” n. 50’ (p. 167). The metanarrative of In Italia itself is set in 1987: the graphic novel introduces the interviewers Rocco and Nico who meet with Ninella and the heading reads ‘Salerno, Febbraio 1987’. Ninella is modelled after Peppinella, whose work in exile as a tailor and romantic interest in a guard are represented in the graphic novel. Indeed, Peppinella tells Dall’Orto, ‘facevo “la sarta” per i carabinieri” […] ce n’e [sic] era uno che si chiamava V.: quanto era bello!’ (p. 168). Beyond Dall’Orto’s research, Romano’s Ricordare (2003) must be mentioned: Romano interviews a person with the fictitious name ‘Antonio’.³³ Antonio’s testimonies greatly overlap with those of Giuseppe B. Ricordare might be the source for the names Antonio and Ninella used in In Italia.

Giuseppe B. gave an interview to Dall’Orto on the condition that no photos or recordings were taken, an important aspect to keep in mind when seeing Ninella framed by the documenting camera within the frame of the graphic novel (Figure 1). Similarly, Antonio’s face is never shown in Ricordare. The survivors’ wishes to remain anonymous is a constraint that necessitates the artists’ processes of fictionalisation when using the oral history interviews conducted by these researchers.

Figure 1. Ninella framed by the documenting camera. Sara Colaone and Luca de Santis, In Italia sono tutti maschi (Rome: Oblomov, 2019), p. 5.

In Italia and The Red Tree build on testimonies but are not testimonies themselves. They make publicly visible elements of oral history interviews whilst fulfilling ethical constraints with the use of fictionalisation. Through their close connection to testimonies and their role in the publicisation and mediation of these testimonies, In Italia and The Red Tree could be considered semi-fictional testimonial works. A close reading of the texts will highlight the role of the media used by De Santis, Colaone, and Rowley in combining historical and fictional material and emphasising transnational and trans-historical connections. I propose a reading of the layers of mediation through which the testimonies gathered by Dall’Orto appear in In Italia and The Red Tree: the transnational and trans-temporal connections which mediate the persecution of homosexuality bring this closer to the twenty-first-century reader.

Popular Culture and Transmission

Wieviorka highlights the role of testimonies in bringing history closer to younger generations: the testimonies of the Eichmann trial speak to young generations who gain more through these than through history books.³⁴ In Italia and The Red Tree make use of survivor testimonies. However, testimonies and indexical images of survivors of the persecution of homosexuality in Fascist Italy are scarce and the wish of survivors to remain anonymous must be respected: In Italia and The Red Tree use different, albeit comparable tools to supplement existing material of queer exiles and thus they bring this material closer to the twenty-first-century reader. As Hartman states, with the passing of time, historical events will have to be brought into the present;³⁵ he underlines the role of art in this process. He notes that ‘in a media-mediated age, this struggle may center on the issue of communicability’. He praises Art Spiegelman’s Maus as an ‘extraordinary adaptation of the popular medium’,³⁶ but seems to remain sceptical about the relationship of popular media with Holocaust testimony.³⁷

Alison Landsberg resists Hartman’s scepticism.³⁸ Indeed, when thinking about In Italia and The Red Tree and their transmission of memories to younger generations, Landsberg’s theory of ‘transferential space’ is useful. According to Landsberg, a process of transference happens ‘affectively, viscerally’ between survivor and second-generation survivor, between survivor and actor, or in spaces like the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.³⁹ Landsberg studies the possibilities of transference via media dismissed as ‘low-brow’, such as the comic/graphic novel, and in her later work through mass culture and technology.⁴⁰ An ‘alternative living memory’, argues Landsberg, might be created for those who do not possess direct experiences. We can consider the graphic novel In Italia in conversation with Landsberg’s focus on ‘low-brow’ genres.

Originally created for entertainment, the genre of the graphic novel is situated at the margins of ‘official culture’: Lorenzo di Paola reminds us in a historical outline of the development of the medium that it can be related to an American lineage of comics, which themselves are related to Yellow Journalism, a ‘stampa scandalistica, di intrattenimento’.⁴¹ Indeed, Yellow Journalism gained its name from the comic Yellow Kid which served commercial purposes and played a role in the Pulitzer-Hearst sale rivalry of the late 1800s. Coulton Waugh delineates the historical development of the comic/graphic novel as related to this sale-war:

Comics […] owe their start to a newspaper war; and an understanding of this is important for an understanding of them. Their first purpose was to build circulation, to sell papers; and this situation remains the same today.⁴²

The monochromatic/duochromatic yellow (and black) of In Italia, recalls the commercial aspect of the Yellow Press. The yellow of the graphic novel is supplemented by a CYMK cover in the case of the 2019 edition – widespread in the colour coding of printed material – underpinning the consumer-oriented aspect of the work.⁴³ In Italia makes use of the comic’s/graphic novel’s ability to reach a wide readership.

In Italia dis/continues the consumerist characteristics of the genre(s) of the comic and the graphic novel; its mass-media related characteristics combine with the historicity of its content. In Italia is ‘rispettosa della verità storica’, based on oral history interviews conducted by, notably, Dall’Orto and it makes explicit its reliance on historical research;⁴⁴ biographical details are numerous in In Italia. The form of the graphic novel itself reflects the historical aspect of the persecution of homosexuality in Fascist Italy and its relationship to racial persecution. Beyond ‘Yellow Journalism’, the overwhelming yellow of its pages connects the graphic novel with Holocaust symbolism: before the use of the yellow star of David as an antisemitic label during World War II, the ‘yellow badge’ was already used in medieval Europe as a visual marker of Jews, anchoring yellow as a symbol of antisemitism across the centuries.⁴⁵ The yellow of Holocaust symbolism is further related to the appearance of the Fascist symbol of the eagle in the book in multiple instances (pp. 52–55, 76, back cover). The pink triangle that supplements the cover’s CYMK colour palette brings in another symbol related to the Holocaust, as those deported to concentration camps for homosexuality were made to wear a downwards pointing pink triangle. The pink triangle’s upward pointing version has been reclaimed and popularised by AIDS activism – although the pink triangle of the cover remains anchored in Holocaust symbolism as it points downwards.⁴⁶

Rowley’s film, not unlike In Italia, blurs the boundaries of documentary and fiction, and brings in elements associated with commercialisation; the filmmaker calls The Red Tree ‘a doc/hybrid’.⁴⁷ The film features actors who play the part of the San Domino exiles: they were cast and costumed for a close physical resemblance with the exiles described in historical evidence, photos, and verbal accounts by the police, creating what we could perhaps consider ‘semi-indexical’ images. Making use of the potentials of the digital film, the motionless, photograph-like images of the exiles recreated in The Red Tree are supplemented with images of archival police records of the exiles which are layered onto the images of the exiles. The film also features contemporary footage of San Domino, onto which the camp’s rules are superimposed (Figure 2). Rowley plays with the layering of contemporary and historical material, and with such strategies, Rowley departs from a historical account and moves towards the present moment.

Figure 2. Contemporary footage of San Domino with the rules of the camp superimposed on it. The Red Tree, dir. by Paul Rowley (Still Films, 2018), 00:09:58. Cf. ‘The Red Tree’, in Still Films Website <https://www.stillfilms.org/portfolio/the-red-tree/> [accessed 19 October 2023].

The trans-temporal elements of the film are supplemented with cross-cultural, transnational connections. Rowley worked with an international production team, and the cast is primarily made up of US-based Italian actors. The film was made in the USA, at a time of extreme political radicalisation epitomised by the election of Donald Trump. For Rowley, then, The Red Tree is simultaneously a historical piece and a political act of warning, bridging past and present and different national and cultural contexts.⁴⁸ The Red Tree fits into Rowley’s broader oeuvre as a filmmaker as he attempts to combine historical work and activism. His most recent collaboration with and work on the American Gays Against Guns activist group emphasises the movement’s trans-historical basis. In an interview conducted by Rowley, activist and co-founder of Gays Against Guns Kevin Hertzog highlights with reference to the 2 June 2016 shooting in the Orlando gay nightclub Pulse:

When the Pulse shooting happened, there were shock waves from the AIDS crisis that reverberated through that experience […] We used the experience of living through the AIDS crisis to inform our decision to try to end gun violence.⁴⁹

The trans-historical perspective highlighted in Rowley’s most recent work is also at play in The Red Tree.

Various historical references blur together in the Red Tree, even at the level of the use of props. The Red Tree, like In Italia, uses the historical symbol of the pink triangle. Here, however, the pink triangles point upwards, bringing to mind AIDS activism. These pink triangles are made up of neon lights which light up behind the actors. The pink neon lights that form the triangles, beyond being a symbol of AIDS activism, are a symbol of commercialisation and entertainment culture. When thinking of The Red Tree with Rowley’s broader oeuvre in mind, we may note that these neon lights recreate the pink light that characterises the Pulse nightclub, a pink light that has survived in Pulse’s becoming a memorial.⁵⁰ This reading is strengthened by the origin of the particular neon lights used by Rowley in The Red Tree: they indeed come from a Brooklyn gay nightclub.⁵¹ These neon pink triangles then simultaneously bring to the fore the memory of the Pulse shooting and of the AIDS crisis.

‘When the Pulse shooting happened, there were shock waves from the AIDS crisis’:⁵² events of varied historical and national contexts can become associated with one-another through shared characteristics. Rothberg has reflected on the ‘layered association of the Holocaust, the “Palestinian Cause”, and the Syrian civil war’ that can be identified in survivor’s testimonies: we may think of the association and simultaneous presence of events of varied spatio-temporal contexts as layers of memory.⁵³ Following in the footsteps of Rothberg, I contend that the layers of memory brought to the fore in The Red Tree, with their trans-historical and cross-cultural references, serve to highlight the persecution of homosexuality in Fascist Italy. Goretti and Giartosio note in their essay published at the end of In Italia that ‘la storia del confino degli “invertiti” […] è quasi impossibile da ridurre a una qualsiasi retorica inamidata, resiste insomma al fascismo etero della nostra cultura ufficiale’.⁵⁴ They signal that the history of the persecution of homosexuality in the Fascist period has not found a place in ‘high-brow’, canonical cultural productions. It is then with the use of ‘low-brow’ media which allow for a non-linear thinking of history, that De Santis, Colone, and Rowley transmit the memories of this persecution. I go on to analyse the spatio-temporal ambiguity in particular segments of these works.

‘Transferential’ Spaces: Images of the Journey

In Italia and The Red Tree both depict a journey back to San Domino; the journey becomes the setting of remembrance. They highlight a sense of geographical loss, through the consultation of a map in In Italia (pp. 47, 78) and the (almost) complete lack of geographical pointers in The Red Tree. They also both introduce spatio-temporal ambiguity through to the evocation of multiple events of queer history. To supplement Landsberg’s study of ‘transferential spaces’, and to think about the layering of spatio-temporally distant events, we might note that ‘transference’, as the etymological root of ‘transfer’ suggests, is an act of ‘carrying’, of carrying ‘across, beyond’, which might be understood with reference to spatiality: Landsberg does gesture towards this question of spatiality.⁵⁵ Through this notion of ‘transference’, I thus focus on the movement, both spatial and temporal, that is prominently brought up in In Italia and The Red Tree.

Places and vehicles dedicated to spatial movement such as the road, the car and the boat form a significant part of the narrative of In Italia and of The Red Tree; In Italia is set on the road between Salerno and San Domino, whilst The Red Tree opens with a journey on a boat to San Domino. In relation to Gianfranco Rosi’s Sacro GRA, Robert S. C. Gordon has recently written of the way photographic framing relates to that naturally afforded by vehicles: ‘a film cliché’ that reminds us of ‘cinema’s intense relation with the automobile, captured in the car windscreen as an analogy for the screen, viewfinder and frame’.⁵⁶ As something of a departure from this cliché, the central topic of In Italia is not what of the outside world can be seen through the windscreen, but the conversations which happen in the car: it is within the car that the documentary filmmakers of the graphic novel film (pp. 4, 58–59, 74–75), and the inside of the car, rather than the road, comes doubly framed by the windscreen and the book (p. 44).

The car of In Italia offers a space for looking back towards a moment in history, as Gordon highlights, bringing to the fore Italo Calvino’s ‘automobile man’ looking back in time through the rear-view mirror.⁵⁷ This act of retrovision, or looking to the past, is illustrated in In Italia with the interviewer Rocco’s eyes framed in the rear-view mirror as Rocco speaks to Ninella about ‘femminielli’: ‘Dagli archivi ho scoperto che ci sono stati […] più di trecento alle isole tremiti tra il 1938 e il ‘43’ (p. 26). Ninella however disrupts this moment of retrospection as he interrupts Rocco: ‘Sapete guidare bene?’ (p. 26). Instead of a straight-forward narration of Ninella’s past, the interlocutors of Ninella, Rocco and Nico, as well as the extra-diegetic reader, receive a segmented narrative. This illustrates his reluctance to tell his story summarised in his exclamation ‘sto facendo un piacere a voi, mica a me, a raccontare ‘ste cose! Io manco volevo ricordarle!’ (p. 75). Ninella does not seem enthusiastic about arriving in San Domino where the official part of the interview is due to take place (even though the interviewers already begin filming during the journey): he repeatedly asks the interviewers to stop along the way and with this contributes to the fragmentation of the retelling of his exile (pp. 28, 43, 57–58).

As if supplementing the narrative line of In Italia, the narrative of The Red Tree opens with a sequence on a ferry crossing over to San Domino. The narrator recounts his journey to San Domino when he was exiled: ‘Una giornata sulla barca per arrivare a San Domino. Mi hanno fatto remare all’inizio, poi forse si hanno avuto pena, o forse no, si sono solo dimenticati che c’ero. E non è questo l’esilio, dimenticare che esisto?’. The voice-over is juxtaposed with images of the journey to San Domino. Images in full colour of a walk in a wooded area are posited alongside the description: ‘ho camminato lungo la salita da solo […] e i carabinieri che me scortavano’. It is then through transition to red filtered images that the exile is made visible to the viewer. Following the depiction of this journey which constitutes the initial parts of The Red Tree, Rowley’s use of colour, of a red filter, signals the change to the time-period depicted. Whilst the voice-over prevails throughout the entire film, the images in full colour signal that the present of narration is that of the journey on the ferry.

These vehicles and spaces of ‘passing-through’ are where the transference of memory takes place: the memory of the persecution of homosexuality is transmitted to the extra-diegetic (and in the case of In Italia also intra-diegetic) reader/viewer. It is on the road to San Domino that Ninella begins telling the interviewers about his story; similarly it is during a ferry crossing over to San Domino that the protagonist narrator of In Italia begins retelling his experience of exile. We must note that these elements might reflect Romano’s Ricordare, where Antonio’s voice can be heard over images of moving buses, cars, and trains, as Romano is repeatedly shown travelling, and attempting to gather oral history interviews. The emphasis on journeys then reflects the reality of this process. It also signals the bridging of different spatio-temporal spaces that both In Italia and The Red Tree work towards and which will be crucial for the transference of the memory of queer survivors to a twenty-first-century reader.

Temporal Ambiguity

In Italia plays with the juxtaposition of simultaneous narrative lines. It brings together on the same page events that are spatially close but temporally separate, as Ninella’s interactions with the interviewer, and his time on San Domino as an exile during the war are depicted at once. In Italia also brings together events which are temporally close but spatially separate. This is the case with protagonist Ninella’s interaction with a ‘brigadiere’, a brigadier of the island, as Ninella patches the guard’s clothing and sews buttons back onto his uniform. Simultaneously intertwined with this narrative strand, Mimì is beaten up and stabbed by a group of political prisoners of the island. The vignettes of the two narrative strands are juxtaposed on the pages of In Italia, their separation marked by the use of different frames, using sharp thin lines in the former and thick blurry lines in the latter case (pp. 89–98; Figure 3). The two strands meet when a guard enters to announce to the brigadier that a captive (Mimì), has been stabbed. This particular sequence thus allows for a non-linear reading of the vignettes, as the reader might follow the narrative strands separately, one narrative line after the other, thus diverging from a normative left-to-right reading.⁵⁸ We might refer to Jan Baetens who calls for a non-restrictive reading of graphic novels which allows for elements such as colour and frames, to be considered as ‘active players’ in the work (Figure 4) – here, as above, where the changes from full-colour to red-filtered images signals different temporality, the formal elements of the works play a key role.⁵⁹

Figure 3. Intertwined narrative strands differentiated by styles of frame. Colaone and De Santis, pp. 94–95.

Figure 4. The role of frames in In Italia sono tutti maschi. Colaone and De Santis, pp. 112–13.

Whilst, as noted above, the graphic novel as related to comics is anchored in a consumerist entertainment-related background, here it exceeds such exchange value and becomes a vehicle for memory in a way that once again echoes Landsberg’s delineation of ‘transference’. Baetens argues for the analysis of ‘the complexities of the combination’ of media. Invoking Roland Barthes’s conception of the ‘writerly’ text developed in S/Z, Baetens writes that ‘it is now the reader’s responsibility to verbally complete the visual story’.⁶⁰ Thus, Baetens inscribes himself in a line of scholars such as Marshall McLuhan who, in 1964, argued that the graphic novel is ‘a highly participational form of expression’.⁶¹ For Baetens, the elements of the graphic novel must be thought of carefully. In this light, other elements of In Italia deserve close analysis. The element of colour for instance is often ignored or marginalised in close analyses, which makes the careful consideration of In Italia’s – and The Red Tree’s – colour palette all the more crucial.⁶² It is interesting to note that in the most recent 2019 edition of In Italia, there are supplements added by the creators of the book, dated 20 February 2019. Additional images by Colaone and De Santis blur into the story (Figure 5). The piece ‘Dieci anni di In Italia sono tutti maschi: un diario di viaggio’ is a watercolour- and pencil-based hybrid of text and image – these pages thus stand in striking contrast with, and draw attention to, the choice of the artists to use a black-white-yellow colour scheme for the story.

Figure 5. Supplementary pages of the new edition blurring into the story in In Italia sono tutti maschi. Colaone and De Santis, pp. 162–63.

The additional pages not only span a period of time between the first publication of In Italia in 2008 and its latest publication in 2019, but they also retell a geographical and linguistic movement: the graphic novel’s translation into French, for instance. Colaone and De Santis write about meeting with queer journalists in Belgium who asked, ‘Quindi nel tuo paese gli omosessuali non possono sposarsi?’ to which in 2010 their answer was ‘no’. – the answer is the same today, although civil unions have since been legalised, on 5 June 2016. The authors comment on the revelatory aspect of such trans-national conversations in a way that once again draws focus on the importance of collaboration and movement across space for a collective thought process about queerphobia: ‘è stato in quel momento per la prima volta nella mia vita, che ho sentito tutto il peso della discriminazione del mio paese’ (p. 171). This addition to the 2019 re-edition of In Italia further captures the impact of the book; the publication has caused what the authors call a ‘domino-effect’ as further academic and artistic works, in Italy, France, or the United-Kingdom, have begun to appear (p. 172). As Colaone and De Santis note, since the initial publication of In Italia, civil union was legalised in Italy; however, the authors juxtapose this noteworthy event with the Pulse gay club attack and remind the reader of ongoing atrocities despite positive changes.

Comparably to In Italia, extensive spatio-temporal areas are covered by The Red Tree. The pink triangles made of neon lights are a material recreation of a symbol of queer identity during Nazi-Fascism as reclaimed by AIDS activists and as informed by recent attacks on the queer community.⁶³ Such a juxtaposition of spatio-temporally varied events is brought to the fore by cinematic devices; images of San Domino are juxtaposed with the actors dancing in an ambiguous, foggy space. Filmed in a Brooklyn warehouse, the dance sequences, overlaid with a red filter in post-production, are displaced from San Domino to instead occupy an artificial space. Rowley intertwines shots of the actors/exiles dancing with documentation of the contemporary San Domino, not only bridging the spatial gap between the Brooklyn set and San Domino, but linking past and present through such semi-indexical images and shots.

Images of The Red Tree show a masculine figure wearing what resembles a bride’s veil, as if taking part in a wedding. Peppinella speaks to Dall’Orto about the queer people’s time in exile on San Domino: ‘cercavamo di vivere bene, come si poteva. Ridevamo, facevamo teatro, […] si festeggiava’ (p.168). With this allusion to a festive scene, The Red Tree depicts this historical reality, with this allusion to a festive scene, this historical reality. When asked about whether queerness could be lived openly in the post-war period, Peppinella testifies to persistent persecution. Peppinella mentions ‘lo scandalo dei “balletti verdi” nel 1960’, queer balls that caused great scandals:⁶⁴ ‘un femmenella per paura denunciò me ed altre quattordici persone, dicendo che pure noi facevano i balletti verdi, che ci vestiamo con i veli, facevamo la danza del ventre … ’ (p. 170). As such, this veil might also represent an imagined version of Peppinella in the post-war period, one that Peppinella however discredits: ‘non era vero niente’. The veil, combined with the dancing sequences of The Red Tree, can stand in for the ‘balletti verdi’ and thus at once remind us of the continued attempts to build a queer community and the continued persecution that this community has suffered from. Interestingly, we might note that at least one of the photographs which has served as inspiration for The Red Tree originated in the post-war period. Goretti and Giartosio’s La città e l’isola indeed features a 1955 photograph of men dancing and looking into the camera, taken by Caio M. Garrubba in Calabria; it is this post-war image that The Red Tree’s dancing sequence imitates.⁶⁵

The ‘Americanisation’ of the Holocaust

The widespread media-based idealisation of the Tremiti as a gay ‘paradise’ is built on an idea of exiles dancing and living out their fantasies; this is widely discredited by scholars.⁶⁶ Danilo Ceirani and Pierluigi Rocchetti sum up: ‘le condizioni […] erano a dir poco orribili’.⁶⁷ The perception of the ‘confino’ as paradise-like is dismantled in The Red Tree with its use of layers of memory, by the juxtaposition of various historical events which are clear examples of queerphobic violence. Images of dancing and veiled figures that might be associated with festivities or other aspects of the ‘paradise-like’ confino are overlaid with the voice-over of the narrator: ‘Potrei raccontarti la storia di quei ragazzi bendati e legati che vengono gettati giù dai tetti dei palazzi, […] Di quei quarantanove ammazzati mentre sorridono e ballano in un locale’. In this way, The Red Tree portrays a point of encounter between past and present and unlike In Italia (bar the 2019 addition to the book), it focuses on events beyond Italy.⁶⁸ Beyond the voice-over, in the context of Rowley’s most recent work around the activist group Gays Against Guns,⁶⁹ the figure covered with a white veil can be linked to American protests in remembrance of those who died of gun violence; the ‘human beings’, protesters who wear white veils and hold up the name and photograph of a person who died of gun violence, are echoed by the veiled figure of The Red Tree. The Red Tree could be critiqued for its relativisation, and Americanisation – including the consumerisation – of a particular event of history.⁷⁰

As Michael Berenbaum, president of the Shoah Visual History Foundation from 1997 to 1999, notes: ‘This is the reason why I invented the term of americanisation of the Holocaust: we took a European event and we integrated it into American culture, popular culture’.⁷¹ For Berenhaum, the Holocaust is used for the teaching of ‘American values’,⁷² to catalyse resistance against authoritarian leadership, or to offer a general delineation of morality, with a focus on the ‘universal import’ of the study of the Holocaust. To achieve these aims, an ‘optimistic’ stance must also be assumed.⁷³

The process of ‘Americanisation’ at work in The Red Tree, in contrast, is built on existing connections across the memory of the persecution of homosexuality in the Nazi-Fascist regime, as symbolised by the Pink triangle, and its use in AIDS activism, as well as the impact of the memory of the AIDS crisis on the protests of activists following recent homophobic crimes such as the Pulse shooting. Further, it works with explicitly anachronistic elements that do not blur with the memory of the persecution of homosexuality during the Nazi-Fascist regime: instead The Red Tree strengthens and lays bare connections. The Red Tree’s references to Syrian and American events, juxtaposed with images of the embodied queer exiles, add nuances to the remembrance of San Domino. The various spatio-temporal references serve precisely to dismantle ideas of San Domino as a ‘gay paradise’.

The visibilisation of events across time and space does not preclude The Red Tree’s focus on a precise historical reality, and thus further resists a criticism of its ‘americanisation’. In The Red Tree, the bridging of past and present in a cross-continental space produces spatio-temporal ambiguity. This is, however, countered through precise symbols which anchor the viewer. The Red Tree works against the ‘flattening’ of terminology and symbols that appears as a risk in a process of an Americanisation of the Holocaust.⁷⁴ As noted above, journeys across different spaces and spatio-temporal ambiguity are prominent in both works. However, in the film, this ambiguity is counterbalanced by the symbol of the red tree. A meeting place for gay men, or ‘arrusi’ in dialect, and the setting of dance evenings in Catania under Fascism, the red tree, or ‘arvulu russu’ is an emblem of Sicilian queer identity.⁷⁵ It should be further highlighted that Catania was the space of ‘l’unica comunità gay italiana organizzata’ before the war.⁷⁶ The ‘arvulu russu’ haunts the dancing shots of the warehouse, projected onto a screen behind the actors. The Red Tree’s red-filtered images thus pay tribute to the symbol of the red tree in their colour. The red tree then accompanies the pink triangle made up of neon lights mentioned above. The symbol of the pink triangle has been criticised as a space of ‘international and generic’ commemoration by Romano,⁷⁷ but the pink triangle of The Red Tree takes on new meaning through its simultaneous presence with elements of Italian queer history symbolised by the red tree.

In a similar modulation of the overuse of the ‘generic’, In Italia’s cover hides a pink triangle in plain sight in the scarf of Ninella represented on the cover (Figure 6): as the wind seemingly blows the scarf, it takes on a triangular shape, thus making the downward-facing pink triangle appear. Here again, the pink triangle brings together several different historical elements. Its placement is that of the pink triangle on the chest of those deported for homosexuality. As part of Ninella’s scarf, the pink triangle also alludes to the biographical elements related to Peppinella who enjoys wearing colourful scarfs: Dall’Orto notes in the preface to the interview with Peppinella that ‘Giuseppe B. è un anziano signore vestito in modo molto sobrio, con l’eccezione di un vivace foulard attorno al collo’ (p. 167). The protagonist of The Red Tree wears a similar scarf, whilst upward-looking pink triangles stand behind him (Figure 7). In both cases, the simultaneous presence of the triangle and the scarf is a play with the juxtaposition of a well-known symbol and a particular reference to a micro-historical narrative gathered from testimonies. As elements of Giuseppe B.’s testimonies are juxtaposed with a trans-historical and trans-national, including contemporary, elements, the contemporary reader/viewer comes to be ‘implicated’ in the process of remembrance.⁷⁸

Figure 6. The 2019 cover of In Italia sono tutti maschi. Colaone and De Santis, front cover.

Figure 7. The mechanical make-up of the pink triangle lights of The Red Tree. The Red Tree, 00:17:09.

Implication Across Time and Space

The narrator of The Red Tree defines exile as constituted by physical disconnection but also through a disconnection that results from forgetting: ‘Non è questo l’esilio? Dimenticare che esisto?’. Forgetting is highlighted in The Red Tree as such: ‘Eppure dopo tanti anni pure quest’isola si è dimenticata di noi […] Hanno dimenticato i dimenticati’. The lack of a community that can remember puts pressure on individual survivors. Dario Petrosino writes in relation to the persecution of queer people: ‘Mancando la communità, viene meno la possibilità di poter ricordare le vicende altre l’arco della vita di chi le ha vissute in prima persona’.⁷⁹ The individual survivor is then under pressure as a singular source of historical material. In the face of Ninella’s reluctance to tell his story Rocco bursts out with a comment blaming a community of survivors: ‘a fare come voi finisce che la gente non sa neppure che c’è stato un esilio degli omosessuali in Italia!’ (In Italia, p. 76). Ninella remonstrates many times and resists the blame that Rocco puts on him. This scene seems to illustrate what Wieviorka calls, in relation to French Holocaust testimony, the ‘shifted responsibility from the silence of the French historians onto the deportees’.⁸⁰ How then is a community beyond the survivors called to act?

The exiles are shown dancing together in The Red Tree in a spatio-temporally ambiguous space. This dancing sequence is punctured by frozen images, reminiscent of a buffering video, recalling photographic images in their motionlessness: the film highlights its reliance on a photograph. Indeed, the image of dancing exiles clearly recalls the 1955 photo from Calabria of men dancing with one another and staring into the camera much like in The Red Tree – as noted above this photo was made accessible through La città e l’isola in which it was reprinted.⁸¹ The Red Tree posits this post-war image – another instance of spatio-temporal ambiguity created by the film – into a broader narrative. Rather than being bound by the frames of the photograph, the actors who embody the exiles allow for a narrative to emerge and disturb the association of the photograph with stillness and death. Cinema’s interest in ‘the line between the still and the moving, between the living and the dead’ is elaborated upon by Emma Wilson. Instead of associating stills with loss and death, Wilson sees stills as bearing ‘a trace of embodied experience, of sensuousness, of engagement with the world, up to and beyond death’.⁸²

The exiles depicted in The Red Tree confront the gaze of the viewer, staring into the camera in the dancing sequence. The actors’ gaze could be perceived as a look which questions the legitimacy of the viewer’s own scrutinising gaze.⁸³ However, supplemented by Gullotta’s voice-over as he narrates the storyline, the viewer is called to look back into these eyes, to join the community: ‘guardami negli occhi, sono i miei, sono quelli dei miei fratelli, forse sono anche i tuoi’. As such, it is from this spatio-temporally ambiguous space, from the dancing sequence itself, drawing on an image from the post-war period, that the viewer of the film is solicited. These images create a sense of involvement. Rothberg’s recent study of the ‘implicated subject’ is pertinent.⁸⁴ Rothberg works through time-based distinctions of past and present, in order to blur synchronic and diachronic implications, moving towards ‘multidirectional links between a current crisis and a past trauma’ which extend across time and space.⁸⁵ Further, in recent pieces, Rothberg combines the implication across time with his concept of ‘lived multidirectionality’, that is ‘a shift in temporal focus: from a debate about a completed historical past to one about active legacies in an ongoing present that has implications for the future’.⁸⁶

Instances of connection must however be contrasted with the historical reality of exile. As the authors of Internal Exile in Fascist Italy highlight, post-war historiography likes to think of former exiles as founders of a new anti-Fascist community building up the Republic and the European Union.⁸⁷ The over-idealised equation of exile with the process of post-war resistant community-building should thus be thought through carefully, with attention to nuances. And indeed, The Red Tree makes explicit this historical reality. The narrator says: ‘Io non sapevo di essere gay. Non esisteva questa parola. E non eravamo ancora comunità’. The anachronistic elements of The Red Tree, and the process of embodiment by foreign actors, alongside a breaking of the fourth wall to establish a connection with a contemporary viewer all stand against an idealisation of exile as birthing a flourishing anti-Fascist and/or queer community right after the war.

In Italia and The Red Tree are not dissimilar in this respect. In Italia depicts a connection between the old Ninella and the young filmmaker Rocco, whilst Ninella and Mimì become disconnected after their experience of San Domino. Similarly, connections in The Red Tree are created across time and space as seen above. The elongated silence that obstructed the remembrance of the persecution of queer people under the Fascist regime also made the creation of queer communities difficult. The Red Tree opens up the possibility for the viewer to join this community, to become ‘implicated’, through a process of remembrance. According to Barthes ‘the Look […] traverses, with the Photograph, Time’;⁸⁸ the actors stare at the camera, and Rowley describes this as a ‘looking through history’. The ongoing work done in this regard in academic and activist circles must be given due attention.

In Italia features a non-ending: the graphic novel closes on images of Ninella in a camera frame with the words ‘Mi chiamo Angelicola Antonioni e ho 75 anni’, a repetition of the introduction of the graphic novel. Although, whilst the ending and the beginning frame the narrative as they mirror one another, the passing of time is also clear: before their arrival to San Domino and the filming of the interview, Ninella claims to be 74 years old (p. 124). The cyclicality of In Italia echoes Spiegelman’s text, about which Hillary Chute comments, ‘Maus’s last page “Just keeps ending”’.⁸⁹ According to Chute, Maus ‘insists that no voice could or should have the last word, thus suggesting the work of memory as a public process’, an analysis that is powerfully applicable to In Italia.⁹⁰ The actors in The Red Tree return the viewer’s gaze; similarly the protagonist of In Italia is framed by the documenting camera. This brings to mind Sontag’s question, ‘what do [the tortured] see?’.⁹¹ The displacement of focus onto the viewer, which itself draws criticism, points towards the need to interrogate our own actions. Judith Butler’s note, ‘photographs do not only represent us; they also build an interpretation of who we are’ might be understood with the ‘we’ in question defined as a collective of viewers, exiles and actors, past and current, all ‘implicated’ in remembrance.⁹² This further echoes Rowley’s endeavour to link past/present and remembrance/resistance⁹³ towards a historical account tied to ongoing activism.

The graphic novel In Italia and the film The Red Tree blur the line between historiography and fiction. It is worth noting that historical accounts such as La città e l’isola by Gorreti and Giartosio themselves complicate a historical/fictional binary: ‘nomi propri e cognomi ricavati dagli archivi […] sono di fantasia. Citazioni ed eventi, vogliamo sottolinearlo, sono tutti assolutamente autentici’.⁹⁴ For the safety of survivors and their communities, it was necessary to bring in fictive elements to historical narratives. In Italia and The Red Tree depict the persecution of queer people during the Italian Fascist regime, but at the same time, they bring forth the memory of the AIDS crisis and of twenty-first-century queerphobic acts. These layers of memory help bring the testimonies to the persecution of queer people in the Fascist regime closer to the twenty-first-century reader whilst respecting survivors’ wish for anonymity.

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.