Jun 3, 2019

What Happened to Gay Italy?

In the summertime I usually make the Paris-Brussels-Amsterdam run, but this year I'm going to Italy. It's been 30 years since my ill-fated graduate studies in Renaissance Italy, so I am prepping by reading some books.

I'm looking for the lushly homoerotic Italy that I remember from grad school: the nude photographs of Wilhelm Von Gloeden, the androgynous prettyboys of Caravaggio, the musclar bodies of Michelangelo.

I'm looking for the glittering gay-positive Renaissance, when  Leonardo Da Vinci sought out male lovers, and Aretino wrote about same-sex marriage.

And the  20th century, with Moravia's Two Adolescents, Umberto Saba's Ernesto, Visconte's Death in Venice, and Pasolini's many homoerotic masterpieces.

Instead, I'm finding a lot of praise of beautiful women, and the erasure of gay people from the world.

1. Dianne Hales, La Bella Lingua: My Love Affair with Italian, the World's Most Enchanting Language (2010) is not actually about the language, but about the culture, with chapters on Dante, film, food, and so on.  Ms. Hales mentions her husband every five seconds, which is annoying but understandable.  But she makes a concerted effort to heterosexualize everyone and everything.  

She learns to appreciate the Italian vocabulary from Niccolo Tommaseo, a 19th century essayist "whose passions included women and words."  Why was it necessary to tell us that, except to make Italy feel unwelcome to LGBT people.

We learn the words for a boy who starts going after girls before he grows a beard, a man who lets ladies walk all over him, a lady-killer, and an elderly man who still longs for women but can't get any.   I'm sure I'll never need any of those words.

How about the word for a man who wants you to come back to his room?

The frescos of Pompeii apparently contained only scenes of men and women coupling.

Lorenzo de Medici extolled "the joys of youth: women, falconry, and the Tuscan countryside."

How on Earth are those the joys of youth?  I was young, and didn't like any of those things.

AND Lorenzo liked men.

Five pages on Michelangelo's relationship with his elderly patron Vittoria, hinting that they were lovers, but no hint that MICHELANGELO WAS GAY.

Is this the same Dianne Hales who wrote a human sexuality textbook with two paragraphs on 'homosexuals':  "Homosexuality threatens and upsets many people because homosexuals are viewed as different."

They're called "gay," and saying that "they upset many people," you assert gays aren't people, you bigot.


2. Tim Parks, A Literary Tour of Italy (2016) actually is no travelogue. It consists of short essays on various Italian writers, all of whom are...you guessed it...straight.

If I have to hear how much this writer "wrote about beautiful women" just one more time.

Aretino is in the book, but he's straight.  Pasolini is not.

Tim Parks, by the way, is the elderly bald-headed guy on the far right.  The other two are Mark Krotov and Alex Shephard, senior editors at Melville House Books.   As far as I know, not a gay couple.

3. Seeking Sicily, by John Keahey.  Ok, Sicily, you're my last hope.  Home of the Taormina nudes in the 19th century and a gay governor today.

Keahey interviews a lot of people, mostly women and elderly men, who reminisce about the beautiful women of their childhood.

Apparently Sicily is a land of "beautiful women."  Old men sit in the cafes, looking at the "pretty girls."  Breasts.  Breasts.  Breasts.

Ok, I get it.  He grew up in Idaho and graduated from the University of Utah a thousand years ago.  He's one of those elderly men who sits in cafes looking at pretty girls and grumbling.  It's understandable that he is unaware that gay people exist.

Keahey visits Racalmuto, the home of "writer Leonardo Sciascia and famed opera tenor Salvatore Puma." Wait -- a gay couple?

No.  He means they both were born there, Scascia in 1921 and Puma in 1920, not that they were a couple.

He does not visit Taormina or interview the governor.

Is it too late to change my trip to Paris-Brussels-Amsterdam?


4 comments:

  1. I LOVE Italy! I have been there three times and will definitely be back, again. We went to Venice and Lake Como last time. I still have vivid dreams about the food and the spectacular scenery. And don't get me started about Italian men...

    I am going to Singapore this summer. Never been that far East and am looking forward to it.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I’ve only been to the north . This time I’m going south , to Naples and then Sicily

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  2. Boomer have you traveled to Spain- plenty of hot looking men

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes, I've been to Spain. Barcelona is one of my favorite cities in Europe, except that they don't have dinner until 11 pm. I liked Granada and Cordoba, but I wasn't a big fan of Madrid. Plus Yuri and I went to Basque country because he heard that Basque men have the biggest penises in the world.

      Delete

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