The idea for my research on Fuori! (Italian United Homosexual Revolutionary Front) was born from years of acquaintance with Angelo Pezzana in Turin. Fuori! would not have existed without him, and for this reason, the seven interviews on Fuori! (including this one, as well as those with Maurizio Gelatti, Vice President of the Fondazione Angelo Pezzana-Fuori!, Maurizio Cagliuso, Archivist and Librarian of the Fondazione Angelo Pezzana-Fuori!, and Fuori! activists, Enzo Cucco, Anna Cuculo, Vera Fraboni and Riccardo Rosso), collected during the summer of 2024 thanks to a Scholarship Catalyst Program grant from Texas Tech University, are to be considered dedicated to him and his work, his method, as well as his ability to implement societal changes.
I met Angelo Pezzana during my high school years when I was around 17 years old, and I maintained a long acquaintance with him, which subsequently saw him informed about many of my academic projects. In Turin, he was a guiding figure, especially for my generation that grew up here between the ‘70s and ‘90s, for those of us inclined towards literary or artistic research, and who did not want to fit into the entrepreneurial life of the city. Seeing him in action, emerging as a charismatic figure from his ascetic desk at the Luxemburg Bookshop, where he always received me to talk about everything and discuss ideas and projects, has reinforced in me a method of reflection, research, and observation of the world. I have never considered Angelo Pezzana solely as an activist, but above all as an intellectual who continuously recreated his image and communicated rigor, discipline, and determination in each of his public endeavors.
Angelo Pezzana founded Fuori!, the first Italian gay movement, in 1971. In 1977, he individually demonstrated in Moscow for Soviet film director Sergei Parajanov, who was imprisoned for being homosexual. This created a media sensation and highlighted the impact of spontaneous and individual activism. In Turin, Pezzana owned the Hellas Bookstore (founded in 1963), and later the Luxemburg Bookstore (from 1975), which was visited by renowned contemporary intellectuals such as James Baldwin, Allen Ginsberg, Fernanda Pivano, and Gore Vidal. Angelo Pezzana began working with the parliamentary group of the Radical Party in the 1976 elections. In 2001, he founded the online newspaper Informazione corretta. He collaborated with the newspaper Libero from 2003 to 2010 as head of the Israel and Middle East section. In 1988, he co-founded the Salone del Libro di Torino with Guido Accornero. These experiences converged in his autobiography Dentro & Fuori: Una autobiografia omosessuale (1996), followed by Un omosessuale normale (2011). He founded the Fondazione Sandro Penna-Fuori!, that became the Fondazione Angelo Pezzana-Fuori! in 2024.
Thank you, Angelo, for this interview. Your work as an LGBT activist has interested all of us who have met you over the years in Turin, especially in the late ‘90s. For this interview, I have chosen to focus mainly on the Fuori! movement and the development of LGBT activism that you started and shaped in Italy. The magazine Fuori! also had an educational purpose within the social context of ‘70s Italy. How did the life experiences shared in the magazine contribute to a greater awareness of identity in Italy?
We adopted a technique from our feminist friends who engaged in shared self-awareness sessions. Each person told their own story, and we had meetings where we were not seeking ideologies but trying to see if the story of the person sitting next to us had something in common with my own, and for this reason we practiced self-awareness. We could also cite books from the ‘60s and ‘70s, all focused on the change that needed to happen regarding what was considered normal because at that time, we were not even worthy of being called “homosexuals” but “abnormal,” with all the negative terms that came with this. We, on the other hand, wanted to be called what we were, that is, “homosexuals,” who could not say it openly because in those years homosexuals were hiding, some more than others. This was happening to a lesser degree to me, because all together, since 1963, when I started as a bookseller and opened a small bookstore called Hellas in the center of Turin, I worked independently and did not have to report to anyone. To me, being homosexual was no longer a barrier in society or among the people who knew me because their response was, “Pezzana is homosexual, we know it, but for him it seems normal.” Actually, it was normal because normality was still defined by the heterosexual family and everything that heterosexuality entailed as the norm.
In these meetings, almost all the participants were schoolteachers, and not always specific groups. There could be an industrialist as well as a shop assistant. Personal stories were at the center of our meetings. On one occasion, two people came and immediately declared, “We are two FIAT workers.” The one who spoke, more alert, did not feel uncomfortable. They both said, “All the names of these scholars that you have mentioned so far, we have never read any of them. My partner (let’s call him Mario for ease) is very shy and is always afraid that something will happen to him, so I am sorry, but we cannot quote anyone. We are here to listen. We are very interested because we work at FIAT, an environment where it is difficult to address topics that are not related to the work we do.”
For a while, things went on like this, until one day they arrived and said, “We have more or less understood the things that you are saying, but we no longer need them. We wanted to say goodbye because our work is hard, so we might go for a walk instead of coming here to discuss ourselves. However, I wanted to tell you about something that happened to Mario and was caused by me. We were at Porta Nuova, in the station – a place where we went to find love for the evening, a practice known as “battere” [cruising]. Mario and I were a couple, so we did not go there for sex but because we could meet other friends of ours. At one point, I told Mario, ‘Go ahead, my shoe is untied, and I am afraid of stepping on it and falling; go, then, I will call you.’ I knelt, pretended to fix my shoe, then looked up and said, ‘Mario,’ I called him, ‘Mario.’ He turned around a few meters away, and I shouted, ‘Cupiu!’” – Every Italian region had a local name to define homosexuals. In Turin, there was ‘cupio,’ pronounced as in the Piedmontese dialect, cupiu. – “Mario was stunned at that moment and could not speak. Then, after a while, I stood up and I saw him coming towards me, he hugged me and said, ‘You saved me by calling me cupiu in front of everyone.’ Naturally, someone laughed, and others elbowed each other, saying, ‘Look at what those two are saying.’ However, I managed to transform that work into nothing and, from that moment on, Mario was no longer afraid of being a homosexual, even at work. Since then, instead of being ridiculed, as it might have happened, we were seen as courageous individuals, our work continued and was respected by our fellow workers at FIAT.” This example illustrates what occurred in our meetings: there were no rules, but there was a genuine openness about what was happening.
So, his partner provided a psychological boost.
No psychologist, no doctor, nothing from any traditional profession, but rather the search for something that could liberate us from something we had yet to fully understand as our own.
The Fuori! movement was undoubtedly significant when you created it with the group associated with you. Over the years, Fuori! has created the idea of a community of people who were interested in enhancing the social and cultural landscape in Italy. How did the existence of a community and Fuori! have contributed to the development of identity awareness?
When someone says, “We homosexuals,” it must be said that in general everyone lived their lives differently but we had some common moments, so if someone went on a train and read a book with a title that could make it clear that they were homosexuals, they kept it with the cover turned backwards; in short, all things that classified a type of loneliness rather than an interest. Because if you read a book about traveling in South America and perhaps your neighbor commented, “This is interesting, can I take a look?” “Please, go ahead”; instead, we had stories that imposed loneliness when you faced them, and this prevented us from being “normal.”
On the contrary, it was helpful to face changes with behaviors that had to belong to everyone, to understand how we had to do things and revolutionize society in general, not so much through violent and revolutionary actions. We had to make a revolution even when we chose the name Fuori!. We wondered what the letter R meant, because the others were easy to explain, but what was the R? We all said that the R stood for “Revolution,” but there was revolution and revolution, and we wanted and needed a change in society that was non-violent and modernization as well. We wanted to be ourselves, like those who understood that we were part of a change, not only ours, but also that of women and here we already had the examples of feminists.
Then, through the status of the Radical Party, Marco Pannella made it clear that we had to change many wrong traditions. We could integrate exactly on the same basis as everyone else, so there was no longer a divide between heterosexuals and homosexuals, but rather people wanting to live in a more open society. This was the reason we became affiliated with the Radical Party after two years and suddenly found ourselves in its numerous offices where we could operate. During that period, we did not have the resources available today, but we relied on leaflets and their distribution. It was a different world back then but being with others helped us understand certain terms such as “family,” to which we had given the responsibility and blame for so many family sorrows. It is obvious that having to hide one’s sexuality, family relationships are always complicated and difficult. We understood that we needed to redefine the word “normality” that was no longer about the sexuality of those who oppressed us but was simply a term that we needed to modernize. This was helpful because we did it in a “normal” manner and we were able to give value to the word itself.
The idiomatic expression “coming out” and the term “out” are taken from the United States. What are your thoughts on this influence and terminology?
Indeed, this is our grammatical origin that was the foundation of the word for our movement. Fuori! stems from “coming out” so that you are no longer the one suffering for yourself because you cannot be “normal” and for this reason you continue to live a hidden life. Instead, you have to change, and how? When we launched issue number zero of Fuori!, released in a thousand copies before being available at the newsstands, we used as image the definition reminiscent of any product that, in comparison to others, was better because one could understand how genuine, true and good it was. We thought Fuori! would convey the message: come out of the shadows because if you remain hidden, you cannot make yourself known to others who might listen to you, and this is what we later discovered to be true. This was the most important aspect that helped us, but not for “R” as “Revolution,” but change.
Now Fuori! has become the Fondazione Angelo Pezzana-Fuori!. Your activism, determined, organized, and with such a courageous focus, has always involved you personally, blending private and public. What were your inspirations in creating the movement, the magazine, and choosing forms of activism such as the individual and spontaneous demonstrations that you and Enzo Francone carried out in Tehran (Enzo Francone in 1979) and Moscow (you in 1977; Enzo Francone in 1980) with great courage?
In a meeting we had in Manchester, England, to give an international, not just national, demonstration of what needed to be done to change history, the situation around Sergei Parajanov, a Russian-Soviet film director, turned out: he was imprisoned and condemned for several years because he was homosexual. He had nothing against the Soviet government. He even made films that I would not want to define as religious yet at the same time it is difficult to define them; they were not ideological, so he was not an enemy. He simply did not adhere to the Marxist obligations imposed on writers and filmmakers. This example was brought up to involve all the participants, as we were about fifteen European movements, holding a demonstration in Red Square to demand the release of this gentle director who was not revolutionary at all but simply “different.”
We decided to carry out this initiative. I went to a tourist agency run by the Communist Party in Turin because obviously we wanted to go without proclaiming our true reason for traveling, also so that we could join an eventual tourist group, and I was able to sign up. We expected everyone to do the same in their own country, but after seeing closely what was really happening, everyone except me declined, saying, “I cannot, I already have a commitment,” because it was bad to say, “I am afraid to go there because I might end up in Siberia.” However, I was in a situation that allowed me to take risks because I was part of Marco Pannella’s Radical Parliamentary Group, and I had the support of someone like him, who would have intervened strongly if anything happened to me.
And this is how it went. At that time, I was friends with Piero Ostellino, a correspondent for the Corriere della Sera. I called him to ask if he could provide me with the addresses of other correspondents willing to be interviewed by me. I also wanted to see how Sakharov, a very famous scholar, lived, as he was held almost in a prison in his own home.
We talked for almost an hour on the phone. At some point, he said to me, “What a mistake I made. Everything we said to each other has already been recorded because in Moscow there is a building where all foreign correspondents are obliged to have their office, their lounge, their room for work. Everything that we say and hear has already been recorded; they already know everything that is coming.” And I said, “I am here now and there is absolutely no way I can go back.” I left with them, and I took a towel with me, and then I also took a pen that was not supposed to look like a marker because otherwise they would have confiscated it. It was a rather thick pen for writing, and I also had a travel towel with me. Once in Moscow, everyone on my trip headed to their hotel, I was detained, and they even squeezed my toothpaste to check if it contained something explosive. Once they saw that I had nothing with me, they took me to the hotel.
I have never taken part in this week-long tourist trip but in the meantime I went to visit Sakharov even though it was very complicated. However, I always had a car with two Soviet guards, those with a long black leather coat, almost down to their feet, that was just scary to look at. But I stayed until I invited the foreign journalists, then I got ready to go to Red Square because my hotel was right there. At that moment, I came down from my room with the towel, with the words “Enough with Article 121” written in English. While they were about to take me, to prevent me from going to the demonstration, there was an American journalist and photographer, and she had a photo taken. That is the only photo that we managed to get, which she then sent to her newspaper, The New York Times, and then also appeared in other non-Soviet newspapers.
I was arrested and taken to the Lubyanka Building in the center of Moscow, where those interrogated were sentenced. It was a huge room: I was sitting on one side, then there was a space and a very long table. There was a girl next to me: she was about twenty years old, and she translated what was said to me. When she saw me, she whispered, “Thank you so much, because I have several friends who are gay,” – we were already using the word gay back then – “for what you are doing, we all thank you very much.” Then came the questions. The first, that interested them the most, was, “You must give us the list of all the homosexuals you have seen in Moscow since you have been here.” I replied, “I did not meet anyone. The only person I went to see was this wonderful scientist. I do not know anyone.” Then, they said, “Do you know that with the action you have taken, you will never be able to set foot in the Soviet Union again?”
In response, I used a bit of irony when facing some very serious situations. I replied, “No, instead I will be able to come again when the Soviet Union is truly a Socialist country,” since they were using the term Socialist to mean Communist. I said, “I think that I will return,” but I never did. Then, there was a literary weekly that evidently could afford to say things in a way that, if someone understood the content well, what happened on that trip would have been clear. While criticizing everything I did, at some point they attacked the Italian Parliament, “The Italian Parliament also lashed out against us: they said that if the President of the Radical Party finds out that something can happen to Angelo Pezzana, he will unleash the entire Italian Parliament against the Soviet Union.” It was stated openly, as if it was a defense of the Soviet Union, but between the lines, it was clear that the Soviet Union, faced with a strong and harsh attack from Pannella, preferred to send me back to Italy and close the matter, so it worked out well for me. I never held it against anyone that I went alone because I had enormous support from Pannella.
In your opinion, does the type of first-person activism like the one you took part in still exist, or was it been replaced by advocacy, based for instance, on financial contributions to associations such as HRC (Human Rights Campaign) in the United States, that operate, I believe, with lawyers and through militancy?
I do not want to be too blunt, but I believe that this approach was never established in Italy because here there were no salaries, and clearly being part of a movement was the result of a belief, without having the economic aspect as an objective.
This partially happened with UNAR (National Anti-Racial Discrimination Office), that financed an association and a structure of the Italian government: one could leave part of their property to them and receive funds. This is equivalent of saying that one was controlled but given money in exchange. I think that this is the only attempt, and it worked with five or six structures. They asked us too, and I refused because it did not seem logical to me.
However, any type of work and especially what has been a movement like Fuori! must respond to a need for contents. For this reason, we can create an archive without asking who we are doing it for, but then everything becomes much more confusing.
In this context, I believe that an archive makes sense when we establish rules for its structure. So, if I write a thesis and establish with my professor what it can be, then I must have an archive that produces and can be accessible to the public so that a student has all the assistance possible to complete a university degree. An archive must help understand history and, therefore, must also help to set up the research and the appropriate sources. Ultimately, it is a job that requires professionalism and must address how to classify books: until a few years ago, this was done by the author’s name, with the title, and not entirely by subject. Actually, this method was not useful to anyone because if I want to do a thesis on a specific topic, I need to request relevant materials on this subject from an Archive, in Turin, Bologna, or Rome, to check if there are materials on that topic. Let’s draw a comparison. How did homosexuals live under Fascism in Italy? This is a specific topic. However, if I classify this topic under “Mario Rossi” and then by the title of a volume, I cannot identify the books that interest me for my thesis. This results in wasted years for those who carried out this research that has never been used by anyone.
Instead, we have understood that the archive must be based on content and not on names or titles that are not useful. We implemented this after years of attempts and work, that gave a result still needing change and improvement up to 90%. We have yet to make this change.
A month ago, they asked me if I agreed to establish the Fondazione Angelo Pezzana-Fuori!, which I had never done before because, according to the law, until a few years ago, a deposit of almost always hundreds of thousands of euros was required. Naturally, I have never had such sums, but in the last years the government has established that with 30,000 euros, a foundation can be created. However, there must a responsible party in charge, contributing funds, and from there, all connections that open possibilities to involve, for example, universities, banks, and large companies that have existing products and then want to maintain a good image by making research and capital available. However, they also require waiting because there are also necessary bureaucratic steps to take: these are not wrong, but I believe that we will still need a few months to make the Foundation functional, truly operational, to give results and be capable of providing students from America, England, or elsewhere with the tools to write a thesis in a functional environment. This is what the Foundation aims to signify in the future.
I would have preferred not to leave my name attached to these initiatives because I have never felt like a leader: therefore, this has always bothered me. I have always had friends with whom I collaborated or held discussions in friendly settings. Now, having something with my name on it makes me a little uneasy because the foundations of the past, which I only knew through transmitted information, seemed dedicated solely to political or labor union figures and did not involve me.
What do you think of the failure of the Zan legislative decree, approved first by the Chamber in 2020 and then rejected by the Senate in 2021?
A premise is that when the law that Zan proposed was rejected in the Senate, there were votes from the government but also from the opposition, because otherwise it would not have been this well-known. I did not agree, also because it contained chapters that went in the direction, for instance, of taking immediately two- or three-year-old boys who, if caught by their family members playing with dolls – while instead there were little girls playing football – to change sexes. This was the law of this figure. I do not want to bring up some slightly exaggerated name as an insult, but I think that it is madness: it reminds me of Judith Butler who I have followed for many years and has done some disquieting things.
However, Zan went to the borders in Gaza, after the massacre of October 7, 2023, saying he was showing his solidarity with Hamas and therefore against Israel. A politician who goes where homosexuals are thrown down from the ninth floor of the tallest buildings and brings the utmost solidarity from an Italian homosexual forces me to say in a total, harsh manner that I will never change my opinion. Terrorism is not something that you must accept, because if you accept terrorism and live with it as if it were an acceptable position, what you are doing is simply the ruin of any ideal. So, if someone comes to us and says, “We want to be in solidarity with criminals,” I will not accept it, it will be written, and anyone who thinks like this will not be part of this Foundation of ours.
How do you think this organization, Fondazione Angelo Pezzana-Fuori!, could contribute to passing laws in favor of LGBT rights in Italy?
I believe the right path to follow is one where no one is more or less than others. Hence, differences should not depend on sexuality. With Renzi, the law on civil unions, not marriage, was passed: while it is a matter of terminology, if you read it, it has many similarities with marriage; it is not crucial that it is called a “union.” This law created the acceptance of families constituted by only men or only women. Now, the conversation includes children and those who could not have them. So, there were foster care structures. Altogether, in many countries including the United States, there are women who legally carry a husband’s child because a wife cannot procreate. Everything is done according to the law, and I do not see a big difference if it is done without exploiting poverty, which would have been horrible and probably has happened.
In terms of essential rights, what is the difference between a democratic country and one that is not?
I will give you a very current example, with the war that Israel is forced to face with Gaza. A soldier died. Netanyahu saw that this soldier, who was killed, already was the official and recognized companion to another one who had not yet been called up to serve in Gaza. What did he do? He went to the Knesset, the Parliament, and asked to give immediately the definition of widower to his companion X, the one who was killed in Gaza, so that he had all the securities of a widow or a widower. The status of widower or widow must be the same no matter how the couples are composed. Israel is the only country in the world where a same-sex couple, if one of the partners dies in war, has an official status of widow or widower.
Do you think there is a possibility of pro-LGBT legislation in Italy in the future?
No, because it seems to me that it makes the concept of being LGBT confusing. Now we use a phrase that has played an important role for understanding, speaking, and writing about these issues but sometimes it does not clarify. What does LGBT mean?
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender.
Of course, this is correct, but what is the difference with those who are instead heterosexual? Here, Judith Butler’s ideas come into play again, but they no longer provide any definition; it is all fluid, the moment people start a family.
However, I always read about fluidity, which in my opinion leads to total confusion because you no longer understand what you are or what you want, except when it comes to having sex: then, if you like men and you are a man, you are gay; if you are a woman and like women, you are a lesbian. This was clear, but now it is no longer clear, thus we live in a situation of sexual confusion that will prevent us from understanding anything to live better.
A law that is not clear, in my opinion, is harmful. Judith Butler’s way of reasoning is that of no longer having anything clear, starting from grammar, including schwa. This nonsense has confused things so much that the problem will not only never be solved but its essence will never be understood. For example, a few months ago, I changed the lock on our headquarters because it is not true that everyone can come there, while maybe they are going to Gaza to show solidarity to a group of terrorists committing monstrous acts like those on October 7.
Meanwhile, nothing is happening globally; if Israel is involved, a “bomb” explodes there. In the meanwhile, Putin has been torturing a country like Ukraine for about two years, and is anyone complaining? But if Israel is involved, then it is all Israel’s fault. This issue inevitably surfaces, even if you do not want to bring it up.
Do you think that a pro-LGBT legislation in Italy will happen?
But I do not want legislation that benefits only some people. We must have the same legislation for everyone, which is different.
This is important.
This came out well because it is exactly what I believe.
Angelo, thank you for this interview. I want you to know that there is gratitude for your activism and how you have dedicated your life to the improvement of society.
You are very kind. I thank you and am happy that you tell me this because I know you are a down-to-earth person. But we are in a moment where, if everything is fluid, it is obvious that no one will understand anything anymore.
Photo Credits © Courtesy of the Fondazione Angelo Pezzana-Fuori! Archives
Cover photograph: Angelo Pezzana 2024 © Fin Serck–Hanssen
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