Scandalous Practices: Homosexuality, Male Prostitution, and Sexual Citizenship in Post-Fascist Italy

Abstract

By analyzing popular magazines and newspapers, fictional accounts, personal letters, and police files, this study explores experiences and discourses produced around male prostitution and homosexuality in post-Fascist Italy. It makes the central argument that male prostitution provides a lens for the historical analysis of homosexualities and anti-homosexual anxieties between the end of WWII and the foundation of the Italian gay liberation movement in the 1970s. In so doing, this dissertation highlights the centrality of (homo)sexuality to the investigation of the crucial turning points of postwar Italian (and European) history, from reconstruction and the Cold War to the economic miracle and the protest movements of the late 1960s. The nexus of male prostitution and homosexual subjectivities, propagated by the media and increasingly resisted by an emerging emancipatory movement, contributed to the ongoing redefinition of normalcy and deviance, thereby redrawing the contours of citizenship and belonging. This research charts male prostitution as a pervasive and ordinary practice in post-Fascist Italy. Parks, train stations, cinemas, and public restrooms were queer spaces where men and male adolescents met and had sex. For many young Italians prostitution was a temporary expedient, a rite of passage into city life and a way to satisfy their financial and sexual needs. Some homosexual men would later remember these sexual experiences with young hustlers as pleasant, adventurous and, at times, genuinely emotional. Nonetheless, cruising and picking up young male prostitutes could also entail blackmail and violence. This study focuses indeed on scandals and murders that dotted the history of male prostitution in Italy and on the discursive explosion that these events engendered. Italian media promoted sexual panics and favored the outbreaks of political anti-homosexual persecutions, while at the same time creating a discursive arena where insurgent homosexualities could emerge through self-identification and mutual solidarity. By exploring the contours of sexual citizenship in post-Fascist Italy, this work argues that homosexuals were “partial citizens” denied full access to an array of social and political rights. The Italian Homosexual Front, founded in 1971, actively sought to change these conditions, presenting a new image of homosexuals as young, proud, and able to cultivate significant affective relationships. In so doing, it broke the metonymic relationship between homosexuality and male prostitution, setting out to “normalize” homosexuality and challenge the status of homosexuals as sexual pariahs and partial citizens.