The Enemy of the New Man: Homosexuality in Fascist Italy by Lorenzo Benadusi (review)

Lorenzo Benadusi’s path-breaking work, which first appeared in Italian in 2005, is one of the most important books published on Fascism and the history of sexuality in the last decade. Fascism championed virile masculinity and disdained effeminacy and homosexuality, yet until Benadusi’s work, no monograph has examined how Italian Fascists dealt with male homosexuality. Exhaustively researched, the book will become an indispensable, definitive text for scholars and students working in many fields.

For an English-language reader accustomed to shorter monographs with relatively clear, concise arguments, the text might seem long and overly detailed. Benadusi is pioneering a field, however, and thus a great deal of explanation is required. Indeed, the history of homosexuality is still somewhat taboo in Italy. “A university course on the subject,” he notes, “would be unthinkable” (4). Within this context, then, Benadusi is starting from scratch, explaining to an Italian audience fundamental scholarship on the history of gender, sexuality, and homosexuality. Moreover, Benadusi had virtually no other studies of Italy with which to frame his work. In this sense, Benadusi has also produced an excellent study of male homosexuality in the pre-Fascist, Liberal era. Benadusi’s focus, it must be noted, is on male homosexuality; the book pays little attention to homosexual women in Mussolini’s Italy, a subject that has just begun to attract scholars.

The premise of the book is relatively simple: male homosexuality represented the antithesis of the Fascist “new man,” a virile, hardened, disciplined, warlike conqueror. Supporters of the regime disdained and persecuted some homosexuals and effeminate men not only because they did not conform to this new ideal but also because they threatened the project of creating the new man in many ways: homosexuals did not procreate; they were considered weak and unsuitable for combat; some commentators viewed the “affliction” as “contagious,” particularly to young men and boys, who might be lured into a life of vice and degeneracy.

The work’s first hundred pages or so examine in great detail juridical, religious, scientific, philosophical, and cultural understandings of homosexuality in Liberal Italy within a larger European perspective. Perhaps most relevant to the book’s subject was the decision by Italian jurists, in both the Liberal and Fascist periods, not to include an article banning homosexuality in the criminal code. In his foreword to Benadusi’s book, Emilio Gentile, one of the foremost scholars of Italian Fascism, refers to a “strategy of concealment” at work in Italy, not just during Fascism but throughout the twentieth century. To illustrate his point, Gentile surveys the very small body of knowledge available about homosexuality in Italy during the 1940s. Fifty years later, in the 1990s, he notes, nothing new had been learned. To the contrary, many films of the 1960s and 1970s, such as Pasolini’s Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom and Bertolucci’s 1900, presented Fascists as depraved homosexuals. These cultural depictions turned Fascism’s victims into perpetrators, perversely distorting the historical reality.

Despite the silence of its criminal code, the Fascist state—a regime that wanted to “virilize the nation”—was nevertheless deeply committed to repressing certain kinds of male homosexuality. Benadusi details the multitude of repressive measures inflicted upon suspected homosexuals. Courts sentenced certain types of homosexual men—most often common criminals, prostitutes, transvestites, and effeminate men—to prisons, asylums, and labor colonies. The most lengthy discussion in the book deals with the repressive activities of the police. Public security officials were empowered to arrest suspects and, without a trial, either exile them to a small village or confine them to an island penal colony. This punishment affected just a few hundred homosexual men over the course of two decades. More common were police surveillance, warnings, arrests, brief jail sentences, humiliating “medical examinations,” and myriad other forms of police harassment. Benadusi’s careful reading of Fascist police files also reveals how...