untitled design

Let’s take the scene

This article is published in number 44 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until November 2, 2021

We’ve been living on anniversaries for a very long time. We live on anniversaries (I’m talking about those born in the twentieth century, so to speak; the others don’t, or not) since we no longer see the future, since we still look with the body and nervous system forward and the head and heart rotated. backwards. Anniversaries allow us to punctuate time by stretching it like a rubber band that finds a thumbtack to hook onto. Just find a date backwards and unroll the ribbon and fall in love with what we find inside grandma’s trunks (digital generally).

We camp on anniversaries because most of the Italian population is – or will soon be – old or very old, with no possibility of reversing the curve. But we also live on anniversaries because things (whether they are material or, almost always, immaterial) have strange powers. And if things, or stories, were really important (even if small in the so-called Official History), they hide within themselves the strength to unleash unexpected wonders in the present and in the future, just like certain stones you touch inside Mayan temples forgotten by centuries (yes, we are tamarri) and that open wide by letting you go out Entity that we didn’t even know they were there. At that point, the anniversary rubber band no longer has the function of an indulgent retromania, but that of a psychomagic gesture of invocation of sensational irruptions into reality. A great Italian music producer, indeed the greatest, Mauro Malavasi, always said that in the musical concept of “evergreen” (or of the immortal hit, of the classicon) there was always hidden a mysterious property, which was to reactivate it as new, very powerful therefore, every time she clung to listen to him. “Evergreen” in fact, as in botany.

Here, the magazine Out! that a group of militants began publishing in Turin in September 1971 following an incredible medical diagnosis of homosexuality as a disease drawn up by a local doctor, belongs to this category. Out! it wasn’t just a magazine. It was born from the association of the same name, the Italian Revolutionary Homosexual United Front, founded by the bookseller Angelo Pezzana. The acronym was a clear reference to the FHAR French (Homosexual Revolutionary Action Front) and the expression that later became commonly used coming out, in addition to the American magazine Out, which became very glossy over the years. No, there were not only men (among whom Mario Mieli also orbited, to say): just think that the movement also merged Homosexual Liberation Front (FLO) founded in the same year by the mathematician Mariasilvia Spolato.

The magazine basically screamed two things. The first: Enough! Enough with the psychic and physical pain inflicted in a gratuitous and ignorant way, enough with the ferocious repression of the freedom to choose one’s sexual orientation, enough with the punches and kicks during the demonstrations for the vindication of these denied rights, and even with prison. And then, precisely: Out! Out as an injunction to the courage to be free, to go out into the open and face uncovered, with your head held high, to ask not only for freedom for yourself (and for the various categories of genre, gradually sifted through and very fragmented in the present) but for everyone. It was the early seventies and asking for a revolution meant asking for a revolution, anyway. Pezzana wrote in the editorial of the first issue: «The homosexual enters the scene as a protagonist for the first time. He personally manages his story. The great awakening has begun. It was up to others before us, Jews, blacks (remember?), Now it’s up to us. And the awakening will be immediate, courageous, beautiful ».

The numbers that followed represent a substantially unmatched editorial masterpiece of political culture, cultural criticism, “detournant” use of images, extraordinary use of humor and satirical language – and of the cartoon, with an ingenious choice – and the overturning of regional insults (checca, busone, buliccio, friariello, buco, etc.) in pointed instruments against those who threw them at. From the fourteenth issue (after a formidable Fuori Donna entirely dedicated to the lesbian question) there is a mutation, because it is part of the association OUT – with Pezzana in the lead – he joins the Radical Party and the music changes, so much so that Mieli leaves. Yes, because in the meantime what had been the strength and intuition of a gang of a few boys from Turin and its surroundings had become a national reality: the network of militant circles spontaneously spread throughout Italy, made up of people who said “Enough!” and “Out!”, in fact.

It was discovered, look a bit, that there were many who wanted it. The magazine was on newsstands, so to speak. The split was very radical – in fact – until the birth of an autonomous Front, in Milan, linked to the extra-parliamentary left, and slowly atomized until its dissolution in 1982 (for those interested in learning more, we recommend the tome When we were fags: homosexuals in the Italy of the past, by Andrea Pini, il Saggiatore, 2011). When three years ago the undersigned and the formidable duo of contemporary art curators Francesco Urbano Ragazzi discovered we had a boundless love for this crazy publishing story, we went to Turin to visit the archives (celebrated in an exhibition at the Polo del ‘900, always in Turin, which has just ended) and we threw ourselves into this mass of paper, scanning everything. The 500-page “bombardone” that came out of it – thanks to Nero Editions and the essential contribution of Levi’s (always alongside LGBT militancy … who naturally wore skin on the skin) – is not for any reason a anthological object of the first thirteen legendary issues of Out!.

It is a bomb-paper (as per the cover) ready to re-ignite to request not only the rights that are missing (adoption in the first place, aspects related to inheritance, etc.), but the return of a desire for radical transformation of collective life that know how to respect all the areas that want to live “outside”: outside the perimeter of the obsessive measurement of digital traceability behaviors, to name one; or beyond what is becoming a soporific use of the “homosexual” (in the words of that Turin doctor of 1971) in the prime-time television delusions that have been going on for a long time, a false inclusion that is instead circus / zoo / obligatory quota / queernorm . In short, there are today – and in front of us – many others “Out!” stop!” to scream out loud, and we believe that this is very clear to children born from 2000 onwards.

To subscribe to Vanity Fair, click here.

You may also like

Get the latest

Stay Informed: Get the Latest Updates and Insights

 

Most popular