This interview is part of a series of seven interviews on Fuori! (including this one, as well as those with Angelo Pezzana, founder of Fuori! (Italian United Homosexual Revolutionary Front), Maurizio Gelatti, Vice President of the Fondazione Angelo Pezzana-Fuori!, Maurizio Cagliuso, Archivist and Librarian of the Fondazione Angelo Pezzana-Fuori!, and the activists of Fuori!, Anna Cuculo, Vera Fraboni and Riccardo Rosso). These interviews were collected during summer 2024 thanks to a Scholarship Catalyst Program grant from Texas Tech University (Office of the President, Office of the Provost, Office of the Vice President for Research) and are to be considered as dedicated to Angelo Pezzana.
Enzo Cucco was an activist of Fuori! since 1976. A Radical Party militant, he was among the founders and an animator of the Fondazione Sandro Penna-Fuori!. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the radical association Certi Diritti and the volunteer Lambda Association in Turin.
Thank you, Enzo, for this interview. In the early ‘70s you participated in Fuori!. What were the most important moments that you want to remember?
Formally, I joined Fuori! in September 1976, but actually, I approached Fuori! at the death of Pier Paolo Pasolini. I was born in 1960 and therefore when Pasolini died I was exactly 15 years old. It was a very strong shock, both from a personal and social point of view, because Pasolini’s death ended up on the front page of all newspapers for weeks. Since I was a young man who read a lot, books, newspapers, I read that Fuori! existed and had a rather particular position on Pasolini’s death. Fuori! has always been strongly against the conjectures and fairy tales that had been made about Pasolini’s death.
Always in November 1975, an article appeared in the Corriere della Sera about Fuori! and mentioned that its main location was Turin at a bookstore called Hellas. So, I started going to this bookshop as a boy who bought books and magazines. Then, there was the 1976 electoral campaign, the historic one where for the first time there were homosexual candidates, and in the month of September, I decided to take the big step and joined Fuori!.
In mid-1977, the first split between the magazine Lambda and Fuori! took place and it carried on. Especially on a personal level, it was an important moment because, as soon as I arrived, I had to choose one part of the movement over the other. At the beginning, I chose to be on the editorial staff of Lambda because it was an information magazine that Francesco Merlini and Laura Fossetti created within Fuori! in 1976. I was part of the editorial team: Felix Cossolo took on an increasingly greater role with progressively critical positions towards Fuori!, until the breakdown over a false interview that he had done with Pannella on homosexuality which was followed by a wide internal debate.
On a personal level, it was very important, but this situation of strong conflict should not be surprising because the history of the homosexual movement, like the history of the women’s movement, is made of clashes, debates, separations; they are commonplace. In the entire 1968, if you look at it historically, there were more trends than participants; there was just a constant heated debate. In this regard, Fuori! was the same, identical, it makes no difference.
The main theme was that Fuori! tied itself to the Radical Party since 1974 and this somehow gradually diversified the movement. A part remained in Fuori!. The movement grew: from 1974 onwards, there was a moment of great growth because the headquarters of the Radical Party also became headquarters of Fuori!. On the other side, there was the so-called group linked to the C.O.M., Milanese Homosexual Collectives of Mario Mieli, that was previously born in Fuori! and then founded C.O.M. in Milan, as well as in other cities. This was a particular reality because it was perhaps what would now be seen as the transfeminist wing of the movement. They used drag a lot in political terms and between 1974 and 1977 the whole part linked to the left was born: at that time, it defined itself as extra-parliamentary, and in reality this was Democrazia Proletaria and Avanguardia Operaia with what remained of Lotta Continua.
The other very important moment, again, since the beginning, was Angelo Pezzana’s demonstration in November 1977 in Moscow for the freedom of homosexuals, in particular for the Russian film director Sergei Parajanov. Pezzana organized everything by himself with the support of us Radicals. There was a big conference on Russian dissent organized by the socialists that resulted in a conference in Venice where Angelo had to talk about Parajanov and the situation of homosexuals in Russia, that was disastrous, dramatic. Together with Carlo Sismondi, I was part of a group of the liaison structure with Angelo in Moscow in regard to his whole story. Not only was there the episode in Moscow, ending up in newspapers all over the world, with the photo that appeared in The New York Times. Angelo was obviously arrested and kicked out of Russia forever. Once he returned to Italy, he continued to interact with the organization committee of the 1977 Biennale, which went down in history as the Biennale del Dissenso, whose director was Carlo Ripa di Meana. The USSR tried in every way to boycott it, and one of the episodes was precisely the attempt to prevent an intervention by Angelo on his recent trip to the USSR and about homosexuals in that country. A demonstration also took place in Venice during the days of the conference. It was a very strong moment because we were in 1977, not many people protested in Moscow about these things. In Moscow, Angelo met Sakharov, and did great liaison work, that was supposed to lead to the demonstration in Red Square: it did not happen because he was stopped by the secret services in the lobby of his hotel just a few seconds before his exit. Obviously, I will let you imagine how we in Turin, Italy, were awake for 72 hours. We followed the case from the point of view of a triangulation between Moscow and Angelo, Turin with Carlo and I, Rome and the parliamentary group with Marco Pannella and Emma Bonino.
Then, there would be many other significant moments, but I will focus on two that have marked the past years: the first one is the last congress in Vico Equense, that took place in January 1982. It was dramatic in many ways because we were at a critical moment in history, understanding that we either had to change or there was something holding back the continuation and even the growth of the movement. We set a goal that was not reached: if by the end of 1982 we had not reached 1,000 members, the national Fuori! would be dispersed. And so it was, because we did not reach 1,000 national members in Fuori! at the national level. Fuori! continued to live and act politically in some groups, particularly in Turin, and with others that continued to carry out initiatives under this acronym, such as demonstrations, conferences, and seminars. We also remained in the Radical Party, but the national group was no longer there and gradually dissipated.
Another significant event that contributed to the death of Fuori! occurred in July 1982 when Angelo Pezzana, Bruno Di Donato, Marco Silombria, together with Sergio Facchetti (who was not part of our Turin group), and I attended a conference of the ILGA (International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association) in Washington, D.C.
Fuori! participated in the founding of ILGA, as you know, initially called IGA, established in Coventry, UK, on August 8, 1978, and also hosted the annual conference in Torre Pellice. We ended up in Torre Pellice because no hotel in Turin was willing to host an international gay convention. There, Mr. Gilli, a Waldensian, told us that he did not care, and agreed to host us as long as we paid for the hotel, and we did, obviously. However, the Catholic priest of Torre Pellice, Don Trombotto, protested by ringing the church bells.
In July 1982, therefore, we participated in the most important ILGA conference in Washington, and we also had a hearing in Parliament. However, the most impactful experience was the beginning of the AIDS crisis, because this is where it all started for us.
We were already aware of AIDS, though it was not called like that at the time, as it is well-known, but the terms chosen by journalists were among the most frightening and discriminating, such as “gay cancer,” “gay plague,” and so on. Our trip to the United States lasted about a month, including ten days in New York, followed by a stay in Washington, D.C., and then a return to New York. In New York, we found ourselves in the middle of an internal controversy within the American homosexual movement. One group believed that the disease was serious and required organized action; in fact, the Gay Men’s Health Crisis was born during those months.
Another group in the movement believed that the disease did not exist and was an invention. One of the most important critics was John Lauritsen, who co-authored an important text for those years, Gay, gay: storia e coscienza Omosessuale, published in Italy by La Salamandra in 1976.
What was your activism during the ‘80s when AIDS became one of the main issues?
The entire ‘80s, from 1982 onward, were characterized by this, because we were aware that it was a real problem. This was the shock that we had in the United States; to understand the situation: saunas, still open in July in New York, were closed in September.
It was very heavy, and we were the first ones to deal with it: this is history, everyone remembers it. It was me, Angelo, and Enzo Francone, who did not travel with us to the United States but was shocked by our stories. Francone produced the very first publication on AIDS with the information that we brought back from the United States. We established relations with the departments of Malattie Infettive in Turin and with the Istituto Superiore di Sanità. Unfortunately, it was not possible to work with the Ministry. There was a lot of our activism in the early years as Fuori!, because there were initially only a few scattered cases but a great deal of political and media debate. We were always in the newspapers in 1984, already in 1983, and especially in 1985. I remember those years as a nightmare because journalists, not knowing what to write, filled the papers with stories about Rock Hudson and other celebrities getting sick and dying.
It was devastating. As the situation worsened, our presence as caregivers became more pronounced because the number of people getting sick increased significantly. During this time, a youth group called Informa Gay emerged in Turin with my help. Within Informa Gay (by 1987-1988), the GSA (Gay-Straight Alliance), Gruppo Solidarietà AIDS, was created, that was run by Bruno Di Donato and me until it was closed, because we decided to close our activities in 1996-1997, with the arrival of a new therapy and when the conditions for HIV-positive individuals changed. In the meanwhile, Bruno died in 1991, along with many of our colleagues and comrades. Bruno’s death was a significant personal moment for me as I experienced it very badly. Bruno Donato was a militant from Rome who turned out to be HIV-positive.
Relations with the Istituto Superiore di Sanità began as early as 1983 because they were very attentive to what was happening. The Malattie Infettive institute here responded to our reminders but did not fully grasp the seriousness of the problem. Retired doctors now remind me of those first meetings that I attended and where they were amazed by this then-unknown disease. At the Institute, however, they read CDC bulletins and all incoming scientific information, realizing immediately that the disease existed, and it was serious. In fact, their first initiative was to open a control group composed of all male homosexuals linked to Circolo Mario Mieli, of which Bruno Di Donato was president.
Bruno Di Donato was tested because the group got tested every six months to monitor the situation. When Bruno found out he was HIV-positive, he stayed in Rome for another year before moving to Turin, where he lived for the last years of his life. Before and after he was a very important friend: we were never lovers or partners, but very close friends as with Angelo, no sentimental-romantic relationship, but a strong bond from the point of view of friendship.
In the period leading up to Bruno’s death, as his situation worsened, I entered more and more in a crisis. Bruno died on my birthday, April 5, 1991, and his partner died the following year. I was mostly involved with AIDS across the board, including the policies being made. In fact, I frequently lectured at training courses organized by the Istituto Superiore di Sanità and at the political level I was one of the founders of the forum AIDS-Italia, that brought together the first Italian groups dealing with AIDS even before Arcigay, that is, Asa in Milan, Circolo Mario Mieli in Rome, and GSA in Turin. These were very tough years, I must say, that transformed the homosexual movement more profoundly than homosexuals themselves realize and have processed. In Italy, perhaps due to the impact, there has been little elaboration on what happened, even in fiction and cinema. Practically, an entire generation was marked in some way, either by becoming HIV-positive and then eventually dying, or by having a partner who became HIV-positive, or because a friend became HIV-positive, meaning that an entire season was marked by this fact, leaving important consequences.
In the meantime, however, there were many other situations. For instance, in 1980, the Fondazione Sandro Penna-Fuori! was established, which later became the Fondazione Angelo Pezzana-Fuori!, the GSA that I have already mentioned, Informa Gay, and then in 2005 Lambda was formed, which was the penultimate experience that I was involved in. Here with me there were also Angelo, Marco, Enzo Francone and many others: we started this volunteer experience that was mainly concerned with caring for LGBT elderly people. It was the first group in Italy; we aimed to build a house for this purpose, but then this failed, so we shifted to caregiving for elderly people until Covid. When it became physically impossible to enter, because this is what we were doing, the group then pivoted to other activities before eventually dying.
In the meanwhile, the Associazione Radicale Certi Diritti was founded, continuing the legacy of radical lesbian activism, and Angelo was also there at the time of the opening, with me and a few others. We started this experience: I am still part of it with its National Board of Directors.
Cover photograph: Enzo Cucco at the Fire disco, Turin, 1978
Photo Credits © Courtesy of the Fondazione Angelo Pezzana-Fuori! Archives
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