PIER PAOLO PASOLINI (1922–1975) did not actively do much for gay rights in Italy, and yet he contributed to progress inadvertently by appearing in headlines over and over again as the country’s most controversial gay person.
One reason that he didn’t do much for gay rights is that he was personally homophobic. He saw his sexual orientation as a sin, and over the years he used various pejoratives to refer to it, such as “secret and guilt-ridden,” “devil,” “terrible,” and “degrading.” Tonuti, his second lover, denied that Pasolini was gay. Even Pasolini denied his orientation in a sense. At one point he wrote: “My homosexuality … had nothing to do with me. … I always saw it as something next to me, like an enemy, never feeling it inside me.” At times, he struggled to free himself of homophobia, but never overcame it, achieving, for a while, only some comfort with hired sex.
In his youth, Pasolini fixated on a particular sexual type and romanticized his sex partners by thinking of sex as a connection with a divine, life-giving source. As he grew older, he realized that this obsession had become a troublesome psychological complex. With age, money, and fame, sex with hustlers was strictly a commercial transaction. The boys that he had once thought of as his poor brothers had transmogrified into mercenary, violent thugs that he hated.
Another way in which Pasolini did not help gay rights was by joining the wrong political party. The Radical Party and fuori were pro-gay, but Pasolini opposed them in favor of the PCI (Il Partito Comunista Italiano), because he was more interested in class struggle than individual liberation, more concerned about the common people, especially the sub-proletariat, than about gay people as a sub-class. In his mind, the underclass was morally superior to the bourgeoisie because they were not materialistic and self-righteous like the Christian Democrats. Moreover, he did not consider his sexual orientation to be worthy of political action.
Yet another way that Pasolini failed to help gay rights was by seeing the tolerance of the new consumer society as false, as tolerance in name only, not a sincere sympathy for difference. He called it “the mask of the worst repression.” His negativity at that point in life kept him from admitting that tolerance, no matter how lukewarm, was always better than intolerance, and his idea that young males were somehow distressed by sexual permissiveness was simply preposterous. For his own part, he felt that sex had been performed “against social duty,” not out of a sense of freedom, and he apparently could not reprogram himself to enjoy it without this baggage.
In spite of himself, however, Pasolini helped gay rights to some extent through a negative form of gay desensitization. Accepting that his homosexuality was an open secret, he placed himself in the forefront of Italian consciousness for a very long time. The PCI was discomfited by his membership, because it saw his sexual orientation as decadent and his interest in hustlers as exploitation of the underclass.
In addition, with his films, Pasolini finally caught up with the times. He considered freedom from censorship another form of sexual freedom, and his Trilogy of Life as part of the struggle for sexual liberation. A cock on the screen was a form of liberationist ideology, an attack on repressive bourgeois morality in and of itself.
Furthermore, Pasolini saw the Catholic Church as passé but still pernicious, and he polemicized against it and its harmful influence on the government and the country. “The Church,” he wrote, “is the merciless heart of the State,” an ecclesiastical regime with tentacles in the police, the judiciary, the press, and the educational establishment, all working to preserve the hegemony of the Church and its political ally, the Christian Democrats. Pasolini attacked the papacy itself for its indifference to poverty. In “To a Pope” he blamed the Church for much of the sexual repression and homophobic violence in the country. To Pasolini, church and state, including the Communist Party, were pitted against sexual freedom and individual expression. To realize oneself, one had to ignore them and live outside of them, as do the characters in his early novels.
In the final analysis, Pasolini’s self-hatred, his exploitation of hustlers, and his opposition to pro-gay parties certainly did not help the gay rights movement in Italy. Strangely enough, what did help, in fact, was his repeated exposure, for good or ill, in the Italian media. His controversial films and polemics against the Church landed him in the headlines again and again—but were nothing compared to the one incident that most people know about today, the savage murder of Pasolini in 1975 at the hands of Giuseppe “Pino” Pelosi, a seventeen-year-old hustler. It was an attack so brutal and merciless that Pasolini’s heart burst.
The media coverage was sensational. There were radio and TV reports across the nation on the hour with numerous newspaper accounts to follow. The press left and right rolled out front-page headlines, lurid photos, autopsy reports, and special sections dealing with various aspects of the case. Such a violent end was viewed as the logical culmination of a lifetime of aberrant sexual practices, revenge for the youths he championed yet exploited, the ultimate expiation for what Pasolini himself considered his terrible difference.
And yet, Pasolini’s horrendous death undoubtedly had a positive impact on his reputation as a poet, writer, and director. The media took it as an opportunity to re-appraise his voluminous work, to recalibrate his place in Italian culture. A couple of headlines set the tone: L’Espresso went with “Massacre of a Poet,” Corriere della sera with “The Most Discussed Writer-Director of the Past Twenty Years.” Throngs crowded the Campo dei Fiori for the PCI’s farewell, and the Radical Party and fuori sanctified him as a gay martyr, a secular saint who had died for his people.
Ken Anderson is the author of Sea Change, a novel, which has also been adapted for the stage.
