Love Club: the series written by queer people to tell those who struggle to be themselves

If the towns and cities we grew up in had a **love club **it is likely that we would have felt less alone and more ready to face the world. The love club it is, in fact, an open and free place where everyone has the opportunity to be themselves and not feel wrong or different from others. This is where queer people find their dimensionand this is where the new one starts Prime Video anthology series produced by Tempesta with the support of the Emilia-Romagna Region. It’s about four self-contained episodes who see the club they frequent in the evening as a fil rouge and to which they return whenever they need to feel understood or simply no longer alone. This is where the lives of light (Veronique Charlotte) Tim (Rodrigo Robbiati) Rose (Ester Pantano) e Zhang (Alessio Lu, very good) show themselves to the viewer with an open heart in their excesses and their distortions, united by the need to overcome a fear and to look beyond. While Luz tries to find a way to live her story with Roberta without the fear of losing her independence and while Tim struggles to deal with a borderline disorder that seems to prevent him from continuing to deejay, there are also Rose, who must find the courage to sing on a stage, and Zhang, who dreams of performing at love club as drag queens even if to do so he will have to find the strength to face a violent companion.

Theirs is a life without the frills and frills that the director of Mario Piredda and the creative flair of Silvia Di Gregorio, Bex Gunther and Denise Santoro, who wrote the series together with Veronica Galli and Tommaso Triolo, return in all its innumerable facets: from unbridled sex to the truest friendship, from violence for its own sake to the anxiety that grows from below by giving an unexpected trajectory to an itinerary that we don’t know until the end where it will take us. But why did it take so long before we see a series like in Italy love club, written by four queer authors? «Why queer people don’t give themselves the opportunity: we lived what we told and, in recent years, we have all felt the urgency of a true representation», explains Bex Gunther, taking advantage of the hospitality of MIXUP4PRIDE – the calendar of initiatives that anticipates the 37th MiX International Festival of LGBTQ+ Cinema and Queer Culture scheduled for the end of September -. «Queer people who write have always been there, but this time they were ready to listen to us: iTime has worked in our favour. I just think the time was right,” adds Denise Santoro, wife of Bex.

Can the fact that Milan has been chosen as the background city somehow serve as a model for other smaller realities? According to the authors, the answer is so obvious. «I grew up in the Tuscan province, where I had my Oh mama in Torre del Lago, while I lived my adolescence in Rome, where I had the Killer Cow. I wouldn’t say that Milan is an example: I would rather define it as a city that is more ready at a given moment, being more open and international than the others. «Even in the province there are strong realities that can grow as Milan has grown: the dream would be to have one love club in every province”. adds Silvia Di Gregorio, certain that the oldest stereotype to unhinge is that of gender fluidity. «We often deal with stereotypes because they reassure the average viewer. When we talk about fluidity, however, we are talking about something that cannot be channeled, and people get scared and defensive.” Let’s not forget, however, also the stereotype linked to the physique Denise talks about – “Since I was a little girl I’ve heard myself called a truck driver” – and Bex’s stimulus to confront the preconceptions of those in front of her. All for one goal: conquer your space in the world without being afraid of anything.