The Italian Vice, Italy and the Invention of Modern Male Homosexuality

The Italian Vice reorients our understanding of the history of modern male homosexuality by focusing on Europe's 'internal Other': Italy. Spanning from the tail-end of the Grand Tour to the mid-fascist years, it argues that Italy was a time/space in which competing epistemologies of homosexuality confronted one another – precisely what characterizes 'modern' male same-sex love and attraction. Turning our understanding of the history of male homosexuality on its head, it proposes that Italy was not primitive, pre-modern, or under-developed but modern in a way that Europe and the US were not. It also highlights the frequently overlooked role working-class men and boys played in the so-called invention of modern male homosexuality. The new scientific epistemologies of sexuality; a pan-European Hellenic revival; a tradition of fostering male same-sex intimacies that cut across age, class, and nationality; Italy's lack of anti-sodomy legislation and specific place in the capitalist world system, including the late entry of bourgeois women into its public sphere; changing understandings of sexuality and gender that resulted from industrialization -- all combined to produce a same-sex sex tourism industry that juxtaposed competing understandings of male same-sex love. These epistemologies were inflected in complex and contradictory ways by issues of gender, class, ethnicity, locality, age and race, such differences not simply 'intersecting' but being constituted alongside one another – particularly given Italy’s ambiguous racial identity, somewhere 'between' the binaries of black and white. Adopting a queer Marxist approach that focuses on both capitalism's long durée and its combined and uneven development, rather than center a history of modern homosexuality on the white bourgeois men who visited Italy, The Italian Vice seeks to glimpse the lives of their Italian lovers. To this end, it adopts an interdisciplinary approach that examines a wide archive including not only works of literature by privileged white bourgeois traveling gentlemen but also Italian sexology; same-sex sex scandals and their treatment in the Italian press; anthropological work on Italian homosexualities; travel diaries; and police records.

John Champagne is Professor Emeritus at Penn State Erie, the Behrend College, USA.