Anarcho-Bolshevik

Anarcho-Bolshevik

Although many of us (correctly) associate fascism with heterosexism, there is surprisingly little discussion on how Fascist Italy in particular oppressed queer folks, and if you resort to English Wikipedia you’ll find no more than a few paragraphs on the topic. Perhaps you assume that Fascist Italy pursued a campaign à la Third Reich. While your imagination is not terribly far from the truth, it isn’t perfectly accurate either.

Fascist Italy’s oppression of the LGBT+ community differed in some respects from the Third Reich’s and resulted in fewer deaths, but that hardly makes the oppression that gay Italians suffered any less serious or less worthy of remembrance either. Quoting Michael R. Ebner’s The Persecution of Homosexual Men under Fascism, in Gender, Family and Sexuality: The Private Sphere in Italy, 1860–1945:

Unlike Nazi Germany, where explicitly anti‐homosexual legislation and propaganda drove brutal repression, Fascist Italy did not specifically proscribe homosexuality in its legal codes or focus on anti‐homosexual themes in speeches and other official propaganda. Neither the régime’s penal code, the so‐called Rocco Code (1930), nor its public security laws (the 1926/1930 Testo Unico per la Pubblica Sicurezza) directly named same‐sex sex acts as crimes or threats to public security.

However, Fascism was definitely hostile to homosexuality. Vincenzo Manzini, a prominent jurist of the era, noted that the Fascist squads who helped bring Mussolini to power attacked homosexuals, corroborating this claim with a story about a group of ‘pederasts’ that regularly socialised at one another’s homes in Venice.

‘Around 1925’, he recalled, ‘the squadre d’azione (action squads) violently rooted out those degenerates and forced the police to take action’. More significantly, though, the Fascist régime’s legislators devoted significant time and attention to developing a strategy for eradicating homosexuality from Italian national life.

It is quite challenging to accurately estimate how many gay men and suspected homosexuals Fascist Italy directly persecuted. The only thing that we can say with certainty is that the total number could not have been smaller than one thousand:

Though difficult to ascertain, the total number of homosexual victims of Fascism was at least several thousand, a hypothesis born out by an itemisation and partial enumeration of the régime’s techniques of repression. […] From 1927 to 1939, the Bolletino della Scuola di polizia scientifica published a yearly breakdown of all case files [which] show [that] over a thousand homosexuals were registered by the Scuola from 1927 to 1939. This number does not include the years 1940–3, and neither does it account for Roman homosexuals arrested but not studied by the Scuola.

As elsewhere in Europe, gay men were frequently disparaged as ‘pederasts’, though the author has found little evidence that that was actually the case. Added to this were other stereotypes:

At the local level, police believed that homosexuals were inherently criminal. If some homosexuals were prostitutes or vagabonds, then all of them were. Stereotypes and a visceral disgust for the behaviour, appearance and mannerisms of homosexual men drove police commissioners to persecute them.

A closer examination of investigations leading to confino politico sentences demonstrates how these motives — stereotypes and prejudice — drove repression at the local level, while the régime’s ideological or programmatic rationale — the improvement of the Italian national stock — provided a universal and specifically Fascist justification.

[…]

Modesti reported that some of these men engaged in prostitution and extortion, while many others were only tangentially linked to Eugenio and Elio’s alleged criminal underworld. One public security concern posed by homosexuals, according to Modesti, was their frequent unemployment and inherent laziness.

Moreover, he reported, many ‘pederasts’ had sex with men of more ‘elevated social classes’ for the purpose of material gain. This type of relationship inevitably led to ‘sadism, the corruption of minors, libidinous acts, extortion, robbery [and] homicide’. As evidence he offered the example of a Swiss professor who had been murdered in Florence during the summer of 1934.

Modesti also stressed the young age of some Florentine homosexuals, referring to them generally as ‘very young’, even though only a few were under the age of 20. Elsewhere in Italy, police voiced similar concerns. Though minors were involved in a few isolated cases, police officials were largely concerned with young men.

Even gay men who willingly served the neopatriarchy (such as Ernst Röhm) were not immune to heterosexist persecution:

Indeed, though a few of the 30 men investigated were unemployed and allegedly prostituted themselves, most were lower‐middle to middle‐class professionals, employed as white‐collar workers, antique dealers, salesmen, shopkeepers, artists and draftsmen, or in other professions or trades. One was a Greek teacher, one a successful merchant, and another a wealthy property owner. Many belonged to the Fascist Party, and most were held to be ‘favourable to the Régime’.

[…]

The ‘most dangerous’ of the group was a 22‐year‐old unemployed electrician named Giovanni, who was married with two young children. Though he did not belong to the party, Giovanni had fought as a volunteer Blackshirt (a member of the Fascist militia) in Ethiopia. The danger posed by Giovanni, according to the Florentine police commissioner, was evidenced by his public behaviour and the lurid details of his sex life.

The penalties for gay men ranged from surveillance (thus inhibiting their sex lives), to cavity searches, to penal labor, or—keeping in with the bourgeois state’s eugenic policies—to confinement, specifically in work houses, hospitals, asyla, colonies, or elsewhat:

Fascist […] executive provincial commissions […] regularly condemned so‐called ‘pederasts’ to ‘common police confinement’ (confino comune), exiling them to small villages in the Italian south or interning them on island ‘confinement’ colonies for a renewable period of one to five years. No evidence of wrongdoing was required, and the accused was granted no defence.

[…]

Mussolini and Bocchini also determined whether an individual belonged in confino comune, for common ‘criminals’, or confino politico, for behaviour the régime deemed inimical to its political power or key initiatives. During the period 1936–9, approximately 100 men were deported to political confinement for ‘pederasty’.

Like the approximately 15,000 other Italians who shared their fate over the course of the régime, including many of Italy’s most militant anti‐Fascists, these men were deported to small villages and island ‘political’ colonies in southern Italy.

The small number of homosexuals sent to political confinement should not be interpreted as a sign of limited repression. The régime used confino politico selectively, and even a small presence of a political or social group often indicated large‐scale repression via other practices and institutions.

For example, the provincial commissions also inflicted noncustodial police sanctions such as ammonizione — a type of probation which required an individual to adhere to a curfew, to report to the police every morning, and to not arouse ‘suspicion’ — and diffida, a warning that an individual was under investigation. The number of individuals subjected to these measures for any specific reason is unknown, but the commissions assigned them more frequently than confino.

Police in Fascist Italy also had the authority to arrest, question, incarcerate and otherwise do whatever they wanted with an individual. In 1939 in Catania, a Sicilian provincial capital south of Mount Etna, the local police commissioner reported to Rome that in recent years he had stepped up police surveillance on cafés, dance halls, seaside and mountain resorts, and other public areas where homosexuals gathered.

His agents regularly arrested and detained (fermi per misure di sicurezza) suspected ‘pederasts’, and once in custody, they were interrogated and often subjected to humiliating anal examinations (visite sanitarie) to determine whether or not they had engaged in ‘passive pederasty’, or ‘anal coitus’. These ‘medical examinations’ were not unique to Catania.

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

As for how many homosexuals that the Italian Fascists killed, this is very difficult to answer, and the author does not propose any quantities; we will probably never know for sure. Nonetheless, I myself suspect that it was in the dozens (if not hundreds) due to police violence, extrastate violence, or the terrible living conditions in the prisons and penal colonies:

Life in the island confino colonies, especially on the Tremiti islands, was characterised by poor nutrition, unsanitary living conditions and monotony. Fresh water transported from the mainland had to be rationed to the detainees, and infectious diseases, malnutrition, dehydration and chronic exhaustion were common.

How Fascist Italy oppressed gay men

How Fascist Italy oppressed gay men