Spaghetti Sissies Queering Italian American Media: Spaghetti Sissies 3031101960, 9783031101960

Table of contents :
Mixed Blessing
Acknowledgments
Contents
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Introduction
Becoming Italian American
Media’s Making of Italian Americans
Representing the Intersection
Mediating Meaning
Works Cited
Chapter 2: Queering the Kitchen: Cultural Friction at the Italian American Table
Works Cited
Chapter 3: Spotlight: Annie Rachele Lanzillotto
The Hyphen
Chapter 4: Pulp Up the Volume: Race, Sexuality, and Diaspora in The Invisible Glass (1950) And Confetti for Gino (1959)
The (Not So) Secret Life of Pulp Fiction
Dangerous Liaisons in Black and White with Shades of Gray
Part 1: The Queer Plot
Part 2: The Straight Plot
Invisibilities That B(l)ind: Some Concluding Remarks
Works Cited
Chapter 5: Spotlight: Dana Piccoli
Chapter 6: Queer Categorical Miscegenation: Sexuality, Race, Gender, Class, and Ethnicity in Victor Bumbalo’s Niagara Falls and Questa
Introduction
Italians, Queers, and Brownness
Niagara Falls: We’re Here, We’re Queer, We’re Going to an Italian Wedding
Are/Were Italian Americans Brown?
The Shangri-La Motor Inn: My Gay Bestie
The Primitive Gay White Male
Questa and The Dignified Black Queen
Coercive Mimeticism and Spoiled Identities
“Dark” Fantasies: Categorical Miscegenation and S/M
Concluding Thoughts
Works Cited
Chapter 7: Spotlight: Katelynn Cusanelli
Chapter 8: “I Would Like to be a Spoiled, Rich, White Girl”: Trans Genealogy, (Self-)Naming and the Entombed Italian American Subjectivity of Venus Xtravaganza
The Ethnic Naming of Venus Xtravaganza
Deadnaming and The Stakes for Trans Biography
The Politics of (Self-)Naming
Genealogy and Media
Appendix
Works Cited
Chapter 9: Spotlight: Norman Korpi
Chapter 10: Lifestyles of the Gay and Mobster
Friends & Family
Alto
Flamboyant Finooks and Excessive Italians
Works Cited
Chapter 11: Spotlight: Mitch Del Monico
Chapter 12: Queering the Guido or Guidoing the Queer? Performing Gender and Identity on Comedy Television
Performing Masculinity
Creating Queer Space Through Comedy
The Family as Means to Laughter
Laughing Out of the Closet
Queering the Guido or Guidoing the Queer?
Works Cited
Chapter 13: Spotlight: Julio “Giulio” Vincent Gambuto
Chapter 14: “Time to Come Out, Girl!”: Queering Italian American Sexuality on TV Land’s Younger
Younger’s Queer and Italian-American Paratexts
From Anthony Marantino to Maggie Amato: Queer Italian American Friends on Mainstream Television
“I’m the Garlic Knot”: Maggie’s Eccentricity From Bottom to Top, Inside and Out
“Two Worlds Coming Together”: Maggie’s Mésalliances
“The Shiksa in the Mikveh”: Maggie’s Profanations
Conclusions: Putting Queer Italian American Identities on the Map
Works Cited
Chapter 15: Spotlight: Laura Fedele & Rita Houston
Index

Citation preview

ITALIAN AND ITALIAN AMERICAN STUDIES

Spaghetti Sissies Queering Italian American Media Julia Heim · Sole Anatrone

Italian and Italian American Studies Series Editor

Stanislao G. Pugliese Hofstra University Hempstead, NY, USA

This series brings the latest scholarship in Italian and Italian American history, literature, cinema, and cultural studies to a large audience of specialists, general readers, and students. Featuring works on modern Italy (Renaissance to the present) and Italian American culture and society by established scholars as well as new voices, it has been a longstanding force in shaping the evolving fields of Italian and Italian American Studies by re-emphasizing their connection to one another. Editorial Board Rebecca West, University of Chicago, USA Josephine Gattuso Hendin, New York University, USA Fred Gardaphé, Queens College, CUNY, USA Phillip V.  Cannistraro†, Queens College and the Graduate School, CUNY, USA Alessandro Portelli, Università di Roma “La Sapienza”, Italy William J. Connell, Seton Hall University, USA

Julia Heim  •  Sole Anatrone Editors

Spaghetti Sissies Queering Italian American Media

Editors Julia Heim Francophone, Italian, and Germanic Studies University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA, USA

Sole Anatrone Italian Studies Vassar College Poughkeepsie, NY, USA

ISSN 2635-2931     ISSN 2635-294X (electronic) Italian and Italian American Studies ISBN 978-3-031-10196-0    ISBN 978-3-031-10197-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10197-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Mixed Blessing

I grew up in a world with a strong sense of la famiglia, and a cultural heritage that went back many centuries, not just to the much touted Roman Empire, but also the rich cultural diversity of il mezzogiorno, southern Italy. I grew up with an older generation of la famiglia, both parents and grandparents, who spoke southern Italian dialect. I grew up with the smell of garlic and the taste of basil, and a rich Mediterranean cuisine that included ceci beans, lentils, and pasta e fagioli, which we called pasta fasul. I grew up in South Philly, a universe unto itself in the heart of a big city, Philadelphia, which was home to many ethnic groups, a cultural salad, not a melting pot. Everyone kept their own unique identity. The Irish celebrated it with a giant St. Patrick’s Day Parade; the Italians with an annual May Procession dedicated to la Madonna that winded past the old, brickfront row houses in the heavily Italian streets of the parish on an already hot Sunday afternoon, just as it might have for hundreds of years in Palermo or Napoli. I grew up in a world that encased us like a protective bubble, shielding us from the alien values of the dominant Anglo culture we glimpsed on TV sitcoms like The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet (1952-66) and Leave It to Beaver (1957-63) that had no Italian characters. The traditional values of those programs were promoted in school by IHM (Immaculate Heart of Mary) nuns who tried their best, like the Borg, to assimilate us into that culture. v

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My parents’ generation wanted us to be Italian American, with emphasis on the word Italian. Which meant following la via vecchia, the old ways, the traditions brought from il vecchio paese, the old country. For Papa, la via vecchia meant being straight, cisgender, conservative and Republican and listening to Mario Lanza or Frank Sinatra. It meant being proud to be Italian and Catholic, even if he never attended Mass or went to Confession. It meant an “America love it or leave it” style of being American. Did Papa know that his parents’ generation, which came over by the millions, much to the chagrin of the dominant Anglo culture which did not welcome those swarthy Mediterranean types, was in the streets fighting against child labor and sweatshops and for the right of workers to a 40-hour week, not to mention safe working conditions and sick pay? Among those immigrants were Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two anarchists who were executed for a murder many believe they didn’t commit. Their trial provoked mass demonstrations throughout the country and the world. During the trial, the judge referred to Sacco and Vanzetti as “dagos,” a derogatory term for Italians. In the South, Italian immigrants were the target of one of the largest single lynchings in American history: 11 Italian men in Louisiana in 1891. Employment ads everywhere regularly excluded Italians, as in no Italians need bother because they’re not going to get hired. In my teens, my refusal to follow la via vecchia was a source of endless clashes with Papa. “Whaddaya wanna be — a girl?” he’d yell at me when I started growing my hair. I was a damn hippie for listening to the music coming out of the radio and suddenly featured on TV programs like The Ed Sullivan Show, music by the Beatles, Peter, Paul and Mary and many others. I was just plain stupid or brainwashed or, in his worst nightmare, a commie when I questioned the catholic religion and/or the war in Vietnam. At 16, I became an atheist. I also realized once and for all, after years of knowing it but not knowing it, that I was queer and gender non conforming. The kids in my neighborhood and in my school as well as the nuns and priests and other adults sensed this otherness in me many years before. To them, I was always a freak of nature — something too feminine, too fragile, too strange because I preferred jumping rope with the girls to playing sports and fighting with the boys. For all the talk about rispetto in my neighborhood, none was afforded me.

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I don’t know how I escaped becoming a statistic. Except no one kept stats on hate crimes in those days. No one even talked of them as hate crimes. It was just what happened to someone who was different and refused to submit to being assimilated. I was dragged into an alley and my face rubbed in the snow while being assaulted with anti-gay epithets. I was stabbed in the arm with a sharpened pencil in homeroom by a classmate who called me a faggot. The nun sat at her desk stone-faced, pretending she didn’t see or hear anything. The monkey with one hand over her eyes and the other bound firmly behind her back. At open house, a nun told Mamma that I was too much like a girl and if she didn’t do something quickly, she’d end up regretting it the rest of her life. One summer afternoon, Papa took me outside and humiliated me in front of the neighborhood kids by giving me a lesson in how to walk like a man. The kids found it hysterically funny. I had nightmares for months. What hurt more than the physical blows and the constant humiliation was the fact that not only didn’t the adults defend or protect me, they actually participated in the bullying, or stood by and did nothing. I don’t know which was worse. Growing up in South Philly was a mixed blessing. While it gave me a cultural heritage of which I will always be proud and will always honor, I ultimately had to leave it all behind because I knew I was queer and never going to be safe there. This anthology is a safe space for us as LGBTQ Italian and Sicilian Americans. It’s important that the stories that get told and recorded about us are the ones we write. Stories about the agony and the ecstasy of our lives as LGBTQ Italian and Sicilian Americans. How we view ourselves. How we continue to honor the culture and the struggle that those weary worn immigrants carried across the ocean and through Ellis Island: the strong family ties; the intense passions; la testa dura, the strong will to survive against all odds; the traditional foods, though we may modify them somewhat if we’re vegan; the beautiful dialects that are being lost; and so much more. We have to ask ourselves: what is our unique identity as LGBTQ Italian and Sicilian Americans? How have we found a place for ourselves in today’s Italian/Sicilian American community and in our families? How do we

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make the media and the country look at us as more than the characters on The Jersey Shore or The Sopranos? How should movies and TV depict us? How do we depict ourselves? This anthology will attempt to answer some of these questions. Enjoy it. February, 2022

––Tommi Avicolli Mecca

Acknowledgments

We would like to give special thanks to Sophia Calder whose enthusiasm and diligent work were instrumental in getting this project off the ground. We would also like to thank our myriad queer communities, both within and without academia who have paved the way for this kind of scholarship by living in ways that challenge the normativity of the everyday. We hope this book helps make space and community for those who do not see themselves in representations of Italian American life. You’re not alone. We’re queer with you.

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Contents

1 Introduction  1 Julia Heim and Sole Anatrone 2 Queering  the Kitchen: Cultural Friction at the Italian American Table 21 Eilis Kierans 3 Spotlight:  Annie Rachele Lanzillotto 61 Annie Lanzillotto 4 Pulp  Up the Volume: Race, Sexuality, and Diaspora in The Invisible Glass (1950) And Confetti for Gino (1959) 65 Clarissa Clò 5 Spotlight: Dana Piccoli103 Dana Piccoli 6 Queer  Categorical Miscegenation: Sexuality, Race, Gender, Class, and Ethnicity in Victor Bumbalo’s Niagara Falls and Questa107 John Champagne 7 Spotlight: Katelynn Cusanelli141 Katelynn Cusanelli xi

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8 “I  Would Like to be a Spoiled, Rich, White Girl”: Trans Genealogy, (Self-)Naming and the Entombed Italian American Subjectivity of Venus Xtravaganza145 Nicholas Boston 9 Spotlight: Norman Korpi169 Norman Korpi 10 Lifestyles  of the Gay and Mobster171 Julia Heim 11 Spotlight:  Mitch Del Monico193 Mitch del Monico 12 Queering  the Guido or Guidoing the Queer? Performing Gender and Identity on Comedy Television199 Carmelo A. Galati 13 Spotlight:  Julio “Giulio” Vincent Gambuto225 Julio Vincent Gambuto 14 “Time  to Come Out, Girl!”: Queering Italian American Sexuality on TV Land’s Younger229 Aria Zan Cabot 15 Spotlight:  Laura Fedele & Rita Houston263 Laura Fedele and Rita Houston Index271

Notes on Contributors

Nicholas Boston  is an Associate Professor of Media Sociology at Lehman College. He holds an MS in journalism from the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, and a PhD in sociology from the University of Cambridge. His research to date is located at the nexus of media, migration, identity, and intimacy. Aria Zan Cabot  holds a PhD in Italian from the University of Wisconsin-­­ Madison. She is the Director of the World Languages and Literatures Teaching and Technology Center at Southern Methodist University, where she also teaches Italian and co-directs a faculty-led study abroad program in Tuscany. Her research interests include Early Modern women writers, the Italian autobiography, diversity in Italian Studies, and Languages for Specific Purposes. John  Champagne is a Professor of English at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College. He is the author of four monographs—most recently, Queer Ventennio, Italian Fascism, Homoerotic Art, and the Nonmodern in the Modern—and two novels. His essays have appeared in such journals as the Journal of Homosexuality, Forum Italicum, and New Cinemas. He is working on a project on homosexuality and Italian racial identity. Clarissa Clò  is Professor and Chair, and Director of the Italian Studies Program, in the Department of European Studies at San Diego State University. Her research interests include feminist and queer theory, migration, diaspora and postcolonial studies, literature, film, music, popular culture, and transmedia storytelling in Italian and Italian American xiii

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Studies. Her work has appeared in numerous journals, including Ácoma, Annali d’Italianistica, California Italian Studies, Diacritics, Diaspora, Forum Italicum, Italian American Review, Italian Culture, Italica, Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies, Research in African Literatures, and Transformations. She has contributed to book collections such as Cinema of Exploration, Encounters with the Real in Contemporary Italian Literature and Cinema, Italian Political Cinema, Postcolonial Italy, and The Cultures of Italian Migration. She co-edited a special double issue of the journal Studies in Documentary Film, and edited a special double issue for Il lettore di provincia. Katelynn Cusanelli  is best known for being the first transgender woman on MTV’s The Real World, she has also appeared on The Challenge: Fresh Meat 2 and The Challenge: Rivals. Katelynn is an activist for the LGBTQIA+ community and advocates for HIV and AIDS awareness; through this work she has been involved with GLAAD, GLSEN, HRC, NOH8, The TREVOR PROJECT, and the It Gets Better project. Mitch del Monico  is a lifelong storyteller who owes a lot of his personal success to people he loves who disagree with him politically. He has worked as a writer, film and music video director, editor, fact-checker, personal trainer, and digital media assistant on a ship that sailed the Atlantic Ocean. For more visit: https://www.mikkidel.com/. Laura  Fedele A New Jersey native and longtime music fan, Digital Director Laura Fedele has helmed WFUV’s online efforts for over 20 years—writing, designing, editing, building, and posting to give music fans context and connection for the music they love. Offering FUV listeners worldwide live streams and vast program archives, the focus from the start has been doing everything possible to connect the FUV-ers with the enthusiastic FUV fans, and making sure they can connect with each other. Carmelo A. Galati  is Associate Professor of Instruction and Co-Director of the Italian Studies Program at Temple University where he offers courses on Italian and Italian American LGBTQIA+ Culture. He has lectured on the concept of masculinity in the Italian American community and its representation in film and television. He has organized and led conference panels on diversity and LGBTQIA+ inclusivity in the Italian classroom and has authored articles on Dante’s Commedia and its appropriation in popular culture.

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Julio Vincent Gambuto  is the author of the essay series “Prepare for the Ultimate Gaslighting” on Medium. His book “Please Unsubscribe. Thanks!” is forthcoming from Avid Reader Press. Julio is founder of Boro Five, an independent film and television content production company and debut feature film, Team Marco, is currently available on major streaming platforms. You can learn more at: http://www.juliovincent.com/. Julia Heim,  Sole Anatrone  collaborate on many different projects and publications including most recently, the transfeminist translation Digital Fissures: Gender_Body_Technology (Brill, 2023); Queering Italian Media (Lexington Press, 2020); “It is Messy. And it is Mediated,” The Italianist: Film Issue (2021); “Working in the Shadows: Collaboration as Queer Practice,” Gender/Sexuality/Italy “Collaborations,” 7 (2021); “Why LGBTQIA+ Inclusivity Matters for Italian Studies,” in Diversity in Italian Studies, ed. A. Tamburri (2021); and co-founding Asterisk, a higher education LGBTQIA+ inclusivity taskforce. Rita Houston  1961–2020, A native New Yorker and nationally recognized tastemaker filled with a broad knowledge and passion for music, WFUV Public Radio Program Director Rita Houston shaped the musical direction of WFUV’s acclaimed and unique music format. Houston was a two-time Radio & Records (R&R) Music Director of the Year, three-time designate of Gavin’s Music Director of the Year, and she was also awarded the Deems Taylor Award for Broadcast Excellence. She is part of the permanent DJ exhibit at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and was named Program Director of the Year by FMQB for 2019. Eilis Kierans  is a PhD candidate in Italian Studies at Rutgers University where her research focuses on contemporary literature, film, queer studies, ecocriticism, and feminist food studies. She has published articles on the work of Grazia Deledda, Dacia Maraini, Christian Petzold, and Clara Sereni. She is co-editor of the new series Other Voices of Italy: Italian and Transnational Texts in Translation as well as editor of the Creative Reviews section of Italian Quarterly. Kierans is passionate about experiential learning and has led students on numerous educational adventures around Italy, Argentina, and Ecuador. Norman Korpi  is internationally known for his groundbreaking appearance on MTV’s The Real World (1992.) Norman received his BFA at Cooper Union and Yale’s Norfolk Program. A Presidential Scholar in the Arts Norman has designed for the Guggenheim Museum, the ICA

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Museum in Boston, and The Pierpont Morgan Collection in New York. For more please see: https://www.normankorpi.com/. Annie Lanzillotto  is a poet, performance artist, song writer, and author of the books: Hard Candy: Caregiving, Mourning and Stage Light, and Pitch, Roll, Yaw (Guernica World Editions), L is for Lion: An Italian Bronx Butch Freedom Memoir (SUNY Press, Finalist for the Lambda Literary Foundation Award), and Schistsong (Bordighera Press). Dana Piccoli  is an entertainment writer, pop culture critic, international speaker, author, adventurer, travel writer, lesbian processor and podcaster and the author of the modern queer romance novel Savor the Moment. You can read more about her work at http://danapiccoli.com/.

List of Figures

Fig. 4.1

Loren Wahl, Take Me As I Am (New York: Berkley Books, 1950) 74 Fig. 4.2 Loren Wahl, If This Be Sin (New York: Avon Publishing, 1952) 76 Fig. 4.3 Lorenzo Madalena, Confetti for Gino (New York: Doubleday, 1959)77 Fig. 4.4 Lorenzo Madalena, Gino (London: Corgi Books, 1960) 78 Fig. 5.1 Dana Piccoli, a white woman with pink hair and a leopard print jacket, stand on a stage holding a microphone and laughing. (Copyright: ClexaCon photo staff, 2019) 105 Fig. 8.1 Tombstone with an image of Jesus and the inscription: Cesare Barrosso 1883–1949, Thomas Pellagatti 1965–1988, Justina B. Salicrup 1911–1990. (Photograph by Nicholas Boston) 147 Fig. 10.1 Two women with long dark hair play the harp while intimately embracing. (© Alto the Movie, LLC photo credit: Valentina Caniglia, AIC IMAGO, director: Mitch del Monico, producer: Toni D’Antonio) 183 Fig. 10.2 Two white women with long dark hair and similar floral print tops sit at a table; one is about to take a bite of a pastry while the other looks on smiling. (© Alto the Movie, LLC photo credit: Valentina Caniglia, AIC IMAGO, director: Mitch del Monico, producer: Toni D’Antonio) 185

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List of Figures

Fig. 10.3 Three white people with dark hair stand side by side, unsmiling, facing us; on the left is a young woman in a red leather jacket, center is a middle-aged woman in dark brown leather, and to the right is a young man in tan leather. (© Alto the Movie, LLC photo credit: Valentina Caniglia, AIC IMAGO, director: Mitch del Monico, producer: Toni D’Antonio)188 Fig. 12.1 Titus, a larger black man, and Mikey, a larger white man, sit sipping coffee next to some trash cans in front of a brick exterior; two of Mikey’s coworkers stand looking on, also sipping coffee 205 Fig. 12.2 Living room interior: Jack, a thin white man, sits with his legs crossed and his hand cupped under his chin, eyebrows raised as he listens to her story 207 Fig. 12.3 Two people sit with their backs to us. Facing us is a white woman with big curly red hair, a low-cut black shirt, and a cross hanging on a necklace that drops into her cleavage 210 Fig. 12.4 A group of people sits around a table laden with plates of food and glasses of wine; at the head of the table an older white man gestures angrily at a younger white man; the rest of the people look knowingly at each other, or gaze down at their plates 215 Fig. 13.1 Close-up of Julio “Giulio” Vincent Gambuto, a white man with close-cropped hair and a dark shirt, smiles against a red backdrop226 Fig. 14.1 Maggie leans out the window of her apartment building wearing a low-cut shirt and a wrap on her head; she is making an “ok” symbol with her hand and she looks at someone not pictured in the street below 239 Fig. 14.2 Liza, Charles, and Kelsey are seated at a colorfully laid dinner table while Maggie stands over them preparing to serve polenta 241 Fig. 14.3 Maggie and Joe stand side-by-side in Joe’s workshop looking at his fish ice sculpture 246 Fig. 14.4 Maggie is smiling, wearing elegant black attire and holding a jar of meat sauce 249 Fig. 14.5 Liza stands in the back, wrapped in a robe, while Maggie enters a pool full of women, with one woman in the foreground with her hair slicked back and her mouth open 250

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Fig. 14.6 Maggie and Noreen sit in the studio, on either side of the painting, their backs to us so we share their point of view. The painting shows a landscape with pink hills, a dark pink cave and a blue sky or, looked at another way, a naked woman on her back, legs open, breasts in the background 252 Fig. 14.7 Close-up of Maggie’s face in the back of a cab, lipstick red lips slightly open, eyes rolled back in her head; a white booted foot rests on her shoulder 254 Fig. 14.8 Maggie is upside down, her back to us; she hangs by straps from the ceiling, her legs and arms flail as she swings in front of the window in her apartment 256 Fig. 14.9 We see a glass storefront painted with the words, “MAGGIE AMATO: Mythologies in Movement.” A man is working at erasing the “A” from Maggie’s last name 260 Fig. 15.1 Houton and Fedele at a music festival. (Photo courtesy of WFUV)264 Fig. 15.2 Houston with Brandi Carlile and Amy Ray at Housing Works Bookstore, 2008. (Photo courtesy of WFUV) 268

CHAPTER 1

Introduction Julia Heim and Sole Anatrone

Being queer and Italian means our lives have been doubly blessed. We have two well-defined communities we can fit into, speak the language of, appreciate and belong to. Carrying the combination of LGBTQIA+ identity and Italian American heritage into a public life in the media means you’ve got built-in friends and enemies. There are levels of assumed understanding you can invoke with a silent nod, a sassy finger snap, or a finger at the side of your nose. —Laura Fedele, infra

The radical increase in entertainment media within the last century has transformed people’s understanding of themselves and the position they hold within the public sphere. Within this context, queers and Italian

J. Heim (*) University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA S. Anatrone Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Heim, S. Anatrone (eds.), Spaghetti Sissies Queering Italian American Media, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10197-7_1

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Americans occupy unusual positions;1 while they have moved along very different trajectories of representation, they have both historically been defined in opposition to the ideal of the typical American and have been represented through a set of stereotypes and caricatures that play heavily off notions of gender and domesticity in ways that pit these two groups against each other. The proliferation of media and the increasing centrality of its images and messages within our lives have meant more content depicting queers and Italian Americans, and while some concerted efforts have been made to control the connotative messages hidden within these representations, both groups are still fettered by mainstream depictions that continue to delegitimize their position in American society. What Italian Americans and queers thus share is their need to negotiate just how bound their identities are to production and (often negative) representation in entertainment media. Laura Fedele’s “sassy finger snap, or a finger at the side of your nose” draw from different cultural registers (queer/drag and mobster/Italian) all of which have been solidified through repetition, both in media and in familial cultural education. Through an analysis of media and representation, we look at some of the ways stereotypes function to define what it means to queer, what it means to be Italian American, and what it means to be queer and Italian American. We ultimately see that it is precisely through a reappropriation of such stereotypes and media representation that queer Italian Americans have (re)claimed space in a heterocentric cultural landscape. We start this investigation from an elaboration of the signification and significance of Italian Americanness, which, for us has always been a point of more contention than our relationship to queerness. Throughout the book the question of queerness is approached through the frame of Italian American specificity; in order to understand how queerness comes into conversation with Italian Americanness, we must first attempt to

1  Our use of the term “queer” and “queers” throughout this introduction is in specific reference to those people who identify anywhere along the LGBTQIA+ acronym and/or their mediatic representation. Its use is intended to point to a distinction between the assumed heterosexuality and heteronormativity of the US public, and those who are othered for their unbelonging; in this way, more than a catch-all, queer is a community-building term that resists normative societal expectation. When used as a verb, “queer” is intended as an act of disruption that challenges these same normative structures that the noun (and the people represented by it) resist.

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understand how the representations of Italian American identity have shaped or excluded us.2

Becoming Italian American The consequences of having Italian American identity be so culturally determined by media representations is personal for us, the editors of this volume, and it is one of the driving forces behind this book. Both of us have a parent who immigrated to the United States from Italy, as a result, we lived our Italianness as one part of our identity, and our Americanness as another, not understanding the ways that the identity marker “Italian American” was applicable to us. We have only very recently learned to understand our Italian Americanness, or rather, learned to look at ourselves as Italian Americans, and this new framing occurred almost as if by chance  when we were each asked to teach classes on Italian American culture at different institutions at the same time. It became clear, when dialoguing with one another, that others (namely those within our institutions) seemed to put us in this category, and so we spent much time thinking through our feelings of belonging while simultaneously critically examining the subject with our undergraduate students. We had extensive discussions about our understandings of our own identities, and why we both individually had been carrying around a certain amount of disdain for the hyphenated identity that now, and probably always, others had been putting on us.3 Through the process of this exploration we found ourselves frequently naming objects, characters, and figures that we understood to truly embody “Italian American identity,” and we realized that we were doing the very thing we work so hard to dismantle in other areas of our lives and scholarship: we had been thinking of Italian Americanness as a monolith. We had taken Chef Boyardee, and the Jersey Shore (2009–2012), and The Sopranos (1999–2007), and we had 2  We have chosen to omit the hyphen and instead leave “Italian” and “American” as two separate terms, thus stressing the ways this hybrid identity is constituted by (at least) two different cultures. For a more nuanced discussion of the use or omission of the hyphen in the Italian American context and the ways this represents or perpetuates social marginalization and cultural alienation see Anthony Tamburri’s To Hyphenate or Not to Hyphenate: The Italian/American Writer: An Other American, (Montreal: Guernica Editions, 1991). 3  We explore the question in the context of a broader discussion about collaboration, pedagogy, affect, and media in our article “It Is Messy. And It Is Mediated.,” The Italianist, 41:2 (2021), 212–217.

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decided that that culture did not reflect our lived experience. We had decided this because we had never seen anyone who lived, acted, or identified as we do reflected in Italian American representation. Scholars of Italian Americana, such as Anthony Tamburri, Fred Gardaphé, and Laura Ruberto have been exploring and pushing the boundaries of these identities in the academic setting, and while we felt an affinity, we struggled to find a bridge between this kind of scholarship and our own lived experiences. We were still looking for the queers! This is precisely the power of representation, and of identity representation in particular. The meaning we had given a specific identity, our specific identity, had been formed through the lens of American media, the siloed vision of identity, caricatured, and stereotyped, and reproduced for an American audience with such discursive power as to convince us of our unbelonging despite our engagement with our scholarly peers. We knew that if we were here, there must be others like us, or quite different from us, but definitely not like what we were used to seeing. And so, our search began…

Media’s Making of Italian Americans As we say back in Sicily, sticks and stones can break your bones but cement pays homage to tradition.4 —Sofia Petrillo

The words of Golden Girls (1985–1992) character Sofia Petrillo clearly and comically synthesize the contemporary role of the Italian American within the American cultural landscape: namely brutish and thug-like, but in a familiar and often comic way. This anecdotal quote, so indicative of Italian American representation, finds its roots in the legacies of signification that we as a culture have inherited from American media industries. This signification—the specificity of Italian Americanness—seems to have begun taking on meaning during the rise of the nation’s nascent cinematic industry. Indeed, the mass Italian emigration to the United States at the turn of the nineteenth century coincided with the birth of Hollywood, and soon these two new Americans (the Italian diasporic people, and the movies) became an integral part of the nation’s cultural fabric both on and off the screen, helping to shape national identity and to 4  Estelle Getty, “Zborn Again” Season 6 Episode 7, Golden Girls, NBC, November 3, 1990.

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secure their places within it. As Giuliana Muscio notes in the introduction to Napoli/New York/Hollywood: “The history of Italian and Italian American performers in the United States is so inextricably related to the history of the Italian diaspora that one actually becomes the history of the other and vice versa.”5 The Italian immigrants working within the entertainment industries in the early twentieth century brought their own media cultures and traditions during a time when silent Italian cinema was still one of the biggest global forces in export entertainment; but, as they settled into their new land and their roles in America’s rising film industry, the United States began using its media to create links between governmental policy, nationalism, pro-consumerism, and Hollywood.6 Within this landscape a gap emerged between Italian actors within the industry, and the roles of Italian characters on screen: “The analysis of casts and plots of American silent films reveals that Italian actors often played aristocrats or circus and music artists, or after the introduction of sound, waiters, while the Italian characters are equally divided between criminals and musicians.”7 The codification of the stereotype of the Italian American figure was determined by the proliferation of certain types of character traits and professions.8 Think, for instance, of the 1915 film, The Italian, in this early piece of American cinema, white American actor George Beban is cast as a hapless immigrant, coming from Italy with no discernible skills, and a great deal of naivete that inevitably leads him into criminality. Originally titled The Dago, this film makes no attempt to hide its 5  Giuliana Muscio, Napoli/New York/Hollywood (New York: Fordham University Press) 2019, 2. 6  The start of World War I saw this shift in a dramatic way. Ibid., 15. 7  Ibid., 18. 8  Much research has been done archiving the relationship between Italian immigrants’ socio-cultural position and their portrayal in cinema. Consider Robert Castillo’s “The Representation of Italian Americans in American Cinema: From the Silent Film to the Godfather,” in The Italian in Modernity, which explores peninsular and diasporic high-brow and low-brow perceptions of Italians and Italian culture, linking many socio-political changes, and bioessentialist notions of identity to changes in cinematic representation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011). Giuliana Muscio has also written extensively on Italian, American, and Italian American transnational cinematic identities in her works Napoli/New York/Hollywood, and Mediated Ethnicity: New Italian American Cinema. The subject has even garnered more recent attention with Ryan Calabretta-Sajder and Alan J.  Gravano’s Italian Americans on Screen: Challenging the Past, Re-Theorizing the Future (Lanham: Lexington Press, 2021). Not to mention more focused research such as Fred L. Gardaphé’s From Wiseguys to Wise Men (New York: Routledge, 2006), to name just a few.

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pity and scorn for a character who, as both titles tell us, is meant to represent the entirety of his people.9 At the same time that this portrayal was cementing into stereotype, the social position of Italian Americans was being heavily influenced, if not determined, by eugenicist-supported anti-immigrant sentiment and legislation.10 In a reflexive, defensive move these immigrant communities were privatizing their ethnic and cultural identities—keeping distinctive cultural traits, like language and food, in the privacy of the home—in an effort to preserve Italianness while not jeopardizing their American integration.11 Thus, the film industry was able to trade freely in stereotype, without needing to make space for mainstream counter-representation by the minority groups themselves; their image, as created and proliferated by the American media, became the representation of their identities. Famously, Rudolph Valentino, one of the biggest stars of early Hollywood and the first of Italian origin, was cast almost exclusively in non-Italian roles, playing Arab princes or Latin lovers, but never Italians or Italian Americans as these were associated with coarseness and crime rather than intrigue and allure. Valentino’s ambiguous relationship to ethnicity carried over to his gender and sexual identity as well; he often presented as androgenous, on screen as well as off, and rumors circulated about his sexuality and that of

9  Peter Bondanella begins with a compelling discussion of The Italian and moves up through the modern era in his study of four main Italian American archetypes in cinema: immigrants, prizefighters, lovers, and gangsters. See Hollywood Italians: Dagos, Palookas, Romeos, Wise Guys, and Sopranos, (New York: Continuum International Publishing, 2004). 10  As Elizabeth Messina notes: “By escalating the rhetoric of threat of the ‘alien menace,’ eugenicists could both justify and rationalize their increasingly hostile and discriminatory behavior against ‘new immigrants.’ Justification ideologies endorse prejudice and discrimination that social norms would suppress and ordinarily find unacceptable.” [“Perversions of Knowledge: Confronting Racist Ideologies Behind Intelligence Testing,” in Anti-Italianism: Essays on a Prejudice, ed.s William J Connell and Fred Gardaphé (New York: Palgrave, 2010), 43). 11  Fred Gardaphé expresses this phenomenon of privatization using David Richard’s study: “Italians were not quick to (re)present their own culture to the public; this is explained by what David Richards refers to as ‘the privatization of culture,’ the idea of being Italian in the home and American outside the home, which enabled others publicly to present Italians any way they pleased” (From Wiseguys to Wisemen, pp. xiv). We also invite readers to reflect on the ways that this continues to inform lived Italian American experience in ways made very evident by the spotlight pieces in this volume.

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his partners.12 Because of this unconfirmed queerness, Italian American social clubs and their historians have had an uneasy relationship to this early movie star, either repudiating him entirely or dismissing allegations of queerness as slander. Valentino’s story serves as a clear example of the deep interconnectedness of Italian American media and Italian American experience since the time of this transformative era in media history; though we intuit a certain queerness in this interconnectedness, the queer Italian American has been and has perhaps remained relegated to a shadow figure.13 While the number of openly Italian American actors increased significantly after World War II, few were out about not being straight, and it would be decades before representations of Italian Americans began to move in any meaningful way beyond the fool, the fesso, the mobster, or the mamma.14 These media archetypes that began to emerge as such in the postwar era continue to be immediately recognizable, such as the hypermachismo of the blue-collar greaser—think My Cousin Vinny’s Vinny Gambini (1992) or The Green Book’s Tony Lip (2018)—the antiintellectualism of the GTL Guido—alà Saturday Night Fever’s Tony Manero (1977), or more recently Jon Martello and Gio Fortunato in Don Jon (2013) and Cruise (2018), respectively—the child-obsessed mamma—the Cammareri brother’s mother in Moonstruck (1987)—and the heteronormative mafia family model (the list is too long to mention). When television, as a new medium, increased its presence in American society it amplified these same images and brought them directly into the nation’s domestic spaces. The notion of a nation as an imagined community was, at the time of broadcast television, solidified by shared televisual experiences that united all households under one national family umbrella. Thus, the collective experience of watching the same television programs simultaneously added to the construction of a cultural imaginary, and 12  A great deal has been written about Valentino, one good place to start for a focused discussion of gender and ethnicity is Gaylyn Studlar’s “Discourses of Gender and Ethnicity: The Construction and De(Con)Struction of Rudolph Valentino as Other” in Film Criticism 13, no. 2 (1989): 18–35. 13  Being relegated to the shadow, however, does not signify a lack of agency. To read more about our understanding of shadow communities as locations of care and queer affect see “Working in the Shadows: Collaboration as Unpopular Queer Practice” in Gender/Sexuality/ Italy “Collaborations,” 7 (February 2021). 14  For a useful analysis of these stereotypes and their socio-political connotations see Jonathan J.  Cavallero and George Plasketes’ “Gangsters, Fessos, Tricksters, and Sopranos: The Historical Roots of Italian American Stereotype Anxiety,” in Journal of Popular Film and Television, 32:2(2004), 50–73.

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solidified the role of the family (and as such the domestic space) as a building block of the national community.15 Add to this theoreticization, the relationship between the spectator and the television personality, as Umberto Eco famously explained in “The Phenomenology of Mike Bongiorno” when describing the eponymous Italian tv celebrity: “The most striking illustration of superman’s being reduced to everyman […] the spectator sees his own limitations glorified and supported by national authority.”16 Eco is speaking to television’s role in concretizing the connections between those “ordinary” flawed people depicted on television, and those same flawed people that make up each individual family, and thus the nation as a whole. For the Italian American as both subject and object of this experience, it meant a doubling down on the correspondence between stereotype and cultural marker. Keeping this in mind helps us understand the power of the proliferation of Italian American character types, and their positionality within the larger cultural framework. Thus television, perhaps even more so than cinema, worked to solidify Italian American identity, starting with early tv adaptations of radio programs like Mama Rosa (1950) and Life with Luigi (1952)—with the mother figure Mama Rosa, and the recently immigrated Luigi—continuing through and beyond broadcast television’s heyday with prominent Italian American characters in shows like Welcome Back Kotter (1975–1979), Laverne & Shirley (1976–1983), and into the age of televisual abundance in the 90s and aughts with The Golden Girls (1985–1992), Who’s The Boss (1984–1992), Cheers (1982–1993), and Friends (1994–2004), all of which showcase Italian Americans as main characters. Now, the image of these minority communities gets push 15  Our discussion of imagined communities is in reference to Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (Verso Books: London, 1983). For more on the relationship between the domestic, the cultural imaginary, and nation building see, for example, David Morley’s “At Home With Television” in which he notes “we see that if the television set is often both physically and symbolically central to the domestic home, then it (or its predecessor, the radio) has often been equally central to the construction of the imagined community of the nation as a symbolic home for its citizens” (in Television After TV, Durham: Duke University Press, 2004, 310). 16  Umberto Eco, “The Phenomenology of Mike Bongiorno” in Misreadings (Harcourt: New York, 1993), 156. We see this carry through into the contemporary age of convergence culture wherein the consumers of television content are also producers of streaming videos themselves. Hence “the everyman” becomes literally “everyman.”

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beyond US national boundaries in this age of Streaming-On-Demand services and transnational media production. As Jason Mittell writes, “Nearly all meanings shown on American television might be considered as representing the national character, contributing to a shared sense of American and what makes the country distinct. This mode of national representation also gains significance as American television circulates around the globe, forming the most widely seen set of images of the United States throughout the world.”17 Pellegrino D’Acierno put it very well, stating: “the fact remains that the figure of the Italian American has been constructed by the majority culture, particularly the mythic stereotype fixed by mass media as part of its Italic discourse […] that is at once Italophilic and Italophobic.”18 In this way, the Italian American is represented—both to US and global audiences—as paradoxically American and Other; think, on the one hand, of the loyalty to place that defines Rocky Balboa or the characters in Jersey Shore; and on the other, of characters like Tony Schalub’s Primo in Big Night (1996), who exalts Italy and rags on the US, and the Falcone family on Canadian animated series Fugget About It (2012–2016) who just can’t seem to “blend.” This kind of dichotomy has repercussions for the notion of Italian Americanness on the personal level as well. While the shows mentioned above continue to reaffirm Italian American archetypes—much to the chagrin of groups like The National Italian American Foundation (see, for example, fallback from Saturday Night Live’s depiction of Wario on May 8, 2021)—it would be reductive to consider these depictions conclusive, or even completely representative of either Italian American media representation or Italian American experience more generally. The disconnect between majority culture representation of these Italian American minorities and minority self-representation within media is arguably most prevalent in theatrical productions. Italian theater—and more specifically, Sicilian and Neapolitan theater—within the United

17  Jason Mittell, Television and American Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press) 2010, 271. 18  Pellegrino D’Acierno, “Introduction,” in The Italian American Heritage: A Companion to Literature and Arts. ed. Pellegrino D’Acierno, (New York: Routledge, 2021).

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States was particularly prolific in the early twentieth century.19 The local theaters—wherein lower-class Italian immigrants would entertain one another, playing songs, singing folk and opera, and putting on performances that ranged from pantomimes and variety shows to the classics of Italian literature—often served as a space for community support. These turn of the century groups brought us theatrical icons such as Antonietta Pisanelli Alessandro and Eduardo Migliaccio aka Farfariello; the latter is most famous for subverting stereotypes with his character of Macchietta Coloniale (colonial stain), an immigrant whose ignorance of his new cultural surroundings created trouble that he inevitably managed to escape due to his Italian wits. These pioneers of Italian American theater paved the way for a subsequent, more professional milieu that included Caffe Cino, founded by Joe Cino in 1958, considered the birthplace of off-off-­ Broadway and an important space in the development of gay theater in New York. Representations of straight Italian Americans by more mainstream non-­ Italian playwrights were also historically not uncommon—consider, for example, Serafina delle Rose in Tennessee Williams’ The Rose Tattoo, and Eddie Carbone in Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge, to name just two. We may find Miller and Williams’ portrayals important for understanding the divide between Italian American experience in their own theatrical productions, and their portrayals within larger mainstream theater, as Peter James Ventimiglia explains: “Both Williams and [Sidney Coe] Howard use the comic stereotypes established earlier in the century by Italian-American authors. It is the misuse of these types, however, that accounts for the playwrights’ lack of success in the depiction of characters.”20 Ventimiglia goes on to argue that while successful in their attempts at assimilation, Italian Americans are underrepresented within the

19  For more on this see, for example, Herman Haller’s Tra Napoli e New York: le macchiette italo-americane di Eduardo Migliaccio. Testi con introduzione e glossario (Bulzoni: Rome, 2006); Emelise Aleandri’s “Italian American Theatre” in Altreitalie. January-July 2004; Reba Wissner’s “All of Mulberry Street is a Stage,” in MAPACA Almanack, vol. 19 (2010): 92–111; and Maxine Seller’s “Antonietta Pisanelli Alessandro and the Italian Theater of San Francisco: Entertainment, Education, and Americanization” in Educational Theatre Journal, May 1976, Vol 28, no. 2 (May 1976): 206–219. 20  Peter James Ventimiglia “Through the Other’s Eyes: The Image of the Italian American in Modern Drama,” in Italian Americana Spring 1976 Vol. 2. No. 2 (1976): 234.

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mainstream theater world and as such must rely on the scarce and often stereotyped figure with which they would at best struggle to identify.21 Let us consider, for a moment, the theoretical implications of the paucity and stereotyped nature of these mainstream theatrical Italian American representations. Whether you adopt Aristotle’s theory that the theater allows for catharsis in viewers, or subscribe to Jill Dolan’s more recent conjectures of the utopian nature of theater and its ability to allow us to all be human together, the takeaway is that this catharsis (in regard to migration trauma or attempts at assimilation), or this collective human understanding (of how to be together and share lived experience) really only seems relevant for Italian Americans in and at Italian American community theaters and productions, making this a more niche experience. Print media, on the other hand, reaches a broader public and serves as a space for personal reflection. Literature and memoir have historically been popular avenues of Italian American expression; writers like John Fante, Don DeLillo, Gay Talese, Mario Puzo, and Diane di Prima are names that ring familiar in conversations about American literature and poetry beyond the confines of ethno-specificity. However, much work has been done to delineate a particular Italian American literary canon that extends beyond the big names to include writers like Rose Basile Greene, Mari Tomasi, Diana Cavallo, and Helen Barolini to name a few.22 Works like Christ in Concrete by Pietro Di Donato, The End by Salvatore Scibona, and the collection Don’t Tell Mama: The Penguin Book of Italian American Writing, provide insight for readers into the cultures and lived experiences attached to Italian American specificity.23 Within the framework of this  Ibid., 237.  For more on the Italian American literary archive see, for example, Fred Gardaphé’s Italian Signs, American Streets: The Evolution of Italian American Narrative (New Americanists) (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996); and Mary Jo Bona’s Claiming a Tradition: Italian American Women Writers (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999). Furthermore, there are a number of collections of Italian American writing such as Regina Barreca’s Don’t Tell Mama!: The Penguin Book of Italian American Writing (New York: The Penguin Group, 2002); Our Roots Are Deep with Passion: Creative Nonfiction Collects New Essays by Italian-American Writers, Lee Gutking and Joanna Clapps Herman, eds. (New York: Other Press, 2006); From the Margin: Writings in Italian Americana, Anthony Julian Tamburri, Paolo A. Giordano, and Fred Gardaphé, eds. (Indiana: Purdue University Press, 2000). 23  See: Pietro Di Donato, Christ in Concrete (New York: Signet, 1993); Salvatore Scibona. The End.(New York: Penguin Books) 2009; Regina Barreca, ed. DON’T TELL MAMA!: The Penguin Book of Italian American Writing (New York: Penguin Books, 2002). 21 22

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analysis we think it is worth stating, as Fred Gardaphé has done, that it is no minority’s obligation to write only and explicitly about their ethnic, religious, sexual, or gender specificity: If writers such as Mary Caponegro do not write narratives about the Italian American experience, they nevertheless signify a sense of Italianità in their writing. While it might be important to Italian Americans such as Gay Talese to see best-selling novels come out of the Italian American community, what is important for the American writer of Italian descent is simply to write.24

While we agree it is no one’s responsibility to represent any specific ethic identity to the broader public—nor would that representation be able to convey the myriad experiences and identities that make up any geographically specific diasporic group—we also must ask: what are the consequences of having most media about a particular minority created by mainstream American media rather than by the subjects themselves? In the music industry we see a more obvious connection between the artist (and the ethnicity of the artist) and the artist’s work.25 Unlike in literature and other forms of print media, identity representation within music is hyper-focused on the artist’s public persona. Important for our purposes is, therefore, the prevalence of Italian American musical performers such as the iconic Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Connie Francis, Tony Bennett, Frankie Valli, and Italian Doo-Wop groups like Dion and the Belmonts, as well as more recent artists like Natalie Merchant, John Bon Jovi, Alicia Keys, and Ariana Grande. While some of the more contemporary musicians do not center their Italian heritage in their music, Sinatra, Martin, Bennett, and Valli all paid tribute to their Italian origins in song; in fact, it was in no small part thanks to their fame that Italian Americans were able to claim some space as legitimate members of American society. Though rumors about mob ties followed many as they rose to stardom, the adoration of an international audience was critical in  Fred Gardaphé, Italian Signs, American Streets: The Evolution of Italian American Narrative (New Americanists) (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 197. 25  This is in no way to imply that all Americans of Italian descent, especially musical artists, have names that reflect this heritage or identity (ex: Connie Francis, Dean Martin, Alicia Keys, Cyndi Lauper). 24

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shedding light on just how established and embedded Italian Americans were in the national fabric by the time of the postwar era.26

Representing the Intersection Music is also the first medium that might come to mind when thinking about the intersection of Italian American identities and queer communities. Artists from Ani Di Franco to Liberace, Cyndi Lauper to Liza Minelli, Madonna to Lady Gaga, have all been important musical figures, occupying space in gay clubs, and in the gay American musical imaginary. Their performative loudness, and their pop musical success have signaled a visibility of Italian American queerness that is most often at looked from just one of these identity markers at a time.27 Lady Gaga, who is not only a gay icon, but also an active gay advocate, recently  responded to the tragic rejection of the Italy’s DDL Zan legislation in 2021,28 with an appearance on Italian television during which she stated her support of LGBTQIA+ Italians and vowed to continue to fight for and make music for them. Despite these transnational attempts at creating pathways between her Italianness and her LGBTQIA+ belonging, few, if any of these connections present her as queer Italian American; she is either an Italian American  For more on the birth of the Italian American musical star, their impact on American culture as a whole and the particular significance of World War II see: Nancy Carnevale, “‘No Italian Spoken for the Duration of the War’: Language, Italian-American Identity, and Cultural Pluralism in the World War II Years,” Journal of American Ethnic History 22, no. 3 (2003): 3–33; Michael Frontani, “From the Bottom to the Top”: Frank Sinatra, the American Myth of Success, and the Italian-American Image,” The Journal of American Culture, Vol. 28, Iss. 2, (Jun 2005): 216–230; Linda Ozborne and Paolo Battaglia, “From Crooners to Rockers,” in Explores, Immigrants, Citizens, ed. by L. Osborne and P. Battaglia (Washington D.C.: Library of Congress, 2013), 275–291. 27  Anthony Tamburri begins to bridge these gaps in his study of Madonna as an Italian American celebrity. He offers an interesting look at the ways race and sexuality are interrogated in her earlier music videos and the ways in which her Italian Americanness along with the representation of gender and sexual variance served to further mark her as an outcast on a number of cultural and identity levels. A.  Tamburri, Italian/American Short Films and Music Videos: A Semiotic Reading, (Indiana: Purdue University Press, 2002). 28  DDL Zan is anti-discrimination legislation aimed at protecting people—LGBTQIA+ included—against hate crimes/speech. 26

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making music with Tony Bennett, or she is an LGBTQIA+ advocate doing work founding, for example, the Born This Way Foundation in 2012.29 Print has allowed the Italian American LGBTQIA+ community an outlet for self-expression in ways that more directly address the intersections of these identities, as is the case with authors like Tommi Avicolli Mecca whose work spans genres from poetry to prose, from theater to editorial; throughout his oeuvre Mecca has been diligent about weaving together the personal and the political, advocating for an awareness of the individual and collective histories of LGBTQIA+ Italian Americans with anthologies like Hey Paesan!: Writing by Lesbians and Gay Men of Italian Descent, theatrical pieces like Italian.Queer.Dangerous, and more personal reflections like the piece that opens this book.30 Mecca’s work resonates in collectively authored volumes like Our Naked Lives, and Fuori: Essays by Italian American Lesbians and Gays, all of which give voice to the complicated nature of negotiating being queer in Italian American domestic spaces.31 Novels like Saturday Night in the Prime of Life, by Dodici Azpadu, and Tender Warriors, by Rachel Guido DeVries, also lend nuance to Italian American queer specificity while framing it as part of a continuum of experience, all complicated and all worthy of exploration.32 These books explore complexity and nuance in ways that go beyond the surface representation too often depicted by token Italian American characters in LGBTQIA+ contexts or vice versa. In Fuori, Mary Cappello discusses

29  Bennett even remarked that underneath it all Lady Gaga was just “a sweet Italian American girl who studied at NYU” (Gay Talese, “High Notes: Tony Bennett in the Studio with Lady Gaga,” The New  Yorker September 12, 2011). One might also find certain amounts of queerness in the campy performance she gave as Patrizia Reggiani in House of Gucci (2021). Neither example is about Italian American queerness, but rather Italians and LGBTQIA+ peoples or aesthetics, creating a distinction that we, the editors of this volume, believe important when recognizing Italian American identity as separate and diasporic to the Italian peninsula and lived LGBTQIA+ experiences there. For more on Lady Gaga’s the Born This Way Foundation see: https://bornthisway.foundation/. 30  Tommi Avicolli Mecca, Giovanna Capone, and Denise Nico Leto editors, Hey Paesan!: Writing by Lesbians and Gay Men of Italian Descent. (Oakland, CA: Three Guineas Press, 1999); Mecca, Italian.Queer.Dangerous. (2005). 31  See Joseph Anthony LoGiudice and Michael Carosone, eds. Our Naked Lives, (New York: Bordighera Press, 2013); and Anthony Tamburri, ed. Fuori: Essays by Italian American Lesbians and Gays, (New York: Bordighera Press, 1995). 32  Dodici Azpadu, Saturday Night in the Prime of Life, (San Francisco, Aunt Lute Books, 1983); Rachel Guido DeVries, Tender Warriors (Ann Arbor, MI: Fire Brand, 1986).

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precisely the plurivocality not only within Italian American and queer communities, but also within those that live at their intersections: Not only is it impossible to assume that Italian/American means the same thing for myself and other Italian Americans who address this subject, but a turning in the direction of my own experience of Italian/Americanness might reveal a set of paradoxes and multiplicities that may have made an alternative sexuality more than viable-necessary and beautiful.33

LGBTQIA+ Italian American figures and narratives often take shape in memoirs or short personal narrations as is the case in the works of Annie Lanzilotto, who wrote a special piece for this volume and whose poetry and theatrical writing echo the themes of her memoir L is for Lion: An Italian Bronx Butch Freedom Memoir in which, as the title suggests, she walks us through the often difficult experience of understanding and defending these two aspects of her identity.34 A similar foregrounding of the intimate informs Giovanna Capone’s In My Neighborhood: Poetry and Prose from an Italian-American,35 and the works of Mary Beth Caschetta, both of which negotiate closeted identities, as Eilis Kierans elaborates in her chapter in this book. Clarissa Clò picks these themes up in her chapter on the salacious narratives of Lawrence Madalena aka Loren Wahl whose pulp works Confetti for Gino and Invisible Glass she analyzes.36 Within American theater the visibility of gay Italian Americans is certainly notable, as is clear from Avicolli Mecca and Lanzilotto who are both prolific playwrights and performers. Crucial to any conversation about Italian American queer theater is the aforementioned producer Joe Cino, who provided a safe space for the open expression of sexuality and paved the way for gay-themed theater. More recently, plays with both explicitly Italian American themes and gay characters have made it to mainstream theater stages, one need only consider My Big Gay Italian Wedding and its 33  Mary Cappello, “Nothing to Confess: A Lesbian in Italian America,” Fuori: Essays by Italian American Lesbians and Gays, ed. A.  Tamburri, (New York: Bordighera Press, 2013), 94. 34  Annie Lanzilotto, L Is for Lion: An Italian Bronx Butch Freedom Memoir (Albany: SUNY Press, 2013). 35  Giovanna Capone, In My Neighborhood: Poetry and Prose from an Italian-American, (Fairfield, CA: Bedazzled Ink, 2014); 36  Lorenzo Madalena, Confetti for Gino, (Montreal: Guernica, 1959); Loren Wahl, Invisible Glass, (Washington DC: Guild Press, 1965).

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follow up My Big Gay Italian Funeral, which, much like Italian American gay representation in other mainstream media, tend to play up the assumed cultural incompatibilities between these identities for the sake of comedy.37 This co-mingling of Italian American experience and gay identity finds expression in other works, like Albert Innaurato’s Gemini and Joey Merlo’s This Boy Cometh to the Mountain.38 In his chapter in this volume, John Champagne complicates this identity intersection even further by looking at it through the politics of race as he investigates the works of Italian American playwright Victor Bumbalo. Cinematic representations that highlight the intersections of Italian American culture and LGBTQIA+ identities, perhaps unsurprisingly, often lean on the humor underlying the seeming incongruence between the two groups; we need only think of the premise of Kiss Me Guido (1997), father Roberto’s difficulty accepting his son’s homosexuality in My Big Gay Italian Wedding (2018),39 and the troubled yet comical coming out narratives of Mambo Italiano (2003), Friends & Family (2001), and Alto (2015)—the latter two of which are analyzed by Julia Heim in this volume. When the links between the people (or actors) and their Italian heritage are erased in these depictions, audiences may have to rely on less overt connections between Italian American and LGBTQIA+ identities, and use “insider” knowledge about who is, or is not, in the “club,” as is 37  Though these works portray these identities in often exaggerated and comedic ways, the project behind the production has been focused on LGBTQIA+ equality, raising money and awareness for both marriage equality and the Trevor Project, a non-profit that works on suicide prevention among LGBTQIA+ youth. My Big Gay Italian Wedding, Script by Anthony J. Wilkinson, (New York City: Actors Playhouse, November 14, 2003); My Big Gay Italian Funeral, Script by Anthony J.  Wilkinson, (New York City: St. Luke’s Theater, New York City, June 16, 2013). Wilkinson has also written and produced a third in the series My Big Gay Italian Christmas. 38  From its advent in 1976, Gemini then went from a low-budget production, to become a broadway show, and later a motion picture, finally returning once more to the stage in 2006. Innaurato reached a limited popularity, possibly, because of the way he depicts marginal identities and the prejudice they face. As Raymond Jean-Frontain notes “His plays are remarkable as much for the marginalizing ethnic identity, sexual orientation, and body image of their characters (people whom he describes as sitting “outside the standard categories our great society thinks so immutable”), as they are for the playwright’s refusal to adopt a politically correct attitude concerning the unfairness of prejudice.” “Innaurato, Albert” in GLBTQ Archive, 2015. www.glbtq.com. 39  While the film version of My Big Gay Italian Wedding is actually an Italian production, it is based on the Italian American play of the same name.

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the case with Alyssa Milano’s queer character in Embrace of the Vampire (1995), or with trans ball icon Venus Xtravaganza, as Nick Boston discusses in his chapter.40 When it comes to television, Italian American gays are not an uncommon sight, as we can see from the chapters in this book. Common character types include the love interest, like Mikey in Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (2015–2019), Vince on Will & Grace (1998–2006), and Joey on Difficult People (2015–2017), all of which are analyzed in depth in Carmelo Galati’s chapter “Queering the Guido or Guidoing the Queer.” We also see recurrent instances of the token gay friend—alà the character Anthony Merentino on Sex & The City (1998–2004); the butch dyke character—often portrayed by actor Lea DeLaria; and the scandalous closeted character—like Sal Romano on Mad Men (2007–2015), or the frequently written about case of Vito Spatafore Sr. on The Sopranos (1999–2007). While these Italian American LGBTQIA+ characters seemingly never take center stage within mainstream televisual narratives, they nevertheless have a visible presence as Aria Cabot discusses in her chapter “Time to Come Out Girl.” In analyzing TVLand’s Younger (2015–2019) Cabot finds radical carnivalesque potential in the lesbian best friend character Maggie. It is important to acknowledge those Italian American televisual figures who, while not necessarily on the LGBTQIA+ spectrum as actors or characters, serve as fundamental to the queer American zeitgeist, like the many ethnically charged characters depicted by actress Rose Marie, the gender-bending performance of Bea Arthur’s character Dorothy Zbornak on The Golden Girls, or the Italian American cop character common to gay porn.41

 Any conversation about queerness in cinematic history is deeply indebted to the work of gay Italian American historian Vito Russo and his groundbreaking text The Celluloid Closet (New York: Harper Collins, 1981). 41  As George De Stefano writes, this character has become “a gay erotic icon, the ‘hot Italian cop’—usually mustached, muscular, and hairy of chest, presumably heterosexual but sexually attainable under the right circumstances.” [“Identity Crisis: Race, Sex and Ethnicity in Italian American Cinema,” in Mediating Ethnicity: New Italian American Cinema, Giuliana Muscio, Joseph Sciorra, Giovanni Spagnoletti, Anthony Julian Tamburri, eds. (New York: John D Calandra Institute, 2010), 12.] 40

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Mediating Meaning When thinking through these mediated meanings we remember Vito Russo’s words: “Hollywood is too busy trying to make old formulas hit the jackpot again to see the future. Hollywood is yesterday, forever catching up with what’s happening today. This will change only when it becomes financially profitable, and reality will never be profitable until society overcomes its fear and hatred of difference and begins to see that we’re all in this together.”42 We will not wait for Hollywood; we are piecing together the traces of bodies and experiences that have otherwise been predetermined and codified in ways that erase us from our own identities. The breadth of the material covered by the different chapters in this volume pushes back against the idea that queerness can be siloed to a corner of any particular field, showing specifically the ways in which Italian American queerness is an integral part of Italian American experience and cultural production. This book is a way to make these identities and characters visible as a collective, as a group that both expands the landscape of Italian American representation, and acknowledges an Italian American ethnic specificity (in all its plurality) within LGBTQIA+ communities and their media representations. By including scholarship on television, film, poetry, theater, pulp fiction, memoir, and performance, Spaghetti Sissies brings together, and makes sense of these representations within the frameworks of an expansive American media landscape. There are, most certainly, differences in the role and purpose of these various depictions; differences, for example, between Italian American media with LGBTQIA+ characters, LGBTQIA+ targeted media with Italian American characters, and American media with Italian American gay characters, each one carrying with it the specific connotations and codes of the assumed cultural frame of its intended audience. Putting them all together as part of the same conversation about Italian American LGBTQIA+ representation means recognizing that these people and these characters exist in each of these categories, and move in and through these contexts, perhaps differently, but always with consideration of their intersection. Just as collectives like Macaronis Riot use closed network groups on social media to foster community between politically radical individuals of Italian descent, so too are other radical, queer Italian American and Italian diasporic peoples using and making media to represent their own  Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet, (New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1987), 323.

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identities.43 In this book, we get at the personal aspect of this with a series of “Spotlight” pieces written by media makers who were invited to speak to their own understandings of how they live their Italian American LGBTQIA+ intersections. As Mitch Del Monico says in his spotlight: “it is my sense of being part of families—both blood and chosen—that helps me get through all this with my sense of self intact. I realize that not every Italian American queer person has a family who can show up with love for them. I hoped that by making my movie, people could at least begin having those conversations.”44 Giving voice to those working in media—television, film, radio, performance, and more—alongside scholarly studies about how these groups are represented, creates a dynamic conversation, one that very explicitly makes evident the bodies and identities for whom these representations matter. Calling this volume “Spaghetti Sissies” is in direct reference to the Spaghetti Western film genre: the genre, in its day, worked to breakdown traditional Hollywood conventions of the Western film, and pushed the standards of propriety that typified American Westerns, all within the constraints of cheaper budgets, a move we consider a queering and opening of generic and industry confines.45 We also believe that the genre points to an important relationship between Italian and American media in ways that toy with hierarchy, mimicry, and camp. Thus, with our title we celebrate this transgressive style and its pushing of conventional boundaries, just as so many of the works in our volume expand the boundaries of what it means to be Italian American and what it means to be queer. “Spaghetti Sissies” as an expression further reclaims both terms in a way that makes space for a new and empowering Italian American queerness and queer Italian Americanness, and all this with a not-so-subtle nod to the kitchen as a space where so much of our Italian American identity is learned, shaped, rejected, spilled, and savored.

43  You can learn more about the Macaronis Riot group, and their radical collective mission at: https://linktr.ee/macaronisriot 44  Mitch Del Monico, “Spotlight 6: Mitch Del Monico,” Infra. 45  For more on this queer reading of the Spaghetti Western see Sole Anatrone, “A Queerer Road: Crossing Borders On and Off the Screen in Corazones de Mujer,” in Queering Italian Media, Anatrone and Heim (ed.s), (Latham: Lexington Books, 2020), 57–74.

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Works Cited D’Acierno, Pellegrino “Introduction,” In The Italian American Heritage: A Companion to Literature and Arts. Edited by Pellegrino D’Acierno, ebook. New York: Routledge, 2021. De Stefano, George. “Identity Crisis: Race, Sex and Ethnicity in Italian American Cinema.” In Mediating Ethnicity: New Italian American Cinema, Giuliana Muscio, Joseph Sciorra, Giovanni Spagnoletti, Anthony Julian Tamburri, eds. New York: John D Calandra Institute, 2010. Eco, Umberto. “The Phenomenology of Mike Bongiorno” In Misreadings. Translated by William Weaver, 156–164. New York: Harcourt, 1993. Frontain, Raymond-Jean. “Innaurato, Albert” in GLBTQ Archive, 2015. www.glbtq.com. ———. From Wise Guys to Wise Men: The Gangster and Italian American Masculinities. New York: Routledge, 2006. Gardaphé, Fred. Italian Signs, American Streets: The Evolution of Italian American Narrative (New Americanists). Durham: Duke University Press, 1996. Golden Girls, Season 6 Episode 7 “Zborn Again.” Directed by Matthew Diamond. Aired November 3, 1990 on NBC. Messina, Elizabeth. “Perversions of Knowledge: Confronting Racist Ideologies behind Intelligence Testing” in Anti-Italianism: Essays on A Prejudice. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Mittell, Jason. Television and American Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Morley, David. “At Home With Television.” In Television after TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition. Edited by Jan Olsson and Lynn Spigel, 303–323. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. Muscio, Giuliana. Napoli/New York/Hollywood. New  York: Fordham University Press, 2019. Russo, Vito. The Celluloid Closet. New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1987. Talese, Gay. “High Notes: Tony Bennett in the Studio with Lady Gaga,” The New Yorker September 12, 2011. Ventimiglia, Peter James. “Through the Other’s Eyes: The Image of the Italian American in Modern Drama” in Italian Americana Spring 1976 Vol. 2. No. 2 (1976): 228–239.

CHAPTER 2

Queering the Kitchen: Cultural Friction at the Italian American Table Eilis Kierans

The kitchen is a political space where cultures and ideologies meet and struggle for dominance, especially in Italian American households where food and family are integral to one’s selfhood. Undoubtedly, Italian American identity is inextricably intertwined with food-centered events, such as Sunday dinner and religious holidays. Scholars across the disciplines have understandably focused on the importance of food, family, and identity in the Italian American context (e.g., Cinotto 2013; Gabaccia 1998; Luconi 2004). Food historian Simone Cinotto points out that “critical studies do not deny the magic of the [Italian American] family table as the site where expressions of solidarity, bonds of affection, storytelling, humor, material culture, and taste have produced an original

E. Kierans (*) Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Heim, S. Anatrone (eds.), Spaghetti Sissies Queering Italian American Media, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10197-7_2

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Italian American identity.”1 Yet, as much as the Italian American table is a space that brings people together, it is also a space that drives them apart. While this phenomenon has more recently attracted the attention of scholars writing through the lens of feminism (e.g., DeSalvo and Giunta 2002; Bona and DiGregorio Kightlinger 2015; Dottolo and Dottolo 2018), there is a paucity of research in the field of Italian American food studies that focuses on the queer presence. This chapter intends to address the overlooked topic of non-normative sexuality in relation to food, gender, and Italian American identity.2 Perhaps unsurprisingly, much of the Italian American LGBTQ community’s reframing and fleshing out of the self takes place around the table.3 Thus, exploring foodways in Italian American queer literature is a fruitful field of inquiry ripe with potential. As food anthropologist Carole M. Counihan expresses, “Eating together lies at the heart of social relations: at meals we create family and friendships by sharing food, tastes, values, and ourselves.”4 Conversely, however, “the collapse of food sharing is often linked to the breakdown of social solidarity.”5 In essence, food spaces are powerful contact zones imbued with fluid meaning, for example, oppression, growth, and empowerment. In “Arts of the Contact Zone”, Mary Louise Pratt uses the term “contact zone” to refer to “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out 1  Simone Cinotto, “The Contested Table: Food, Gender, and Generations in Italian Harlem, 1920–1930,” in The Italian American Table: Food, Family, and Community in New York City (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2013), Ch. 1, Kindle. 2   See Simone Cinotto, ed., “All Things Italian: Italian American Consumers, the Transnational Formation of Taste, and the Commodification of Difference,” in Making Italian America: Consumer Culture and the Production of Ethnic Identities (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), Kindle. In his introduction to the volume, Cinotto tangentially expands upon the scope of his earlier ideas and touches upon the Italian American queer experience: “Lesbian and gay Italian Americans have confronted their discrimination within the group while reclaiming ethnic expressions of solidarity, bonds of affection, storytelling, humor, material culture, and taste to produce original Italian American lesbian and gay identities” (emphasis added). He does not, however, expand upon this observation in his work. 3  Donna R.  Gabaccia, We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1998), Kindle. It is worth echoing Gabaccia’s succinct yet powerful idea that “[w]e are what we eat.” 4  Carole M.  Counihan, “Food, Culture, and Gender,” in The Anthropology of Food and Body: Gender, Meaning, and Power (New York: Routledge, 1999), 6, Kindle. 5  Ibid., 14.

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in many parts of the world today.”6 Pratt highlights that values such as equality, fraternity, and liberty are glorified but rarely achieved in imagined communities: “The concept of the contact zone is intended in part to contrast with ideas of community that underlie much of the thinking about language, communication, and culture that gets done in the academy.”7 She lists components of the contact zone that are growing more visible in cosmopolitan American society: Autoethnography, transculturation, critique, collaboration, bilingualism, mediation, parody, denunciation, imaginary dialogue, vernacular expression—these are some of the literate arts of the contact zone. Miscomprehension, incomprehension, dead letters, unread masterpieces, absolute heterogeneity of meaning—these are some of the perils of writing in the contact zone.8

She contends that these characteristics are becoming increasingly more widespread in society. As a result, it has become more difficult for people to maintain that a stable reality exists. In their autobiographical work, Italian American writers Giovanna Capone, Mary Beth Caschetta, and Mary Saracino offer a glimpse into their unstable realities.9 Their writing—penned in a similar vein as a memoir—details their difficult transitions from childhood to womanhood around the 1970s and 1980s.10 They come of age during a period when 6  Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Profession (1991): 34, https://www. jstor.org/stable/25595469. 7  Ibid. 8  Ibid. 9  See Stefano Luconi, “Food and Ethnic Identity in Italian-American Narrative,” Prospero. Rivista di letterature straniere, comparatistica e studi culturali 11 (2004): 206, http://hdl. handle.net/10077/6292. Luconi aptly points out that “[n]arrative—both fictional and autobiographical—is a proper field to analyze the inner meanings encoded in Italian Americans’ food-related behavior.” 10  For a sketch of Louise DeSalvo’s approach to memoir writing, see Nancy Caronia and Edvige Giunta, eds., introduction to Personal Effects: Essays on Memoir, Teaching, and Culture in the Work of Louise DeSalvo (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 1, Kindle. The autobiographical works of Capone, Caschetta, and Saracino adhere to Louise DeSalvo’s notion of memoir. Caronia and Giunta point out: “DeSalvo suggests that memoir does not outline a linear journey of the self-in-the-making, a self invested in its separateness and individuation from the community of its origins. Instead, the contemporary memoir, in its most original and literary manifestation, theorizes a notion of the self less individualistic and more fluid and inclusive than the self of autobiography.”

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second-wave feminists were pushing for workplace equality, reproductive freedom, and parity in the completion of household labor. It was a time when Capone, Caschetta, and Saracino were waging their own unique yet related resistances against their families’ Catholic, patriarchal beliefs. In their writing, they poignantly portray their opposition to living as feminine Other in the kitchen while simultaneously seeking to overcome their families’ Othering of them as lesbians at the table. Louise DeSalvo and Edvige Giunta emphasize that “[a]lthough Italian American women’s response to their culture is ambivalent—a simultaneous embrace and rejection—their work is ultimately transformative.”11 Inevitably, each author highlights the dynamic nature of identity in their own unique way. As writer Kym Ragusa reminds us,12 “No identity is singular, clear-cut, fixed—each is situated in histories and in daily lives that are endlessly complex.”13 Indeed, one’s identity—be it sexual, religious, or transnational—is constantly in flux and often clashes with societal norms. Capone, Caschetta, and Saracino depict food-related spaces as contact zones ripe with conflict and reconciliation—spaces where ethnicities, ideologies, and foods intersect “and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power.”14 In The Milk of Almonds: Italian American Women Writers on Food and Culture, Louise DeSalvo and Edvige Giunta examine the complex and intricate relationship between food and Italian American women: “[They] have long questioned their place within a culture that, while it can be a source of sustenance, it can also represent a patriarchal force that often diminishes and silences women. And so we invited contributors to examine personal responses to food and how these have been shaped by the facts of our culture, ethnicity, and gender.”15 In this chapter I widen the breadth of the discussion in order to 11  Louise DeSalvo and Edvige Giunta, eds., introduction to The Milk of Almonds: Italian American Women Writers on Food and Culture (New York: The Feminist Press, 2002), 25, Kindle. 12  See Kym Ragusa, The Skin Between Us: A Memoir of Race, Beauty, and Belonging (New York: W.W.  Norton and Company, 2006). In her memoir, Ragusa—a woman of Italian-­ American and African-American heritage—discusses the tensions of a racially divided New York City around the 1960s and 1970s. It is also worth noting that Ragusa was a creative writing student of Louise DeSalvo at Hunter College. 13  Kym Ragusa, “It’s Not Easy Being Green: On Culture and Ethnicity,” in Olive Grrrls: Italian North American Women and the Search for Identity, ed. Lachrista Greco (Madison: Olive Grrrl Press, 2013), Part I, Kindle. 14  Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” 34. 15  Louise DeSalvo and Edvige Giunta, The Milk of Almonds, 14.

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shed light on the multifaceted ways cultural friction rooted in gender, ethnicity, and sexuality impacts how each author navigates their fluid relationship to family and food-centered contact zones of the home. In doing so, I show how the authors resist and rethink ethnic traditions and thus reframe their relationship to the cherished recipes and culinary spaces of their culture.16 Giovanna Capone’s In My Neighborhood: Poetry and Prose from an Italian-American depicts home as a place teeming with vitality, a space she cherishes despite that as a young woman she does not feel free to express her sexuality within its walls. Capone is a second-generation Italian American of Neapolitan descent. She was raised by working-class parents in an immigrant neighborhood in New York where she came of age around the early 1980s. In her short story “Greyhound Bus,” she recounts the first time she left the Bronx at the age of eighteen to live with her girlfriend in Texas. A couple of weeks prior, she suffers her perceptive mother’s hostile suspicion: She shakes her finger in my face. “You keep giving me answers,” she says, “but you ain’t giving me the right answers.” The sweat is beading up on her lip. “Ever since you’ve been hanging around that girl you got all these crazy ideas in your head. Now you wanna go down there.” 17

Capone’s father takes a more cunning approach to convincing his daughter to stay in New York; guilt trips are his poison of choice. As he drives Capone to the bus station, he gripes about the numerous sacrifices he has made for his ungrateful children: “ ‘I’m breaking my ass,’ he says, ‘and for what?’ He flicks the fingertips of one hand under his chin. ‘Va fangool!’”18 It is important to note that during this period—at the restless age of eighteen—Capone has not yet come out to her family: “The more he talks, the more I feel like a liar, a gutless liar. He doesn’t know the real reason I’m 16  See Sandra M. Gilbert and Roger J. Porter, eds., “Introduction: At the Family Hearth: Memory, Identity, Ethnicity,” in Eating Words: A Norton Anthology of Food Writing (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2015), 84, Kindle. Gilbert and Porter emphasize the importance of the representation of food in memoirs: “Some of the most celebrated culinary writing appears in memoirs, many of them coming-of-age stories that show how, when, and why the author became captivated, indeed often obsessed, by food.” 17  Giovanna Capone, “Greyhound Bus,” in In My Neighborhood: Poetry and Prose from an Italian-American (California: Bedazzled Ink, 2014), Part III, Kindle. 18  Ibid.

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leaving and neither does Ma. I can’t tell them I fell in love with a woman.”19 Capone, however, harbors little resentment for being unable to live openly as a lesbian in the family home. On the contrary, she expresses pity for her father: “All his kids are turning out wrong. Now this one’s a dyke. I feel bad for him.”20 She suggests that being queer in her Italian American family is as depraved as drinking too much at the bar like her brother. Thus, Capone intuits that expressing her sexuality openly does not entail leaving the family home on her own volition, but rather it is grounds for speedy expulsion. Capone’s Catholic parents have a narrow view of sexuality and how women ought to behave in romantic relationships. It is telling that even her cisgender, heterosexual sister is constrained to leave home in order to navigate her courtship on her own terms. In “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” cultural anthropologist Gayle S. Rubin explores the framework of sex and politics with the intention of creating a liberatory range of ideas about sexuality. In her essay, she outlines the traditional pyramid of sexuality that deems most sexualities abnormal: “Modern Western societies appraise sex acts according to a hierarchical system of sexual value. Marital, reproductive heterosexuals are alone at the top erotic pyramid.”21 She proposes that although longterm lesbian and gay couples skirt respectability, “bar dykes and promiscuous gay men are hovering just above the groups at the very bottom of the pyramid,” for example, sex workers and transgender people.22 Capone’s parents’ ideology is closely aligned with Rubin’s hierarchy. They, however, assume their children are heterosexual, unable to fathom that their offspring’s sexualities could stray from Catholic tradition. Consequently, throughout Capone’s youth, her parents are adamant she abide by outdated norms upheld by the gender binary. For example, we can deduce that she is allowed to date boys, but only on their strict terms. In “‘Sunday Dinner? You Had to Be There!’,” Simone Cinotto highlights that at the beginning of the twentieth-century immigrant parents rigidly controlled girls, a norm that followed “the patriarchal code of honor and shame of rural southern Italy, in which a girl’s offense against a rigid  Ibid.  Ibid. 21  Gayle S. Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, ed. Carole S. Vance (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 151. 22  Ibid. 19 20

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sexual morality would jeopardize the respect (rispetto) of the community for the entire family—especially its males.”23 Despite that Capone’s coming of age takes place in the late 1900s, her parents nonetheless seek to limit her independence outside of the home—contrary to some progressive immigrant parents of the 1930s, who accepted their children’s exploration in the public sphere on the condition that they attend family events in the private one: In many urbanizing societies of the twentieth century, parents were inventing new ways to deal with their increasingly independent children. In Italian Harlem negotiating the conflicts between immigrants and their American-­ born children resulted in a distinctive generational contract. The terms of this contract were fairly straightforward: immigrant parents would grant their children much greater autonomy in public in exchange for showing allegiance to the family through ritual and symbolic actions—most importantly the regular participation in the gatherings centered on ritual food consumption. 24

Although Italian American familial norms were slowly changing, Capone’s parents remained stubbornly rooted in conventions of the past.25 Perhaps unsurprisingly, Capone’s mother began socializing her to play guardian of the hearth at a tender age. In her short story “A Place at the Table” she explains: “Then she’d ask me to set the table. I usually did so, complaining all the way that my brothers never got assigned such a task.”26 23  Simone Cinotto, “‘Sunday Dinner? You Had to Be There!’: Making Food, Family, and Nation in Italian Harlem, 1930–1940,” in The Italian American Table: Food, Family, and Community in New York City (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2013), Ch. 2, Kindle. 24  Ibid. 25  For an overview of the importance of Sunday dinners to Italian immigrants arriving in the United States between 1890 and 1940, see Simone Cinotto, “All Things Italian: Italian American Consumers, the Transnational Formation of Taste, and the Commodification of Difference,” in Making Italian America: Consumer Culture and the Production of Ethnic Identities, ed. Simone Cinotto (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), Kindle. Cinotto observes: “The bountiful Sunday dinners of Italian immigrants could seem wasteful, indigestible, and vulgar to middle-class observers, but for immigrants they were crucial occasions of solidarity building and fun, in which familiar, nutritious food intended to regenerate and sustain hard-working bodies would be exchanged and consumed.” Sunday dinners and other food events fostered camaraderie and created a sense of community among Italian immigrants. 26  Giovanna Capone, “A Place at the Table,” in In My Neighborhood: Poetry and Prose from an Italian-American (California: Bedazzled Ink, 2014), Part III, Kindle.

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Capone perceives that she is being groomed to do the traditional female gender role. Gender theorist Judith Butler argues that as opposed to being a gender, one is always doing a gender. The internal essence of gender is not natural, but rather it is constructed through discourse and manufactured through the duplication of the gendered gestures of the body. The performative effect of repeated acts is the naturalization of heterosexuality and a binary gender system.27 In essence, Capone’s mother would like her to repeat and internalize the monotonous tasks that she as mother and housewife performs in the family home day after day. In doing so, she reinforces the socially constructed idea that domestic labor is women’s load to carry. Indubitably, women have traditionally been saddled with the responsibility of bringing food and family together. In Western culture, the binary gender system has long framed the kitchen as woman’s corner of the world where feminine traits take center stage. It is within the confines of the kitchen that little girls learn submission and servitude usually at their own expense. Counihan observes that “[r]eciprocity of giving and receiving, of cooking and eating, makes for equality among partners, and its lack contributes to power imbalances. In many ways, food establishes and reflects male and female identity and relationships.”28 Indubitably, many women are forced to swallow domestic exploitation.29 Capone depicts the kitchen as her mother’s sphere, and she remembers her most fondly within its confines: “I remember the smells of my own mother’s kitchen / the

27  For a comprehensive explanation of Butler’s gender theory, see Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 33. She illustrates that “gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being.” 28  Carole Counihan, “Food, Culture, and Gender,” 13. 29  For an excellent example of domestic exploitation in Italian Canadian literature, see Maria Francesca Di Scala, “How I Found Feminism,” in Olive Grrrls, ed. Lachrista Greco (Madison: Olive Grrrl Press, 2013), Part II, Kindle. As a child, the protagonist has a “feminist baptism” at the dinner table when she starts to question why the unspoken expectation is that her mother should retrieve the provolone from the refrigerator despite that the cheese is for her father and he is seated closer to the fridge: “Why, I wondered, did my mother, whom I watched tackle task after task all day long—have to get up and get the cheese? Cheese that was not requested. Cheese that was not even necessary. My father was not even sure he wanted the cheese, for crying out loud.”

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sizzling sound of fresh garlic in a pan / on Sunday morning.”30 While Capone’s mother may cook with cuore, the kitchen is nonetheless a place she is expected to occupy. In essence, women prepare food, one of many humdrum and inessential, intermediary duties they are required to perform,31 whereas men create cuisine, an act often regarded as an awe-­ inspiring and essential form of art.32 In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir describes Man as Subject and Woman as Object: “She is determined and differentiated in relation to man, while he is not in relation to her; she is the inessential in front of the essential. He is the Subject; he is the Absolute. She is the Other.”33 Capone’s parents attempt to mold her into an inessential Object, as opposed to encouraging her to embrace the essential Subject that she is. Although Capone goes to great pains to hide her sexuality, she makes it no mystery that she is deeply attached to her family’s Italian American traditions. She is particularly fond of the delectable dishes with which her parents furnish the family table on Sundays. As her father drives her to the bus station, distraught to see her go, they pass a Wonder Bread truck that reminds her of the hearty family fare she is leaving behind: I never knew what Wonder Bread was till I went to school and saw kids eating baloney and cheese sandwiches on white bread. I never envied them, nor felt like I was missing out. Mario always bought Italian bread with sesame seeds, whole wheat or dark rye, and that’s what I prefer today. Red peppers 30  Giovanna Capone, “Some People Are Ashamed of Spaghetti,” in In My Neighborhood: Poetry and Prose from an Italian-American (California: Bedazzled Ink, 2014), Part I, Kindle. 31  For an overview of the “inessential intermediary,” see Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier (New York: Vintage Books, (1949) 2011), 481. She expresses: “Done every day, [housework] becomes monotonous and mechanical; it is laden with waiting: waiting for the water to boil, for the roast to be cooked just right, for the laundry to dry; even if different tasks are well organized, there are long moments of passivity and emptiness; most of the time, they are accomplished in boredom; between present life and the life of tomorrow, they are but an inessential intermediary.” 32  See Andrea L. Dottolo and Carol Dottolo, “Introduction: Setting the Table,” Italian American Women, Food, and Identity: Stories at the Table (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), Kindle. Dottolo and Dottolo highlight the gendered nature of preparing food: “For example, cooking at home, for one’s family, is considered feminine. If a man assumed these responsibilities, his behaviors would also be deemed feminine. Meanwhile, ‘chefs’ are often men, and this role is also masculinized. Who is considered a cook or a chef is not only about gender, but also about how cultural contexts define food and power.” 33  Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-­ Chevallier (New York: Vintage Books, (1949) 2011), 6.

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fried in olive oil is a lot more appetizing than baloney. Actually, I love the traditions of my culture. I’m proud of them. But they’d never guess it, especially lately. When I’m angry and feel suffocated, the last thing I wanna do is appreciate them. 34

In My Neighborhood is peppered with poems that focus on Capone’s relationship to food, family, and tradition, which she steadfastly defends and praises. In her poem “Some People are Ashamed of Spaghetti” she expresses: “We Italians had a history / a distinct culture and ancestry / it’s not what you see on T.V. / Where some guy named Guido is a low class ass / and every goombah carries a loaded gun.”35 In another poem titled “Who Are you?” she communicates her multiethnicity through food: “As a child, we ate eggplant and mozzarell’ / lasagna and braciole / calamari and linguine with clams / We ate baloney and Velveeta too / like the rest of the Americans.”36 However, despite dabbling in American fast foods, she describes the traditions of Italian culture as a saving grace: “I carry the gifts of my culture to this day / They keep at bay / the Big Macs and Cracker Jacks and Wonder Bread ways / of this culture crushing / Anglo American land.”37 More specifically, she depicts the dinner table as a space that keeps her cultural rituals strong: “Today when I pick up my fork / I feel all of us together on Sunday / keeping the traditions alive / and our culture intact.”38 Despite the obstacles Italian cultural norms impose, Capone is careful not to criticize Italian food traditions. On the contrary, she relishes the culinary customs that make her proud to be Italian. Thus, as Capone describes in “Greyhound Bus,” it is only when her family home fades farther into the distance that she reflects warmly on the Italian delicacies of her upbringing. She is grateful for the precious fruits of her family, ones she is acutely aware are not to be found in Texas. And so, as her father makes his last desperate plea, she is fleetingly at a crossroads: “Mario’s final question rings in my ears. ‘I don’t know why you gotta do this.’ Damn him for making me doubt myself.”39 Capone waves a

 Giovanna Capone, “Greyhound Bus,” Part III.  Giovanna Capone, “Some People are Ashamed of Spaghetti,” Part I. 36  Giovanna Capone, “Who Are You?,” in In My Neighborhood: Poetry and Prose from an Italian-American (California: Bedazzled Ink, 2014), Part I, Kindle. 37  Ibid. 38  Giovanna Capone, “Some People are Ashamed of Spaghetti,” Part I. 39  Giovanna Capone, “Greyhound Bus,” Part III. 34 35

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teary-­eyed goodbye; she understands that she cannot flourish within the narrow confines of the family home. She must go her own way. It is Capone’s inability to come out of the closet at home that shapes many of her major life decisions, such as where to reside. In Epistemology of the Closet, queer theory scholar Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick examines the limitations that binary oppositions impose upon people, compelling many to hide their sexuality for fear of the consequences they may face: “The gay closet is not only a feature of the lives of gay people. But for many gay people it is still the fundamental feature of social life; and there can be few gay people, however courageous and forthright by habit, however fortunate in the support of their immediate communities, in whose lives the closet is not still a shaping presence.”40 The rigid binary thinking of Capone’s family drives her far from the comfort of the family kitchen and dictates where she navigates space as a young woman. Indeed, around the mid-1900s many queer people in the United States were relocating to areas of the country that might offer them a supportive community where they could live freely and openly as themselves. Rubin describes socially motivated migration to cosmopolitan cities: In the United States, lesbian and gay male territories were well established in New  York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles in the 1950s. Sexually motivated migration to places such as Greenwich Village had become a sizable sociological phenomenon. By the late 1970s, sexual migration was occurring on a scale so significant that it began to have a recognizable impact on urban politics in the United States, with San Francisco being the most notable and notorious example.41

Today, New York City and San Francisco continue to be recognized for their large and robust LGBTQ+ presence. It is telling that although New York City was on Capone’s doorstep, an area to which members of the LGBTQ+ community have flocked since the mid-1900s, she ultimately makes her home on the other side of the country, eventually ending up in the San Francisco Bay Area where she lives today. Capone’s move across country suggests that she is unable to reconcile both her sexual identity and her ethnic identity too close to home. Thus, she leaves her ethnic community in New York in favor of embracing her lesbian identity 40  Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Oakland: University of California Press, (1990) 2008), 68. 41  Gayle S. Rubin, “Thinking Sex,” 156.

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more fully in California. Consequently, Capone experiences cultural tension, constrained to straddle two homes that compete for her attention. In her poem “At 23, I took a Greyhound Bus,” Capone sheds light on her life in the wake of relocating far from home. She expresses how, as an independent woman who does not conform to her family’s standards, she feels like estranged Other among her relatives: “At 23 / the power of the family is strong / It’s everything in fact, / and knowing that / you don’t belong / is misery.”42 She is subjected to scrutiny upon attending yearly family events with her “short dark hair / leather jacket / and a big black motorbike.”43 In particular, she describes the disgust she arouses in her dusty aunts, sternly clad in black: “Che vergogna! Malafemmina! / Defying the family….They’d die / if only they knew, / sifting clues / like lentil beans / They’d see me once a year / and stare.”44 Although Capone’s relatives are unaware that she has no intention of marrying a man, they are nonetheless scornful of the way she expresses femininity. It can be surmised that in “sifting clues” they suspect that her sexuality is not the kind supported by the Catholic Church. In an ironic tone, however, Capone underscores that it is also in the spirit of their religion to forgive sinners of their depravities: “Acts of Contrition / are powerful ammunition / against a young gay child / trying to stay alive.”45 She perceives that the way she expresses femininity, deemed perverse in her family’s eyes, ultimately costs her close ties with her Italian American relations and the tight-knit community with which she grew up: “Never mind. / This paesan’, in another time / used to make eggplant / with her mother.”46 Significantly, as an adult she depicts cooking as a cathartic outlet that allays the despair of not belonging. It is a treasured tradition that connects her to the community she left behind. Thus, she finds solace in being able to take old family recipes back to the comfort of her kitchen, a safe space where she is free to be both Italian American and lesbian: “Even now, at 53, / I sift Romano cheese / fry eggplant in a pan. / When all else fails / I can always cook.”47 In “Immigration, Isolation, and Industry” (1998), food historian Donna R. Gabaccia describes the eating customs of families who immigrated to 42  Giovanna Capone, “At 23, I took a Greyhound Bus,” in In My Neighborhood: Poetry and Prose from an Italian-American (California: Bedazzled Ink, 2014), Part I, Kindle. 43  Ibid. 44  Ibid. 45  Ibid. 46  Ibid. 47  Ibid.

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the United States during the 1800s and early 1900s. She notes that for immigrants “to abandon immigrant food traditions for the foods of Americans was to abandon community, family, and religion, at least in the minds of many immigrants.”48 Although Capone comes to understand that her family cannot offer her the nurturing environment that she needs to thrive, akin to her foremothers, she carries with her the sacred Italian recipes of her youth. And so, even though Capone returns to a quiet casa devoid of fellow paesans, it is in her California home that she evokes visceral memories of her childhood through the art of cooking. It is in solitude that she brings her family’s recipes to life while living freely as she pleases: “I can always make a good red sauce / and remind myself / that despite the cost / I’m the boss / in my kitchen and life.”49 It is ultimately in the comfort of her kitchen that Capone feels cradled in tradition on her own terms. Unlike Capone, however, many Italian Americans do not have wholesome memories of food and feast from childhood, and consequently they do not seek to preserve the traditions of their kin.50 In particular, Mary Beth Caschetta’s portrayal of her youth is devoid of vivid descriptions of food. Her ascetic depiction of family meals suggests that her home life was not happy. Indeed, it is raw and harrowing narratives like hers that complicate mainstream plotlines that glorify and idealize the Italian family table. Caschetta experienced a disturbing upbringing that in adulthood tempted her to cut ties with her ethnic community altogether. In her autobiographical short story “Bride of Christ” (1999), she recounts growing up in a prosperous, well-respected Italian American family in upscale Western New York during the late 1970s and 1980s.51 The youngest of 48  Donna R. Gabaccia, “Immigration, Isolation, and Industry,” in We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1998), Kindle. 49  Giovanna Capone, “At 23, I took a Greyhound Bus,” part I. 50  See, for example, Louise DeSalvo, Crazy in the Kitchen: Food, Feuds, and Forgiveness in an Italian American Family (New York: Bloomsbury, 2004). DeSalvo describes the desire of her mother, a second-generation Italian immigrant, to assimilate to American culture and the friction this creates with her stepmother (DeSalvo’s step-grandmother), a first-generation immigrant, who wholeheartedly tries to preserve the traditions of her Italian culture. In particular, DeSalvo illustrates her depressed mother’s affinity for American fast-food meals and her disdain for her stepmother’s Southern Italian peasant fare. 51  Mary Beth Caschetta, “Bride of Christ,” in A Woman Like That: Lesbian and Bisexual Writers Tell Their Coming Out Stories, ed. Joan Larkin (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), Kindle.

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four children, she describes family life as centering primarily around the needs of her three brothers. The story is divided into three sections, each of which recounts a different secret. In particular, she details the childhood sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of her father and brother beginning at the innocent age of five. Caschetta simultaneously explores and seeks to suppress her lesbian sexuality during the years in which she is sexually abused by her family members. While her stories highlight her mistrust of men, particularly esteemed ones, it is important to point out that Caschetta does not suggest that her sexuality is related to the sexual abuse inflicted on her by men.52 Her later short story “The Seven Sacraments” picks up where the “Bride of Christ” leaves off. 53 It is composed of seven non-linear sketches of her life, each one representing a different sacrament accompanied by a fish recipe that she sets out to prepare in anticipation of the Italian Feast of the Seven Fishes, celebrated on Christmas Eve. Caschetta organizes the dinner alongside her Italian American friend, Maria, during a volatile period of her life: “The Christmas Maria and I decided to cook the fish, we’d been friends nearly seven years. I’d flown out west, leaving behind a desperate feeling of barely being alive. I was a few months out of a six-year relationship that had been difficult and deceptive. I was tender, sensitive about being alone. I had no idea I was waking up into a new life, where love and happiness would make sense.”54 At the time, Caschetta had already come out to family and friends and experienced queer romantic relationships. Nonetheless, we can surmise that she continues to feel the remnants of the loneliness and despair she suffered in her past.

52  For an analysis of childhood sexual abuse in relation to sexual identity, see Monique D. Walker et al., “Childhood Sexual Abuse and Adult Sexual Identity Formation: Intersection of Gender, Race, and Sexual Orientation,” The American Journal of Family Therapy, Routledge 40, no. 5 (2012): 386, https://doi.org/10.1080/01926187.2011.627318. According to Walker et al., most relevant research indicates that more non-heterosexual people suffer from childhood sexual abuse than their heterosexual counterparts. Healthy sexual identity, quite like healthy eating behavior, is shaped by numerous factors. It, however, needs to be emphasized that although more non-heterosexual people have suffered from sexual abuse as children, the majority of research shows that there is “no direct causal link” between childhood sexual abuse and identifying as a non-heterosexual adult later in life. 53  Mary Beth Caschetta, “The Seven Sacraments,” in The Milk of Almonds: Italian American Women Writers on Food and Culture, ed. by Louise DeSalvo and Edvige Giunta (New York: The Feminist Press, 2002), 96–107, Kindle. 54  Ibid., 104.

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In her stories, Caschetta reflects on her forlorn childhood and the lack of support she received from the parents she was taught to trust and respect. She portrays a little girl who was encouraged to suffer in silence, suppress and forget while, ironically, she was forced to rely on her abusers for nourishment and care.55 During this period, “simple tasks had become mind-boggling; days jumbled, [her] brain easing from normal lines of thought. [She] was a train in danger of derailing starting from the first night [her] brother began coming into [her] room.”56 As Caschetta’s mental health deteriorated, she grew “whispery and cautious.”57 Understandably, her autobiographical writing highlights her contempt of her ethnic community, especially patriarchal figures—fathers, brothers, priests—who Italian Americans traditionally hail as protectors of family values. Yet, it is after openly condemning her family and breaking the silence—the code of omertà—that she gradually regains an appetite for the traditions of her culture.58 Although Caschetta is unable to forgive and forget the sins of her family, as a stable adult she expresses her desire to reconcile with her past through the restorative act of preparing the dishes of her foremothers. Moreover, she rewrites her relationship to her roots by breaking bread at the table of supportive Italian American amic*. Today, Caschetta has a healthy relationship with her ethnic community. However, decades passed before she was able to confront the deep-seated trauma of her childhood and to connect fruitfully with her Italian American heritage.

55  See Mary H.  Harvey and Judith L.  Herman, “The Trauma of Sexual Victimization: Feminist Contributions to Theory, Research and Practice.” PTSD Research Quarterly 3, no. 3 (1992): 1–8, hsdl.org/?view&did=13537. Incest survivors experience high levels of continual distress. However, sexual abuse inflicted by a primary caretaker with whom the victim is well acquainted (e.g., father or brother) has longer-lasting psychological effects than sexual abuse inflicted by a relative who does not reside in the victim’s home. 56  Mary Beth Caschetta, “Bride of Christ.” 57  Ibid. 58  For a summary of how Louise DeSalvo, similarly to Caschetta, transgressed the rules of omertà, see Nancy Caronia and Edvige Giunta, eds., introduction to Personal Effects: Essays on Memoir, Teaching, and Culture in the Work of Louise DeSalvo (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 18–19, Kindle. It is noteworthy that DeSalvo paved the way for breaking codes of omertà in Italian American immigrant narratives. Caronia and Giunta emphasize, “By writing of incest, physical abuse, and mental illness, not only does DeSalvo violate the taboos surrounding these subjects, but she also illustrates the complicated ways in which these forms of violence are interwoven with class and ethnic oppression.”

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Caschetta was raised in an Italian American family that trumpeted the patriarchal values of the Church. Her father “was the king of everything, and [his family] knew better than to challenge him, especially at a meal.”59 He was a respected gynecologist while her mother was a subservient housewife who catered to her husband’s whims. The lives of young girls were particularly restrictive: “As daughters we were policed by unreasonable curfews, hemmed in by history and the threat of pregnancy. Our brothers were the preferred ones—a fact we managed not to notice.”60 Yet, Caschetta would soon discover that the biggest threat to her body and well-being was not a stranger who lived outside of her community, but rather her own father and brother—the man she was raised to revere and a seemingly normal teenager ten years her senior. The sexual abuse they inflicted upon her is etched indelibly in her mind: Eventually, the memory of my father rose like the Erie Canal stench of 1977: I am small, almost five, with my father hovering over my bed. There is no possibility of a mistake or religious symbol: the image I see at thirty-one is frozen in black and orange, a clue only my body can decode. My body does the difficult work of remembering what my brain is slow to release. The door, his face, my pain, flesh that goes hot and then dead come together over time, like sluggish sheep in herding.61

Caschetta’s father played the role of the family patriarch, openly protective and dominant, yet secretly a perpetrator and pedophile. Her older brother both literally and figuratively followed in his father’s footsteps. He dubbed his little sister Tuner, a derogatory nickname used to convey the fishy odor of her vagina. Caschetta would awake in the night with her brother’s hands in her pants, and as its worst “[she] woke up with bruises, [her] skin turning colors from pinching.”62 Although Caschetta confides in her mother, she merely makes a halfhearted attempt to protect her; she seeks to prevent her son’s wandering hands by stringing bells on her daughter’s bedroom door. Perhaps she would have been safer under the roof of a

 Mary Beth Caschetta, “The Seven Sacraments,” 100.  Ibid. 61  Mary Beth Caschetta, “Bride of Christ.” 62  Ibid. 59 60

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stranger. 63 Caschetta is stuck in a stressful home environment from which she cannot escape. Day after day, she is constrained to share the dinner table with her abusers, beholden to her brother’s gaze as he glares at her with “a funny look across his face, as if the sun were in his eyes and he couldn’t quite make [her] out.”64 She is ultimately forced to swallow her trauma so that her family can maintain their image as the picture-perfect Italian American family. Undoubtedly, her childhood memories are not idyllic. Thus, it is understandable that she labored to “master the whispery murmur of Protestant girls, to control [her] hands, to refrain from giving the evil eye—or the finger—to someone stoonad enough to get in [her] way. [She] wanted to be a nice girl, not an Italian one….”65 Caschetta describes being Italian as hostile and hypocritical. She lived in a wealthy, close-knit community where children sucked down pasta twice a week, attended church regularly, swore in Italian and English, and assumed that noisy grandparents were the norm. She expresses that beyond the narrow confines of her family’s social circle she felt like Other: “As a kid, I knew enough to stick to my own—the other sons and daughters of Italian doctors—and downplay the nagging feeling that, outside of the small circle, I didn’t belong.”66 Caschetta longed to feel fully American and, as such, she attempted to reject the customs of her Italian community in the small ways she could. In doing so, however, she is confined to the fringes of both Italian and American society. As a young woman, Caschetta has more freedom to break away from Italian values and ideals and, instead, to embrace American ones. She was attracted to blonde boys and fantasized about marrying “into a polite first-­ class citizen status.”67 She was flattered when a boyfriend failed to 63  For pertinent childhood sexual abuse statistics, see Ángel Castro et  al., “Childhood Sexual Abuse, Sexual Behavior, and Revictimization in Adolescence and Youth: A Mini Review,” Frontiers in Psychology 10 (2019): 2, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02018. Castro et al. point out that child sexual abusers are usually a person the child loves, and the abuse typically takes place at home or school. In most cases, 85% of the time, the abuser is male, between 30 and 40 years old. Girls are three times more likely to suffer from child abuse than boys. Both girls and boys are at greatest risk of being sexually abused between 6 and 12 years of age. 64  Mary Beth Caschetta, “Bride of Christ.” 65  Mary Beth Caschetta, “The Seven Sacraments,” 96. 66  Ibid. 67  Ibid.

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remember she was Italian: “ ‘I always forget your ethnic.’ ”68 Yet, despite that Caschetta may have passed as an ordinary American girl, even as an adult living outside of the family home she is unable to escape the clutches of patriarchal culture. As a freshman in college, she quickly realized that the rotten fruits of her Italian roots were not unique to her family. On one occasion, she and a friend dutifully accompanied a visiting priest from Rome to his accommodation where he enticed them to engage in sexual play. The girls managed to escape his sinister presence and, just like her mother taught her, she tried to suppress her lingering memories. Caschetta suggests that her emotional stability was further shaken by this distressing event. We can infer that her capacity to trust men was greatly affected by their sacrilegious actions as they repeatedly sought to exploit her. As a young adult, the psychological effects of the abuse Caschetta suffered surfaced in her erratic eating behavior. In her later story “The Seven Sacraments,” she recalls flirting with anorexia as a college student adjusting to the “ketchup pasta mush” in the cafeteria.69 At the time, Caschetta did not fully forgo food, but she perceived her eating behavior as risky: Others shared my distaste—starving girls on the margin of every meal. They dressed in gossamer dresses, hair piled impossibly high, bones jutting, smiles strained. I’d grown aware of anorexia, finding myself precariously perched on its thin edge. Unnerved by their sunken eyes, I felt dangerously close to the truth about food: one day I could wake up and simply refuse.70

Although she was clearly not fond of mass-produced cafeteria grub, her negative relationship to food transcended mere fussiness. Many researchers have examined the correlation between sexual abuse, posttraumatic stress disorder, and abnormal eating habits. For example, Sarah R. Holzer et al. point out that “PTSD may be seen as the natural consequence of [sexual] trauma and, furthermore, eating disorder symptoms may help victims to manage aversive emotional arousal associated with PTSD.”71 We can deduce, in a similar vein as Catherine of Siena (who adopted an ascetic/anorexic lifestyle and adamantly refused a husband in favor of  Ibid.  Ibid., 101. 70  Ibid.,101–102. 71  Sarah R. Holzer et al., “Mediational significance of PTSD in the relationship of sexual trauma and eating disorders,” Child Abuse and Neglect 32 (2008): 565, https://doi. org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2007.07.011. 68 69

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God),72 that devoid of conjugal duties, Caschetta considered becoming the bride of an impalpable Christ preferable to becoming the bride/slave of man in flesh. Hence, despite the numerous times she witnessed firsthand the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church, both as a child and college student, she seriously contemplated taking the veil: “I spent months imagining myself in a little stone chamber with stern, dowdy women who believed in the merit of study and silence, who had simple, austere meals at regular hours, who might someday kiss me in the passionate name of the Lord.”73 Caschetta expresses how deeply she longed for solitude and stability, a room of her own among hearty women. However, it was also during her years at college that she eventually laid her religious aspirations to rest and traded in her Bible for the feminist literature of Woolf and Irigaray.74 Moreover, she learned a new vocabulary: “depression, scholarship, sexuality.”75 Indeed, similarly to feminist author bell hooks, she turned to theory because she was profoundly wounded. In “Theory as Liberatory Practice,” bell hooks conveys: “I came to theory because I was hurting—the pain within me was so intense that I could not go on living. I came to theory desperate, wanting to comprehend—to grasp what was happening around and within me. Most importantly, I wanted to make the hurt go away.”76 The enlightening ideas that Caschetta explores in her books help her to understand the fragments of her life. It was also as a 72  For an analysis of Catherine of Siena’s ascetism, ardent devotion to the Church, and subversion of patriarchal norms, see Rudy Bell, “I, Catherine,” Holy Anorexia (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1985), Ch. II, Kindle. Bell explains: “Following the death of her older sister, for which she blamed herself, Catherine was repelled by all worldliness, absolutely refused to take any bridegroom but Christ, and entered upon the conquest of her body.” 73  Mary Beth Caschetta, “The Seven Sacraments,” 101. 74  See Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, (1976) 1985). It should be pointed out that, like Caschetta, Woolf was a victim of incest and mistreated by her two older half-brothers. In the second section of her memoir, “A Sketch of the Past,” she briefly describes the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of her 18-year-old brother, Gerald Duckworth, when she was six years of age. She was 58 years old when she explicitly wrote about this distressing period of her life. Although Woolf arguably presents the sexual abuse as an event of tangential importance, her traumatic experience informs various themes that run throughout her memoir. 75  Mary Beth Caschetta, “The Seven Sacraments,” 101. 76  Bell hooks, “Theory as Liberatory Practice,” Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 4 (1991): 1, openyls.law.yale.edu. The pen name of Gloria Watkins is bell hooks. She chose this pseudonym in order to honor her mother and great-grandmother. She does not capitalize her name so that people pay more attention to her ideas than her identity.

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college student that she turned to self-writing, and akin to Woolf,77 she brought to light family secrets as a form of recovery from an ominous past of abuse by men: “In some way, going public with my writing replaced my childhood need for secrets and God. Or revenge against my father. I began to write the way I prayed—constantly and passionately—hoping I’d be able to find a forgiving listener.”78 Psychiatrist Judith L. Herman maintains that a victim’s reconstruction of their trauma narrative is lacking if they are unable to put the details of their story into words: “A narrative that does not include the traumatic imagery and bodily sensations is barren and incomplete.”79 Caschetta’s writing is in line with this criteria; her words are wrought with emotion and vivid descriptions of her difficult childhood. She shares pieces of her past, slowly, story by story—a cathartic process that alleviates her pain. It is through the raw and rejuvenating practice of self-writing that Caschetta builds a bridge between past and present. Self-writing, however, is not an easy undertaking. In Caschetta’s case, she must pen the unspeakable and face the shadows of her past. She is forced to reflect on the heinous misdeeds of her family, who are regarded as righteous and respectable in their community. She suffered immense injustice at the hands of her father and brother and halfhearted concern at the kitchen table of her mother: “My mother had abandoned me simply and without fuss; she turned a blind eye when her husband and son came to my bed at night to sin.”80 Socialized to treat men as superior, it was in her silence that Caschetta’s mother was complicit in her husband’s and son’s atrocious behavior. Thus, even if she did not agree with their conduct, she did not consider condemning them as a viable option. In later years, she suggests that she obsequiously went along with her husband’s evaluation of their son’s behavior despite evidence to the contrary:

77  For a closer exploration of the connections between Louise DeSalvo’s and Caschetta’s (life) writing, see Louise DeSalvo, Vertigo: A Memoir (New York: Dutton Books, 1996); Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989); Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling Our Stories Transforms Our Lives (London: The Women’s Press, 1999). It is interesting to note that, akin to Caschetta, Louise DeSalvo was deeply inspired by Woolf’s work and the restorative power of memoir writing. 78  Mary Beth Caschetta, “The Seven Sacraments,” 102. 79  Judith L. Herman, Trauma and Recovery (New York: BasicBooks, 1992), 177. 80  Mary Beth Caschetta, “The Seven Sacraments,” 106.

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“‘Your father thought he was adjusting to puberty’ though he was nearly eighteen.”81 We can assume that her family values were learned through religion, among other institutions. In The Will to Change (2004), bell hooks describes the physical violence her father inflicted upon her as a child, highlighting that her loving mother reinforced his behavior. She points out the origins of her parents’ patriarchal thinking: “At church they had learned that God created man to rule the world and everything in it and that it was the work of women to help men perform these tasks, to obey, and to always assume a subordinate role in relation to a powerful man. They were taught that God was male. These teachings were reinforced in every institution they encountered.” 82 In like manner, the patriarchal mindset of Caschetta’s mother stems from the teachings of the Church. Consequently, when Caschetta is sexually abused by her father and brother, her mother perpetuates the status quo through her unwillingness to take action and speak out against their ruthless and illegal actions. She deems it more important to protect the integrity of her sacred husband and son than to support her daughter through a traumatizing, life-changing experience. Within her Italian American family, Caschetta was doubly damned for being both a girl—sexually exploited by men—and a lesbian—shamed by family. Therefore, her solution was to reject Italian American culture altogether, and thus the family dinners and dishes that went along with it. Exclusion was a preferable and safer alternative to belonging. In “Queer Italian Americans as Part of the Mosaic of Gender, Sexuality, Ethnicity, Race, Class, and Power”,83 Michael Carosone explores the marginalization of queer Italian Americans within their own social groups, ones that are hardly naïve to the difficulties that marginalization creates. Yet, they are complicit in supporting patriarchal power structures and therefore fail to empathize with their own queer offspring, often preferring to exile them from family affairs: “Ironically, in essence, they are treated the same way  Mary Beth Caschetta, “Bride of Christ.”  Bell hooks, The Will to Change (New York: Atria Books, 2004), 18. Hooks’s mother is complicit in her husband’s abuse. When hooks is whipped by her father for refusing to handover her marbles, considered a boy’s toy, her mother comforts her, but she does not hesitate to admonish her for participating in male activities and failing to heed her father’s warnings. 83  Michael Carosone, “Queer Italian Americans as Part of the Mosaic of Gender, Sexuality, Ethnicity, Race, Class, and Power,” How Class Works Conference: Class and Sexuality, State University of New York at Stony Brook, June 2008, 1–20. 81 82

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their immigrant ancestors were treated by mainstream society when they arrived in America from Italy.”84 Carosone discusses the crises of identity that many queer Italian Americans face due to their marginalization. He poses an important question: “Why must sexuality be repressed for ethnicity; or, ethnicity for sexuality? Why must we repress one for the other? The answer to such a question lies in the strict gender codes of every society, and each society’s roots, which are planted deeply and firmly in religion.”85 Undoubtedly, Caschetta’s parents prescribed cultural norms that were passed down from generation to generation. In the words of Antonio Gramsci, “Man is above all else mind, consciousness—that is, he is a product of history, not of nature.”86 In brief, he maintains that social life is the bread and butter of the Church, not its ideology.87 Given that Caschetta’s father blatantly disobeyed the teachings of Catholicism, it would seem that her parents were opposed to her sexuality not because it challenged their beliefs, but rather because it could cost them the respect of their community. We can infer that Caschetta’s father had no lapse of good judgment when he chose to sexually assault her despite the brutality, criminality, and irreligiosity of his actions. However, sexual abuse is usually a private act that is inflicted behind tightly closed doors while, on the contrary, coming out of the closet is a more public act that requires opening doors. Thus, Caschetta’s father conveniently hid his transgressions and, instead, chose to point an accusing finger at his daughter for her non-normative sexual identity. Understandably, as a young woman Caschetta seeks to distance herself from the hypocrisy of her ethnic community. Years later, however, it is in the intimate confines of the kitchen that she makes peace with Catholicism and Italian American culture. Caschetta recounts, “Last Christmas, after Maria Salerno and I cooked a different fish for each of the seven sacraments, I started believing in God again….  Ibid., 13.  Ibid., 3. 86  Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks: European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism (New York: Columbia UP, 1992), 42. 87  David I. Kertzer, “Gramsci’s Concept of Hegemony: The Italian Church—Communist Struggle,” Dialectical Anthropology 4, no. 4 (1979): 321–328, https://www.jstor.org/ stable/29789979. Kertzer suggests that allegiance to the Church stems more from the sense of community it provides as opposed to its religious doctrine. He notes that in Antonio Gramsci’s prison writings he closely examines the political role of Catholicism and the Church in Italy, highlighting that it was a highly influential institution in the wake of the nation’s unification in 1860, during a time when Italy’s secular institutions were faltering. 84 85

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Maybe my past came back to claim me: Baptism, Confession, Eucharist, Confirmation, Ordination, Matrimony, Extreme Unction. It’s hard to say for sure. I used to pretend I wasn’t Italian.”88 Indeed, Caschetta makes it clear that, unlike her treasured friends, she has never been interested in preserving Italian food traditions—likely because she associates them with her antagonistic family members and the discomfort she felt during meals as a child. 89 Moreover, it is telling that she only learned to make one Italian dish and grew to shun religion. She relates, “I was 24 and three years out of college when I met the Salerno sisters. I was lonely, single, depressed, an atheist by default, and as much estranged from the notion of God and Father as I was from my own father, on whom I blamed most things.”90 Yet, it is in the invigorating company of the Salerno sisters that Caschetta is gradually moved to reconnect with her roots through cooking: “Once in a while I showed up at their place to cook, help cook, or pretend to help cook for a family party.”91 In joining forces with queer-­ friendly Italian American friends in the kitchen, Caschetta is inspired to reevaluate her ethnicity: “It felt good to be Italian, to have sisters who expected so little.”92 It is ultimately in preparing the seven fishes on Christmas Eve—side by side faithful friends—that she celebrates both the birth of Jesus and the rebirth of her faith in Catholicism. And although she may not fully agree with the Church’s teachings, she happily honors its celebrations. In “ ‘Sunday Dinner? You Had to Be There!’,” Simone Cinotto explores the traditions of Italian American families living in Harlem between 1930 and 1940. He describes the dinner table as a vibrant place where religious events were remembered first and foremost for the food that was served at the table: Both religious feasts and life-cycle events were celebrated with particular dishes and menus. Even for the American-born, the complexities of this food calendar defined their parents’ culture and, as the code was learned and interiorized, the liturgy of a family religion. “I had learned early…that  Mary Beth Caschetta, “The Seven Sacraments,” 96.  See Mary Beth Caschetta, “The Seven Sacraments,” 101. Caschetta primarily has negative food memories from childhood. Only once does she suggest she missed the al dente pasta of the family home when in college she was forced to eat “ketchup pasta mush” in the cafeteria. 90  Ibid., 102. 91  Ibid., 98. 92  Ibid. 88 89

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Mardi Gras, Easter, Christmas and New Year’s Day did not have to do so much with things religious as with things to eat,” a second-generation immigrant remembered. 93

At present, American children still arguably tend to learn the schedule of food-centered holidays before they become familiar with Catholic theology. In Caschetta’s experience, it is the collective process of preparing holiday dishes—the medium of food—that reconnects her to her roots: “Maria and I cooked for nine hours, using recipes from our relatives. We used memory and our taste buds to guide us, paying homage to our grandmothers, each of whom had cooked a variation of this meal throughout her life.”94 But most importantly, it is in preparing the dishes of her past that she revives relations with her kin, family of her own making, despite that “the idea of getting trapped inside another Italian family, rife with disappointment and with sexual and emotional demands, scared [her].”95 In taking a leap of faith, Caschetta succeeds in uniting her ethnic and sexual identity; she is proud and free to be both Italian American and unabashedly lesbian. Yet, despite her newfound appreciation for Italian American tradition, she is still left to reckon with her patriarchal family. To Caschetta’s relief, her mother gradually grew to accept her sexual identity. Perhaps unsurprisingly, her mother was initially disheartened when she discovered her college-age daughter was a lesbian: “I can still picture her, cornering me in the kitchen, her nightgown thin as a tissue, my tea getting cold on the countertop. I’m not sure how she knew. ‘What are you? A lesbian?’96 Although Caschetta did not come out to her family until she was a young woman, her attraction to women was apparent in childhood. It is, however, likely that her mother turned a blind eye to her sexuality as she did her sexual abuse. Indeed, Caschetta’s taboo sexuality almost cost her membership in the girls-only neighborhood Alligator Club when her comrades caught her grinning like a Cheshire cat at lesbian pornography stolen from their fathers and brothers (a scene reminiscent of a Simona

 Simone Cinotto, “‘Sunday Dinner? You Had to Be There!’,” Ch. 2.  Mary Beth Caschetta, “The Seven Sacraments,” 106. 95  Ibid., 97. 96  Mary Beth Caschetta, “Bride of Christ.” 93 94

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Vinci novel).97 Moreover, the members accused her of preferring to role-­ play as a boy so she could steal kisses from girls. As a teenager, Caschetta started dating the gentlest man she could find so as not to draw attention to her sexuality or to be coerced into fornication. Her overbearing mother was disappointed when she broke off their romantic engagement; she longed for a white wedding. However, in a twist of events, she eventually accepts that her lesbian daughter is also a child of God and deserves to be protected: “‘Everyone’s a child of God.’ She knows what my father did to me. ‘Lesbian or not,’ she says, ‘next time things will be different.’”98 Caschetta imagines Judgment Day as taking place within her mother’s austere domestic domain, devoid of food and frills: “[A] cup of coffee, the kitchen table, my mother seated across from me.”99 She is understandably relieved to be in her mother’s good graces. However, although Caschetta makes amends with her mother and regains her appetite for Italian tradition—despite appearances—she does not succeed in making peace with her father and settles for the crumbs of his love. In 2011, Caschetta published an article in the New York Times titled “What Wasn’t Passed On” in which she details the pain she felt upon discovering that she was disinherited by her father; she wanted to believe her father learned to love her. At the age of 42, Caschetta was pleased to be patching up her tumultuous relationship with the family patriarch. Their relationship, however, was still wrought with tension. In particular, dinner dynamics continued to be stressful; the table was a space that amplified her father’s staunch desire to defend boys’ business: “Usually when my family got together for a meal, the dinner table turned into a minefield. My father and brothers were conservative; my mother and I were progressive. Goading was their sport; dodging was ours.”100 Yet, at the close of her last visit to the family home, in a banal but rare gesture of kindness, he packed her a lunch for the car trip back to Massachusetts. Caschetta recounts: “Here was the man who had given me life, and however difficult our past, he wasn’t going to be around forever. I scraped ice off the windshield,

97  See Simona Vinci, A Game We Play, trans. Minna Proctor (London: Chatto and Windus, 1999). In Vinci’s controversial novel, children and young teens explore their blossoming sexualities in a remote shed where they peruse porn and engage in sexual play that ultimately has devastating consequences. 98  Mary Beth Caschetta, “Bride of Christ.” 99  Ibid. 100  Mary Beth Caschetta, “What Wasn’t Passed On,” New York Times, Dec. 8, 2011.

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stomped snow off my boots. ‘I love you Dad.’”101 Despite some hesitancy, Caschetta’s father returned her expression of love. Thus, following a heart attack that leaves him dead, she is shocked to read his will: “‘I leave no bequest to my daughter for reasons known to her.’”102 Her father—her perpetrator—held a grudge beyond repair. Even in death, he managed to damage his only daughter. Caschetta is left grappling for answers: Why had he done it? I suspect in part I was the wrong kind of offspring for him. The only daughter, and the family outsider, I had moved away from my hometown and their idea of who I should be. I found the love of my life, a woman, and married her. I didn’t share many of my family’s beliefs or hobbies, and was never the type to hold back an opinion.103

Although her father’s actions caused her excruciating pain, her disinheritance was perhaps a blessing in disguise; it forced Caschetta to reflect closely on her relationship to the world around her: “Through books, research, and other people’s stories, I set out to solve my mystery. In the process, I got the opportunity to take a long look at myself, my father, my family, the laws and our society.” While Caschetta’s mother eventually accepted that she would be no man’s bride, her father likely never came to terms with her sexuality—a possible reason for her disinheritance. Yet, there is more to the story than meets the eye. In her New York Times article, Caschetta overlooks an important part of the narrative. In condemning her father’s despicable crime in published writing, she breaks the silence that protects and perpetuates the patriarchy. It is probable that Caschetta’s father caught wind of her early writing in which she boldly reveals his penchant for pedophilia. In her work, bell hooks highlights the harmful norms that protect the patriarchy and require that men’s violence is never openly condemned: “To be true to patriarchy we are all taught that we must keep men’s secrets.”104 However, Caschetta actively unlearns what she is taught; she does not merely show contempt for patriarchal ideology—she seeks to unroot it. She understands firsthand that holding men accountable for their insidious actions and subverting patriarchal thinking starts with candid conversation: women play a crucial role in  Ibid.  Ibid. 103  Ibid. 104  Bell hooks, The Will to Change, 56. 101 102

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calling out misogyny. As Caschetta relates, “My mother always said I couldn’t keep a secret. She said I wasn’t really her daughter.”105 In a similar spirit as Caschetta, Mary Saracino underscores the hypocrisy of her family in her autobiographical short story “Telling”.106 A second-­ generation Italian American, she recounts growing up in a Catholic, working-class community in New York around the 1960s.107 She lives with her unhappily married parents, four brothers,108 and two sisters until her mother resolves to run away with the local parish priest and relocates Saracino and her sisters to Minnesota. Consequently, her relationship with her father grows distant. As the years progress, she comes of age, comes out to her mother, and moves in with her girlfriend when she is kicked out of the family home for her sexuality. Although her mother is quick to transgress the teachings of the Bible to suit her own desires, she does not hesitate to point the finger when Saracino challenges her sacred ideology. Time and again, she longs to come out to her biological father, as she realizes her secret is driving them farther apart. At the ripe age of thirty-five, she musters up the courage to openly discuss her sexuality with him. It is within the suffocating confines of the kitchen that she gives voice to her lesbian identity and consequently her sexuality is put on trial. It is in the kitchen that Saracino’s father takes stock of his damned daughter, deemed a disgrace in the eyes of God. Yet, the conversation that unfolds around his table is hardly the first to overwhelm her with a sense of distress and dread. In Saracino’s earlier autobiographical story “Smoke and Fire,” her childhood home is portrayed as a chaotic environment that she helps her

 Mary Beth Caschetta, “Bride of Christ.”  See Mary Saracino, Voices of the Soft-Bellied Warrior: A Memoir (Denver: Spinsters Ink, 2001), vi-vii. In her memoir, or what she calls the “the autobiography of [her] voice,” Saracino illustrates the process of coming to terms with painful events that she believes led to the loss of her voice (spasmodic dysphonia). She questions, “Is it a coincidence that I was physically silenced as I was shattering emotional lies? I do not think so.” 107  Mary Saracino, “Telling,” in Dispatches from Lesbian America, ed. Xequina Maria Berber, Giovanna Capone, and Cheela Romaine Smith (California: Bedazzled Ink, 2017), 282–293, Kindle. 108  See Mary Saracino, Voices of the Soft-Bellied Warrior, 62. Saracino describes the childhood sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of her older brother: “Nate was a young man, barely in high school, as troubled and rageful about his life as I was about mine. He thrust his anger, his sorrow and his confusion onto my body.” 105 106

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exasperated, chain-smoking mother to manage.109 In particular, she depicts the kitchen—often described as a housewife’s haven during the 1960s—as a space devoid of emotional nourishment and stability. In the opening scene of the story, Saracino’s father and siblings frantically prepare to leave for work and school. Her father stomps and hollers around the house quarreling with anyone who dares to get in his way. Her anxious mother confides in her: “‘I wish they’d all just shut up, for once.…Why’d I ever have so many goddamn kids?’”110 As she prepares breakfast, she tries to convince herself of her worth as a mother while carelessly clambering around the kitchen. Unsated in motherhood and a loveless marriage, she is on the verge of a nervous breakdown and desperately longs to abandon the domestic domain in order to flee with her lover, the parish priest (despite her devotion to the Catholic Church). Saracino illustrates: “Mama cuts a piece of toast and lays it on a small plate. She drops the butter knife onto the floor. It clangs and splatters oleo onto my clean shoes. She stares at the floor, then she looks at my laces and finally right into my eyes. Her eyes are empty, like a dark and dangerous room. I look away, so I don’t have to go inside.”111 As the oatmeal burns, Saracino scurries to turn off the stove; her mother drags indifferently on a cigarette and does not so much as lift a finger. Throughout the story, Saracino serves as her mother’s surrogate: she prepares breakfast, cleans the kitchen, and cares for her younger siblings. She shares her mother’s load, performing house chores and safekeeping her most damning secret—an ungodly love affair.112 We can surmise that Saracino feels the weight of Italian feminist Silvia Federici’s resounding words: “They say it is love. We say it is unwaged housework.”113 She perceives the anxiety and depression suffered by many desperate housewives of the time.114 109  Mary Saracino, “Smoke and Fire,” The Milk of Almonds: Italian American Women Writers on Food and Culture, ed. by Louise DeSalvo and Edvige Giunta (New York: The Feminist Press, 2002), 59–64, Kindle. 110  Ibid., 59. 111  Ibid. 112  See Mary Saracino, Voices of the Soft-Bellied Warrior, 3. Saracino describes the heavy burden of guarding her family’s secrets: “When I was a child, I make a tacit agreement with my mother to keep my family’s secrets. Protect her at all costs. I have paid a high price for this silencing.” 113  Silvia Federici, Wages Against Housework (Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1975). 114  Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W.  W. Norton & Company, (1963) 2012).

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The heart of the story unfolds in a claustrophobic kitchen that contributes to Mrs. Saracino’s sense of imprisonment. Her misery is reflected in the mechanical yet inefficient way she runs her home. She makes functional fare for breakfast, a quick batch of oatmeal and toast devoid of passion; food preparation is hardly executed with creativity. Thus, after helping her mother to frantically feed and organize her siblings, Saracino is irritated when her best friend Amelia waffles on about the warm breakfast her mother happily whipped up before school: “‘Didn’t you eat breakfast?’ she asks. ‘My mom made me waffles. She said it’s what you need on a cold day like today.’…I don’t want to hear about Amelia’s breakfast or how sweet her mama is.”115 Saracino longs for an attentive mother who lovingly prepares meals for her family, a mother who encourages her to savor childhood. It is important to consider that upon moving to Minnesota and reconnecting with the Italian culinary traditions to which she was accustomed in New  York, Saracino is reminded of her grandmother’s cooking, not her mother’s. In “On Being ItalianAmerican: An Introspection,” she relates: “I spent a lot of time, during high school, at Carbone’s grocery store and Cossetta’s Deli excavating my cultural ruins. I bought, cooked and ate real Italian food—not mushy Creamette noodles, but robust garlic, fresh oregano, homemade, warm Italian bread. Real Italian pasta, real Italian sausage, pungent black olives that reminded me of Sunday dinners at my grandmother’s house in upstate New  York.”116 She is grateful to find Italian pantry staples in Minnesota precisely because they are not served at her mother’s table. Mrs. Saracino was less invested in preserving the food traditions of her foremothers than she was in upholding the gender and sexuality norms of her forefathers. In essence, Saracino’s food and kitchen memories in her mother’s home are grim and do not reflect the rich and extravagant Italian American food

 Mary Saracino, “Smoke and Fire,” 63.  Mary Saracino, “On Being Italian-American: An Introspection,” Sinister Wisdom: Il viaggio delle donne 41 (July 1990): 109–110, https://www.jstor.org/stable/ community.28044767. 115 116

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scenes that pepper many narratives.117 Her mother halfheartedly nourishes her daughter as a child—both emotionally and physically—and as an adult she barely nourishes her at all. Upon finding a raunchy love note penned to Saracino by her high school lesbian lover, she chastises her and eventually cuts her off financially for straying from societal norms. Saracino expresses: The doting daughter I had always been felt shocked, shamed, and furious. But, I felt something else, too. Defiant. Declaring my right to my sexuality was my first act of treason. I had disobeyed my Catholic, Italian American family’s proscription: marry, have children. But my offense was more audacious, more dangerous than that. My true crime was to assert my separateness, to trust my needs and make them more important to my sanity than the needs of my family. For the first time in my life, I put my own needs before my mother’s.118

As a result of respecting her own desires, Saracino’s mother and stepfather—despite their own forbidden love—treat her as deviant and defective. Crip theorist Robert McRuer highlights that “able-bodiedness, even more than heterosexuality, still largely masquerades as a nonidentity, as the natural order of things.”119 He emphasizes the reciprocal relationship between compulsory able-bodiedness and compulsory heterosexuality, underscoring that Judith Butler’s theory of compulsory heterosexuality, outlined in Gender Trouble, could be seamlessly applied to notions of compulsory able-bodiedness: “In short, Butler’s theory of gender trouble might be resignified in the context of queer/disability studies as what we could call ‘ability trouble’—meaning not the so-called problem of 117  See, for example, Francesca Roccaforte, “Beyond the Wooden Spoon: Excerpt from an Italian-American Memoir,” in Dispatches from Lesbian America, ed. Xequina Maria Berber, Giovanna Capone, and Cheela Romaine Smith (California: Bedazzled Ink, 2017), 252–256, Kindle. Roccaforte vividly recalls the care with which her mother, the robust matriarch, made eggplant parmigiana. She understands food as a means of empowerment with which her mother manipulated men. Yet, despite the freedom her mother had in the kitchen, as a child Roccaforte perceived that men are in power, and so she began to emulate boys and date girls. Despite that her mother did not fully accept her sexuality, the Italian dishes she served helped her to feel a sense of belonging. 118  Mary Saracino, “Telling,” 285. 119  Robert McRuer, “Introduction: Compulsory Able-Bodiedness and Queer/Disabled Existence,” in Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 1.

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disability but the inevitable impossibility, even as it is made compulsory, of an able-bodied identity.”120 Tom Shakespeare, scholar of queer and disability studies, astutely points out that activists of disabled sexuality pose similar questions to activists of queer sexuality: “Are we trying to win access for disabled people to the mainstream of sexuality, or are we trying to challenge the ways in which sex and sexuality are conceived and expressed and limited in modern societies?”121 Indubitably, society’s construction of sexuality—as well as other identity markers—is narrow and arguably unimaginative. As feminist disability theorist Rosemarie GarlandThomson reminds us, only a small percentage of the population meets the standards of the privileged profile of a normate (e.g., white, wealthy, healthy, cisgender, heterosexual male). On the contrary, disability is normal and even inevitable if one lives into old age. She highlights that “disability is perhaps the essential characteristic of being human. The body is dynamic, constantly interactive with history and environment. We evolve into disability.”122 In brief, disability knows no boundaries and cuts across race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class. Yet, despite the apparent normalcy of disability, Saracino’s mother perceives her heterosexual self as socially acceptable and her queer daughter as Other. In turn, she sets out to ­correct her offspring’s sexuality. Saracino is eventually allowed to visit the family home for Sunday dinners—but she must abide by her mother’s strict social rules and feign a heterosexual, able-bodied identity at her table. Hungry for love, Saracino complies with her mother’s rigid requirements and, consequently, she becomes co-conspirator in her mother’s construction of her heterosexual identity: Each Sunday, I took the leftover love that my mother and my stepfather threw me and sucked it clean to the bone. Lying, to myself and to them, was easier at their dining room table than in the car on the way back to the apartment that Cheryl and I shared. At supper, I became a complacent and com120  Robert McRuer, “Compulsory Able-Bodiedness and Queer/Disabled Existence,” in The Disability Studies Reader, ed. Lennard J.  Davis (New York: Routledge, 4th edition, 2013), 373. According to McRuer, heterosexuality is the norm in the same way able-­ bodiedness is the norm. However, homosexuality is not the opposite of heterosexuality and disability is not the opposite of able-bodiedness. Rather, homosexuality and disability are deemed unequal and inferior to heterosexuality and able-bodiedness. 121  Tom Shakespeare, “Disabled Sexuality: Toward Rights and Recognition,” Sexuality and Disability 18, no. 3 (Nov. 2000): 162–163, https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1026409613684. 122  Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, “Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory,” Feminist Formations 14, no. 3 (Oct. 2002): 21, https://doi.org/10.1353/nwsa.2003.0005.

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pliant partner.…I felt ashamed to have acquiesced to her rules—when you are in my house you will pretend to be something that you are not—even as I ran through the moves in her playbook.123

Throughout dinner, the family sticks to safe conversation topics: work, school, family news. However, discussing amorous relationships is taboo table talk. Thus, in exchange for a superficial relationship with her mother, Saracino suppresses her non-normative sexual identity at family dinners. Indeed, this is a trope common to queer coming out stories, particularly ones about Italian Americans whose traditions are inextricably intertwined with food festivity. 124 Akin to many people whose lives straddle different cultures, Italian Americans code-switch depending on their context. For example, during school lunch in the public sphere Italian American children may join their peers in eating typically American foods, such as peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.125 Yet, around the family table in the private sphere they are not ashamed to dig into a bowl of spaghetti.126 In a similar vein, queer Italian Americans may express their sexuality freely among friends while, out of fear, they hide their sexuality around family.  Mary Saracino, “Telling,” 286.  See, for example, Frank Spinelli, “Sunday Dinners,” in Our Naked Lives: Essays from Gay Italian American Men, eds. Joseph Anthony LoGiudice and Michael Carosone (New York: Bordighera Press, 2013), 157–167. The Spinelli family’s Italian American dinner table is depicted as a space where affection and commitment are best communicated through food. As an adult, Spinelli suggests that his Catholic parents would never welcome him and his male partner to sit at their table. Initially he attends Sunday dinners alone, suppressing his queerness in the family home. Eventually he begins to skip Sunday dinner altogether until the patriarch passes away and his boyfriend Chad falls ill, at which point Spinelli’s mother accepts their gay relationship and invites them to express their love side by side at her dinner table. 125  See Sandra M. Gilbert and Roger J. Porter, eds., “Introduction: At the Family Hearth,” 86. Gilbert and Porter point out that authors “show that no matter how much immigrant parents’ food tastes are shared by the child, they may become a source of embarrassment and conflict when set against American culinary habits.” 126  For a deeper understanding of cultural code-switching, see Gene Demby, “How Code-­ Switching Explains the World,” National Public Radio, last modified April 8, 2013, https:// www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013. Demby fleshes out the meaning of cultural code-­ switching: “Linguists would probably quibble with our definition. (The term arose in linguists specifically to refer to mixing languages and speech patterns in conversation.) But we’re looking at code-switching a little more broadly: many of us subtly, reflexively change the way we express ourselves all the time. We’re hop-scotching between different parts of our own identities—sometimes within a single interaction.” 123 124

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In essence, although code-switching has its benefits, it can also be detrimental to one’s mental health. As a result of her mother’s distressing response to her sexual orientation, Saracino is struck with a deep-seated fear of coming out to her biological father. At the time, her relationship with her father was already strained: “The wide spaces between his life and mine were crowded with something that language, like love, failed to name. We used the constant presence of others to keep the odious monster at arm’s length.”127 Consequently, afraid that her sexuality will be the ruin of their tenuous relationship, Saracino repeatedly finds excuses to remain in the closet. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick points out, “[e]ven at an individual level, there are remarkably few of even the most openly gay people who are not deliberately in the closet with someone personally or economically or institutionally important to them.”128 Thus, although Saracino comes out to friends and understands that she is no sinner, the thought of facing rejection by both her mother and her father is too much for her to swallow: “Even though my father still lived far away in Seneca Falls, NY, I feared that he would discover my sexuality and shun the truth of me, as my mother had.”129 As a result, after coming out to her mother at the age of seventeen, she avoids coming out to her “pious Catholic” father for almost two decades until he finally corners her in the kitchen.130 As a middle-aged woman, Saracino returns to Seneca Falls to celebrate her father’s seventieth Birthday. During her visit, she festers up the courage to broach difficult issues with the family patriarch—no easy task for Saracino, who was raised to suffer in silence and to fear the sound of her own voice. In her memoir Voices of the Soft-Bellied Warrior, she relates: “I feel the full power of my mother’s hand around my throat, but now the fingers have become mine, clutching, clenching, and shoving the truth into my belly.”131 As they sit around the table nibbling on cookies and sipping coffee, Saracino and her sister express how hurt they felt by his absence during childhood: “Somehow we’d found a way to begin the arduous task of speaking the unspeakable. At that quiet lunch, my sister and I bravely attempted a truer intimacy with our father.”132 The  Mary Saracino, “Telling,” 284.  Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 67–68. 129  Mary Saracino, “Telling,” 287. 130  Ibid. 131  Mary Saracino, Voices of the Soft-Bellied Warrior, 4. 132  Mary Saracino, “Telling,” 288. 127 128

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discussion takes a drastic turn, however, when Saracino’s father looks her straight in the eyes and pries, “‘Why’d they kick you out of the house?’”133 The opportunity finally arrives for her to unload her burden and to disclose her secret, but she panics and stuffs cookies down her throat, suddenly speechless. The act of eating stalls time and allays her angst. She longs for her sister to speak on her behalf: “My heart sank. I wanted her to open her mouth and tell him for me. I wanted her to fashion the words into something sweet and easy to swallow. I wanted her to make my lesbian secret respectable, dress it properly with heterosexual acceptance.”134 The kitchen is wrought with tension, and Saracino is oppressed by the overwhelming silence. In her poignant essay “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” Black lesbian poet Audre Lorde poignantly emphasizes the consequences of silence and fear: “We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired. For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.”135 And so, as Saracino struggles to chew her cookie—dangerously close to choking on her silence—she faces her fears and speaks her truth: “ ‘They kicked me out of the house for being gay.’ ”136 Initially she feels at ease, surprised to have evaded “Catholic hell-fire-and-brimstone outrage at [her] deviance” as both her father and step-mother nonchalantly respond, “‘So what.’”137 Thereafter, her father rattles off supportive platitudes (“‘It’s just how God made you. He makes us all different’”).138 However, Saracino is disillusioned when he instructs her not to act on her desire: “He had done it; just as I had feared. My father had delved into the recesses of his Catholic faith and dredged up the Pope’s encyclical on

 Ibid.  Ibid., 289. 135  Audre Lorde, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley: Crossing Press, (1984) 2007), 32, Kindle. Lorde originally delivered this paper on December 28, 1977 in Chicago, Illinois as a participant on the “Lesbian and Literature” panel at the Modern Language Association convention. Thereafter, it was published in Sinister Wisdom 6 (1978). 136  Mary Saracino, “Telling,” 289. 137  Ibid. 138  Ibid. 133 134

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homosexuality.”139 The biggest blow, however, comes when her father returns home from Sunday mass and reassures the family that he intends to say an extra novena for her soul. Saracino is shattered: “The coffee turned in my stomach. I wanted to poke out his beatific eyes, one at a time, and lay them on a tray, beside the bananas and grapes in the center of the kitchen table, to stare back at the world, like St. Lucy’s.”140 It is noteworthy that she employs food as a vehicle to express distress—food and despair go hand in hand, a connection she likely made in childhood. Ultimately, it takes Saracino’s father years to warm up to the idea that his daughter is a thriving lesbian: “Saving my queer soul was hard work, but some headway has been made” she reports in a sarcastic tone.141 She, however, surmises that it is his soul that needs saving, not hers. As such, Saracino ceases to suppress her sexual identity in order to adhere to the rigid ideals of her Italian American family. She concludes: “The creaking closet doors are fully open, now, unencumbered. Telling is as powerful as a month of novenas, and as grace-filled as anything divine or secular could possibly be.”142 By the end of the story, she is no longer burdened by secrets or a stifling sense of familial obligation. She deeply understands, to echo Lachrista Greco, that “[t]o empower ourselves, we must break our silence.”143 Thus, in lieu of breaking bread each week with her Italian American family, who repeatedly fail to nurture her individuality, we can surmise that Saracino will share wholesome Sunday dinners with her supportive partner. In doing so, sweet food memories will slowly replace the embittering ones of her past. In defying the patriarchal norms of their families, Capone, Caschetta, and Saracino renegotiate their relationship to Italian American traditions and reconsider how they navigate food-centered contact zones of the home as lesbian adults. Capone evokes warm memories of the family table through cooking her mother’s cherished dishes in the solitude of her own kitchen, far from disapproving family. Caschetta’s faith in family and tradition falters in young adulthood. However, her spiritual and culinary roots are revived as she prepares for the Feast of the Seven Fishes alongside her  Ibid.  Ibid., 292. 141  Ibid., 293. 142  Ibid. 143  Lachrista Greco, ed., “Introduction, or Why is This Important” in Olive Grrrls (Madison: Olive Grrrl Press, 2013), Kindle. 139 140

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loving Italian American allies. As a teenager, Saracino teaches herself the basics of fresh Italian cooking, fare not to be found in her mother’s kitchen. As such, she is equipped to bring treasured Italian recipes to the table of her partner upon growing fed up with the oppressive cultural confines of family dinners. Although the authors do not succeed in shattering their kin’s narrow notions of womanhood, it is in breaking their silence—a gradual process—that they contribute to building a culturally fluid society. Audre Lorde implores: “What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?”144 After years of secrets and cultural indigestion, Capone, Caschetta, and Saracino acutely understand that “your silence will not protect you.”145

Works Cited Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier. New York: Vintage Books, (1949) 2011. Kindle. Bell, Rudy “I, Catherine.” In Holy Anorexia, Ch. II. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1985. Kindle. Bona, Mary Jo, and Jennifer-Ann DiGregorio Kightlinger. “The Fruits of Her Labor: Louise DeSalvo’s Memoirs of Food and Family.” In Personal Effects: Essays on Memoir, Teaching, and Culture in the Work of Louise DeSalvo, edited by Nancy Caronia and Edvige Giunta, 189–209. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. Kindle. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. ———. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (1988): 519–531. Accessed April 15, 2021. https://doi.org/10.2307/3207893. Capone, Giovanna. “Greyhound Bus.” In In My Neighborhood: Poetry and Prose from an Italian-American, Part III. California: Bedazzled Ink, 2014a. Kindle. ———. “At 23, I took a Greyhound Bus.” In In My Neighborhood: Poetry and Prose from an Italian-American, Part I.  California: Bedazzled Ink, 2014b. Kindle. Caronia, Nancy, and Edvige Giunta, eds. Introduction to Personal Effects: Essays on Memoir, Teaching, and Culture in the Work of Louise DeSalvo, 1–36. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. Kindle. 144 145

 Audre Lorde, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” 30.  Ibid., 29.

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Carosone, Michael. “Queer Italian Americans as Part of the Mosaic of Gender, Sexuality, Ethnicity, Race, Class, and Power.” How Class Works Conference: Class and Sexuality, State University of New York at Stony Brook, June 2008. Caschetta, Mary Beth. “Bride of Christ.” In A Woman Like That: Lesbian and Bisexual Writers Tell Their Coming Out Stories, edited by Joan Larkin. New York: Harper Collins, 1999. Kindle. ———. “The Seven Sacraments.” In The Milk of Almonds: Italian American Women Writers on Food and Culture, edited by Louise DeSalvo and Edvige Giunta, 96–106. New York: The Feminist Press, 2002. Kindle. ———. “What Wasn’t Passed On.” New York Times, Dec. 8, 2011. Castro, Ángel et al. “Childhood Sexual Abuse, Sexual Behavior, and Revictimization in Adolescence and Youth: A Mini Review.” Frontiers in Psychology 10 (2019): 1–5. Accessed March 1, 2021. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02018. Cinotto, Simone, ed. “All Things Italian: Italian American Consumers, the Transnational Formation of Taste, and the Commodification of Difference.” In Making Italian America: Consumer Culture and the Production of Ethnic Identities, edited by Simone Cinotto. New  York: Fordham University Press, 2014. Kindle. ———. “‘Sunday Dinner? You Had to Be There!’: Making Food, Family, and Nation in Italian Harlem, 1930–1940.” In The Italian American Table: Food, Family, and Community in New  York City, Ch. 2. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2013. Kindle. ———. “The Contested Table: Food, Gender, and Generations in Italian Harlem, 1920–1930.” In The Italian American Table: Food, Family, and Community in New York City, Ch. 1. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2013. Kindle. Counihan, Carole M. “Food, Culture, and Gender.” In The Anthropology of Food and Body: Gender, Meaning, and Power, 6–24. New  York: Routledge, 1999. Kindle. Demby, Gene. “How Code-Switching Explains the World.” National Public Radio. Last modified April 8, 2013. https://www.npr.org/sections/ codeswitch/2013. DeSalvo, Louise, and Edvige Giunta, eds. Introduction to The Milk of Almonds: Italian American Women Writers on Food and Culture, 12–28. New York: The Feminist Press, 2002. Kindle. DeSalvo, Louise. Crazy in the Kitchen: Food, Feuds, and Forgiveness in an Italian American Family. New York: Bloomsbury, 2004. ———. Vertigo: A Memoir. New York: Dutton Books, 1996. ———. Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work. Boston: Beacon Press, 1989. ———. Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling Our Stories Transforms Our Lives. London: The Women’s Press, 1999.

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Di Scala, Maria Francesca. “How I Found Feminism.” In Olive Grrrls: Italian North American Women and the Search for Identity, edited by Lachrista Greco, Part II. Madison: Olive Grrrl Press, 2013. Kindle. Dottolo, Andrea L. and Carol Dottolo, eds. “Introduction: Setting the Table.” In Italian American Women, Food, and Identity: Stories at the Table. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018a. Kindle. ———. Italian American Women, Food, and Identity: Stories at the Table. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018b. Kindle. Federici, Silvia. Wages Against Housework. Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1975. Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. New  York: W.  W. Norton & Company, (1963) 2012. Gabaccia, Donna R. “Immigration, Isolation, and Industry.” In We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1998a. Kindle. ———. We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1998b. Kindle. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. “Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory.” Feminist Formations 14, no. 3 (Oct. 2002): 1–32. Accessed April 1, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1353/nwsa.2003.0005. Gilbert, Sandra M. and Roger J. Porter, eds. “Introduction: At the Family Hearth: Memory, Identity, Ethnicity.” In Eating Words: A Norton Anthology of Food Writing, 84–92. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2015. Kindle. Gramsci, Antonio. Prison Notebooks: European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism. New York: Columbia UP, 1992. Greco, Lachrista, ed. “Introduction, or Why is This Important.” In Olive Grrrls: Italian North American Women and the Search for Identity. Madison: Olive Grrrl Press, 2013. Kindle. Harvey, Mary H., and Judith L. Herman. “The Trauma of Sexual Victimization: Feminist Contributions to Theory, Research and Practice.” PTSD Research Quarterly 3, no. 3 (Summer 1992): 1–8. Accessed April 15, 2021. hsdl.org/ ?view&did=13537. Herman, Judith L. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence–From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York: BasicBooks, 1992. Holzer, Sarah R. et al. “Mediational Significance of PTSD in the Relationship of Sexual Trauma and Eating Disorders.” Child Abuse and Neglect, 32 (2008): 561–566. Accessed March 15, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu. 2007.07.011. hooks, bell. “Theory as Liberatory Practice.” Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 4, no. 1 (1991): 1–12. Accessed March 15, 2021. https://openyls.law.yale.edu/. ———. The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love. New  York: Atria Books, 2004.

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Kertzer, David I. “Gramsci’s Concept of Hegemony: The Italian Church– Communist Struggle.” Dialectical Anthropology 4, no. 4 (1979): 321–328. Accessed March 1, 2021. https://www.jstor.org/stable/29789979. Lorde, Audre. “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action.” In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. 29–32. Berkeley: Crossing Press, (1984) 2007. Kindle. Luconi, Stefano. “Food and Ethnic Identity in Italian-American Narrative.” Prospero. Rivista di letterature straniere, comparatistica e studi culturali 11 (2004): 205–216. Accessed March 1, 2022. http://hdl.handle.net/10077/6292. McRuer, Robert. “Compulsory Able-Bodiedness and Queer/Disabled Existence.” In The Disability Studies Reader, 4th ed., edited by Lennard J. Davis, 369–378. New York: Routledge, 2013. ———. “Introduction: Compulsory Able-Bodiedness and Queer/Disabled Existence.” In Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability, 1–32. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Kindle. Pratt, Mary Louise. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Profession (1991): 33–40. Accessed March 1, 2021. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25595469. Ragusa, Kym. “It’s Not Easy Being Green: On Culture and Ethnicity.” In Olive Grrrls: Italian North American Women and the Search for Identity, edited by Lachrista Greco, Part I. Madison: Olive Grrrl Press, 2013. Kindle. ———. The Skin Between Us: A Memoir of Race, Beauty, and Belonging. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2006. Roccaforte, Francesca. “Beyond the Wooden Spoon: Excerpt from an Italian-­ American Memoir.” In Dispatches from Lesbian America: 42 Short Stories and Memoir by Lesbian Writers, edited by Xequina Maria Berber, Giovanna Capone, and Cheela Romaine Smith, 252–256. California: Bedazzled Ink, 2017. Kindle. Rubin, Gayle S. “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality.” In Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, edited by Carole S. Vance, 143–178. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984. Saracino, Mary. “On Being Italian-American: An Introspection.” Sinister Wisdom: Il viaggio delle donne 41 (July 1990): 105–110. https://www.jstor.org/stable/ community.28044767. ———. “Smoke and Fire.” In The Milk of Almonds: Italian American Women Writers on Food and Culture, edited by Louise DeSalvo and Edvige Giunta, 59–64. New York: The Feminist Press, 2002. Kindle. ———. “Telling.” In Dispatches from Lesbian America: 42 Short Stories and Memoir by Lesbian Writers, edited by Xequina Maria Berber, Giovanna Capone, and Cheela Romaine Smith, 282–293. California: Bedazzled Ink, 2017. Kindle. ———. Voices of the Soft-Bellied Warrior: A Memoir. Denver: Spinsters Ink, 2001. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Oakland: University of California Press, (1990) 2008.

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Shakespeare, Tom. “Disabled Sexuality: Toward Rights and Recognition,” Sexuality and Disability 18, no. 3 (Nov. 2000): 159–166. Accessed March 1, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1026409613684. Spinelli, Frank. “Sunday Dinners.” In Our Naked Lives: Essays from Gay Italian American Men, edited by Joseph Anthony LoGiudice and Michael Carosone, 157–167. New York: Bordighera Press, 2013. Vinci, Simona. A Game We Play. Translated by Minna Proctor. London: Chatto and Windus, 1999. Walker, Monique D. et al. “Childhood Sexual Abuse and Adult Sexual Identity Formation: Intersection of Gender, Race, and Sexual Orientation.” The American Journal of Family Therapy 40, no. 5 (2012): 385–398. Accessed March 1y, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1080/01926187.2011.627318. Woolf, Virginia. Moments of Being. Edited by Jeanne Schulkind. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, (1976) 1985.

CHAPTER 3

Spotlight: Annie Rachele Lanzillotto Annie Lanzillotto

The Hyphen “You’re worse than an Italian man,” a Fiorentina friend once told me. We were neighbors in Brooklyn. She also owned a house in a fratteloni of Florence. I knew what she meant. I was a diehard flirt. I didn’t have what Americans call “boundaries.” I talked to everybody in the street. I’d talk to anybody. Women sat on my lap in social settings, some woman or another would end up sitting on my lap. Flirting with the world was the sangue inside me. I am an old dyke; a lesbian. I believe “suction” and not “protrusion” is the life force of the universe. I believe women have triple the power of men. I get sucked in. It’s visceral. I can feel it. The way the ocean pulls you in, the way the moon pulls the ocean, the way a woman pulls you in. It’s the life force. The pull to the center of the force field, gravity, magnetism, the earth’s iron core, all pull. That’s how all the planets are held in place spinning in orbit around the sun. It’s funny to me that

A. Lanzillotto (*) Bronx, NY, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Heim, S. Anatrone (eds.), Spaghetti Sissies Queering Italian American Media, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10197-7_3

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superheroes are portrayed with powers that propel outward from them. I think a dyke superhero would have a magnetic power, the whole world would be pulled to her, right up into her cunt. Big suction energy. The whole sea could go inside her. The sky, the earth. She’d never have the need to throw a punch or ever have any projectile; no bullets, nothing that shoots, ever. My superpower as an artist helped me define my lesbian identity with my family living in Italia. When I first sought out my cousins in the paese around Bari, I didn’t speak much Italian and just a fluttering of syllables of 1900 era Barese. We tried to understand line drawings of each other. They’d ask why I wasn’t married, why I wasn’t traveling with a man, and after stumbling through conversations, they concluded: “Ahhh sì… teatro.” I was a woman of the theater; being an artist made it easier in Italy to be recognized as gay. I remember that moment, when I felt for the first time that I made sense to them, all through one word that gave me a context: teatro. Over the decades, I got to know some of them with much more intimacy, and we learned of each other on nuanced levels, especially as my language proficiency increased. I remember when I handed my Italian cousins copies of my first book, in the subtitle is the word “butch.” There’s no translation for the word butch in Italian. On my book tour through the Mezzogiorno, this word was a sticking point. For me, it became a game: let’s see how many near-synonyms in Italian, scholars and translators and readers could come up with. No word hit the proverbial nail on the head. No word that exuded butch strength or did the flip we do to reclaim power from words that once oppressed us. As an Italian American I live in that hyphen the world has created for us. I am the hyphen rather than being Italian or American, I am the hyphen, and it looks like a minus sign. My heart is always half in two places. Will it ever come together? Will I ever feel like I belong anywhere outside of my works of art? In the Mezzogiorno, above being gay or an artist I was L’Americana. The one who returned after a century. A couple of years ago in the paese, I visited a nursing home a bunch of times to visit my aunt who was in, what turned out to be the last year of her life. We walked side by side through the halls singing loudly, “O Maria quanto sei bella,” which she taught me. We were a two-person procession to the divinity of Mary. A nun stopped to say hello and asked my aunt who her visitor was. My aunt looked up, and with twinkly eyes the color of the Adriatic Sea, said loudly, “L’Americana.” She was so proud. Not many American nipoti made it

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back and went day after day to the nursing homes in the villages in the heel of the boot. A couple of my cousins came to a performance I did in Matera. That was a thrill; to hand them my books and CDs and to feel the acknowledgment that there is an artist in the family. In Italy, having an artist in the family, I feel it means more than it does in the US. Artists have a place, are valued, are understood to create quixotic works, and live quixotic lives outside hegemonic values. Art is the marrow of the land right along with vino and olio—is l’arte. The drumbeat of Sicilia. The elders singing in devotional street processionals. The scirocco carrying beats and deities from Africa sweeping up into the heel, the arch, the toe, the triangle, the boot kicks. The maestrale floating madonnas from Constantinople to Barese fisherman. Everyone knows some Dante by heart and Puccini and Verdi arias, and in many senses everyone is an artist. The care with which gelato is scooped and handled as delicately as if you were diapering a newborn, there’s an artistry you experience all day long from the first cappuccino in the morning to the art of conversation and interaction in the piazza at night. I don’t mean to paint Italia in high gloss colors, yet in my piccolo paese, any night of the week in a caffè bar, everyone is there: dykes, artists, elders, everybody, whoever you’re looking for, whoever you want to talk with or grab into a game of Scopa! One defining moment came for me in 2018, when I performed at Sicilia Queer Filmfest in Palermo. I remember reading a poem called “Licking Batteries” which is about me learning as a kid to point my tongue on a battery cathode to see if there was any juice in it. The stingy salty sensation was the key. The poem goes into later in life, sexual applications of this skill. I remember vividly the faces in the audience. The young lesbian couples, butch/femme, holding onto one another, eyes glowing as I read. Over the course of a few days, then a return trip to Palermo, I made a couple of friends and listened to the troubles some of the young twenty-­ something-­year-old dykes were having with their very Catholic mothers not accepting them. I began to write a letter to the mothers: Carissime Mamme Palermitane     Time is ruptured You will never get this time back Your daughter will always remember the days and nights you shut the door on her lover These closed doors are never erased

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Invite the opposite. Invite them in. Invite all of them. Your daughter loves you but cannot be other than who she is No sooner could she change the color of her eyes      You could no sooner change her      as you could make ocean waves      break in the opposite direction Be her hero. Love her unconditionally Invite her friends over You are missing out on the best party of your life You have wasted years already, drenched your daughter’s soul with the battle fatigue of being gay and not accepted not celebrated by you She loves. She is healthy. These are facts. Celebrate your daughter’s life, not the picture in your mind of your daughter’s life but your daughter’s life. For she lives. She aspires. She is building a life with a foundation of love. Get to know the woman she loves Enter the conversation Dive in. Open Embrace her love and you will gain a friend for life and another daughter who loves and sparkles for her Do not drive them away You are missing the greatest joy of your life Years from now when your heart opens in sickness or old age you will grow to regret the years you now waste Years from now, when you call your daughter’s name, when you need her, she will be there to catch you—but let her come to your bedside remembering you were always there for her, rooting her on, cheering her, supporting her, guiding her, lifting her soul.

I am still writing this letter.

CHAPTER 4

Pulp Up the Volume: Race, Sexuality, and Diaspora in The Invisible Glass (1950) And Confetti for Gino (1959) Clarissa Clò

A version of this chapter was published in Italian as “Passioni pulp e famiglie impossibili: diaspora, razza e sessualità in The Invisible Glass di Loren Wahl e Confetti for Gino di Lorenzo Madalena,” in Ácoma, XXV, no. 16 nuova serie, (2019): 47–64. I thank Vincenzo Bavaro and Fiorenzo Iuliano for granting me permission of publication in English.

C. Clò (*) San Diego State University, San Diego, CA, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Heim, S. Anatrone (eds.), Spaghetti Sissies Queering Italian American Media, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10197-7_4

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The Invisible Glass and Confetti for Gino were written in the 1950s by Lawrence Madalena, a relatively unknown Italian American author from San Diego.1 While Confetti for Gino was properly credited to Lorenzo Madalena, whose name was proudly italianized for the occasion, The Invisible Glass was published a few years earlier under the pseudonym of Loren Wahl to provide privacy and anonymity.2 Both novels engage with questions of race, gender, class, masculinity, and sexuality woven together within a diasporic framework that spans multiple locations in Italy and the US. Such critical aspects alone make these books worthy of our attention, but as significant is also the form in which they came to fruition. In both cases pulp, as both fiction and paperback, plays an important and overlooked role central to their decoding. Enormously popular in the middle of the twentieth century, but little explored in 1  Lawrence  Joseph  Madalena (1919–1983) was born and raised in San Diego. He attended San Diego State College (now University) and graduated in 1941 with a degree in English before being drafted in WWII. He was stationed in Trinidad—where he oversaw an African American regiment, the 99th Anti-Aircraft Coastal Artillery—North Africa and eventually Italy. When he returned from the war, he obtained his teaching credentials from UC Berkeley and graduated from the Claremont Graduate School with a master’s thesis in support of African Americans’ civil right to vote. In 1957 Madalena returned to Italy as a Fulbright recipient to teach English in Naples and Sardinia. Throughout his life he taught in various high schools and colleges in San Diego and Southern California. He remained an Army reservist for 20 years before retiring. A small but significant archive of Lawrence J. Madalena’s papers with letters, photos, and personal information about his life and publications, the only surviving documents about the author, is in the process of being donated to San Diego State University’s Special Collections by Pasquale Verdicchio. For biographical information about Madalena, see also Kenneth Scambray, “America’s Americas: The Melting Pot Begins to Cool in Lorenzo Madalena’s Confetti for Gino,” in Queen Calafia’s Paradise: California and the Italian American Novel (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2007), 51–66; Pasquale Verdicchio, “Fishing for Complements in Lorenzo Madalena’s Confetti for Gino,” in Confetti for Gino, Lorenzo Madalena (Toronto: Guernica, 2011), 403–420; Marina Niceforo, “Italian Fishermen, American Sea: Fishing Language in Lorenzo Madalena’s Confetti for Gino (1959),” in Navigating Maritime Languages and Narratives, ed. Raffaella Antinucci and Maria Giovanna Petrillo (Oxford and Bern: Peter Lang, 2017), 191–201; and Fred Moramarco, “The Man Who Turned Fact into Fiction” San Diego Reader, 7 September 2000, https://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/2000/sep/07/ man-who-turned-fact-fiction/. 2  Loren Wahl, The Invisible Glass (Greenberg: New  York, 1950). Full text accessible at https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/003086657; Lorenzo Madalena, Confetti for Gino (Doubleday: New  York, 1959). Full text accessible at: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/ Record/003091153. All citations in the essay refer to these editions.

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Italian American Studies, pulp can help us illuminate the contribution of Italian America to the genre and its relevance in promoting and mediating non-normative and marginalized identities, experiences, and practices. Pulp is part and parcel of these novels. Not only does Madalena’s writing exude a certain pulpy quality, an aesthetic interest that he had cultivated since college, but pulp is also the package in which both books were made available to different audiences, since they were reprinted in various paperback editions in the US and the UK, allowing for a larger dissemination in the English-speaking world. In light of the proliferation of these additional versions, which to some extent determined the conditions of visibility, availability, and circulation of the books, the role played by pulp in the formation of diverse readerships and identities is worth exploring as it complicates our understanding of race, ethnicity, and sexuality, and their discussion not only in the Italian American, but also in the popular literature of those years. In other words, pulp, with its specific lurid modes of recording and transmission, gives us access to a different type of archive for studying the Italian American experience, opening up new possibilities for understanding its impact and influence in American culture at home and in the diaspora. This is a lesson that we should keep in mind as we build our transnational literary canons and assess who and what qualifies as Italian and American. While few critics to this day have discussed the two novels in relation to one another, The Invisible Glass and Confetti for Gino have far more in common than may initially meet the eye. Not only are they the product of the same author, but they are reflections and refractions of his experiences, observations, and limitations. The struggles for self-acceptance that the Italian American protagonists undergo in both novels are very similar and are expressed in the same dramatic style. Deriving its title from an expression used in W.E.B. Du Bois’ 1940 autobiographical essay Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept to indicate the unacknowledged damages of systemic segregation on Black folks, The Invisible Glass takes place in Northern Italy at the end of WWII within an African American military unit and deals with issues of homosexuality, according to the terminology of the time, and race oppression. In this novel, Lieutenant Steve La Cava is a former history teacher from San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf, with an open mind and an interethnic sensibility. He appreciates Black popular culture, listens to the music of Lena Horne and Ella Fitzgerald, and has no problem mingling with African Americans.

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These traits make him bond with and fall for Chick Johnson, an ambitious African American private from Los Angeles, far different from the rest of the subservient “Negro” soldiers from the South who serve in the same unit.3 But “the invisible glass” that keeps La Cava and Chick apart is only momentarily scratched, and their budding friendship falls apart after they spend a drunken night together. If the condemnation of the treatment of African American soldiers within the still segregated US army is particularly stark, equally striking is the portrayal of the tortuous coming out narrative of the Italian American protagonist and the ultimate impossibility of a positive resolution, let alone the fulfillment of a gay interracial romance. Chronologically, Confetti for Gino starts where The Invisible Glass ends. Having served in the navy during WWII, Gino DeMarino, the titular character of the novel, had undergone “an uncomfortable awakening. His association with thousands of other men had jolted him into the realization of his educational and social poverty.”4 Madalena clearly implies that Gino’s stint in the navy made him question his own role in society, since he discovered that “he had more ambition than to be just another Wop fisherman,” and he resented his return to the Italian fishing colony “that stubbornly adhered to its traditional life while the rest of San Diego changed.”5 Throughout the novel Gino ineffectively rebels against the expectations of his mother and, by extension, his community, trying to fulfill the American dream vicariously by dating and wanting to marry Vicky, a WASP waitress with hidden secrets of her own, until he realizes that he cannot escape the tenets of his ethnic heritage. Both novels were considered taboo in their own ways. While lacking direct references to gay themes, Confetti for Gino, openly attributed to Madalena, was quite controversial when it was first published and continued to be shunned by local Italian Americans over the years because of the unflattering characterization of some members of the tight-knit San Diego community, identifiable despite the fictional filter. Madalena was accused of airing the proverbial dirty laundry of a neighborhood he knew intimately. If the novel celebrated communal customs, rituals, and practices in 3  This is the language used in the novel and during the historical time in which it was written. On this topic see John McWorther, “I Can’t Brook the Idea of Banning ‘Negro’,” The New  York Times, January 7, 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/07/opinion/ negro-ban-word-dont.html 4  Madalena, Confetti, 13. 5  Madalena, Confetti, 13–14.

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chapters rich in details and descriptions, and denounced the exploitative conditions imposed by the tuna canning industry, it also brought attention to the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church, the racial prejudices harbored by the Italian fishermen against other ethnicities, and the double standard in gender and sexual relations between men and women. Though it was, and still is, the only literary work to emerge out of San Diego’s Italian community on the waterfront, the novel was subject to a relentless informal censorship, with some pages of the circulating copies literally ripped out.6 Confetti for Gino was long out of print before being republished in 2011 by the Canadian independent publisher Guernica Editions, with an Afterword by Pasquale Verdicchio.7 Meanwhile, unbeknownst to most, Madalena was also, as mentioned, the author of The Invisible Glass, a novel that dealt with even more controversial topics in its pairing of gay and interracial desire. Eventually included among the “lost gay novels” of the last century, The Invisible Glass, too, had its own history of rejection and censorship with accusations of pornography far more serious than those that were raised by Confetti for

6  For mention of the torn pages of Confetti for Gino see Gina Lubrano, “Italy Begins Along India Street,” The San Diego Union, October 4, 1976, B1, B3. Madalena wrote about the ostracism and harassment he received after the publication of Confetti for Gino, noting that the novel “alienated my neighborhood, childhood friends and immediate family” to the point of forcing his resignation from the San Diego City Schools before leaving town. Less than two weeks after Confetti for Gino hit the stands, Madalena wrote a letter to The New Yorker inquiring as to whether they might be interested in a piece on his “traumatic experience” as an author, “on what happens when and after a fairly dignified respected teacher of English writes a frank, sexy novel about his neighborhood.” He mentioned that his personal and professional life had been thrown “into a tizzy,” losing friends, winning new ones, fending off accusations of being a “sex maniac” and receiving “mysterious phone calls at 2 or 3 A.M. from both females and salacious males.” Even his priest refused to see him, while still accepting his weekly contributions. See Madalena’s Claremont Graduate School’s employment application, 22 February 1966, and the letter to the Editor of The New Yorker, 17 August 1959. Lawrence J. Madalena Papers. SDSU Special Collections. 7  Lorenzo Madalena, Confetti for Gino (Toronto: Guernica, 2011). Notably, the local newspaper San Diego Reader published Confetti for Gino on its pages in installments in 2000, its serialization underscoring not only its pulpy quality, but the connections of pulp to other types of popular literature of the nineteenth century, like dime novels and feuilletons. See https://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/2000/sep/07/confetti-gino/.

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Gino.8 Nowadays The Invisible Glass is noted as an important contribution to “a queer history of the United States,” but it is also a diasporic and transcultural work between Italy and the United States that deals with the complex intersections of race, ethnicity, and nationality.9 For these reasons, it would be a mistake to simply label The Invisible Glass as a gay American novel without also reclaiming the critical commentary it contains regarding Italian, Italian American, and African American experiences during the war. Likewise, it is reductive to interpret Confetti for Gino as solely a “local color novel,” as Madalena himself, perhaps strategically, described it at the time.10 Instead, both novels speak to broader cultural changes and struggles over individual and collective identities occurring in the Italian and American societies of those years that pulp fiction was especially equipped to capture.11

The (Not So) Secret Life of Pulp Fiction Most reviews of The Invisible Glass and Confetti for Gino acknowledge the sociological significance of Madalena’s novels: the importance of the denunciation of racism in the first, and the representation of a local Italian ethnic community in the second. In general, however, they criticize the writing style as realistic but aesthetically ugly and uninteresting. The Invisible Glass has been compared to a “trashy gay novel,” or a Hollywood 8  Anthony Slide, Lost Gay Novels. A Reference Guide to Fifty Works from the First Half of the Twentieth Century (New York: Harrington Park Press, 2003), 174–179; David Bergman, “Selling Gay Literature Before Stonewall,” in A Sea of Stories: The Shaping Power of Narrative in Gay and Lesbian Cultures: A Festschrift for John P. De Cecco, ed. Sonya L.  Jones (New York: Harrington Park Press, 2000): 47–48. In the correspondence between Madalena and his Doubleday editors during Confetti for Gino’s preparation for publication some scenes and references were deemed pornographic and Madalena was asked to revise them, which he only partially did in order not to lose his intended characterization of the fishermen. See, for instance, Chapter 13 of the novel, which mentions masturbation and “little books” also known as “Tijuana Bibles,” namely pornographic comics. Lawrence J.  Madalena Papers, Letters from 27 June 1958; 27 February 1959, and 25 March 1959. SDSU Special Collections. 9  Michael Bronski, A Queer History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2011), 168. 10  See Madalena’s Claremont Graduate School’s employment application, 22 February 1966. Lawrence J. Madalena papers. SDSU Special Collections. 11  For a discussion of the assimilationist push occurring within American society at the time, see Scambray, “America’s Americas: The Melting Pot Begins to Cool in Lorenzo Madalena’s Confetti for Gino,” in Queen Calafia’s Paradise: California and the Italian American Novel, (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2007), 51–66.

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“bad movie,” while Confetti for Gino has been characterized as excessively sentimental and melodramatic.12 It is true that neither book is a masterpiece by the stylistic standards of high art, and yet, both novels share lowbrow pulp qualities that tell us much about the emergence of habits, tastes, obsessions, and identities at midcentury. Madalena had a protracted love affair with pulp fiction. While still in college, he published an article in the campus student literary magazine El Palenque entitled “Pulp Writing 1A”, in which he outlined the main features of the genre.13 Referring not only to books, but also to the comics and magazines that lured millions of thrill-seeking readers each month to the newsstands with their catchy and colorful covers, Madalena defended the dignity of this literature made of “fascinating stories of murders, adventure, cowboys and space ships,” suggesting that “students interested in writing can find good training ground in the pulps.”14 He pointed out that many reputable authors, like Dashiell Hammett, embraced pulp and that, while there was no specific formula, the trick was to be able to say old platitudes in a clever way, for “the term ‘pulp’ actually refers to the quality of the paper in the dime magazines, not to the stories.”15 Pulp fiction continued to have a long-lasting influence on Madalena’s writing, peppered with exaggerated emotions, excessive pathos, and inflated hyperbole. The genre allowed him the freedom to discuss a range of topics and subjects not usually engaged by more elevated literary forms, from the gossip and everyday life of his San Diego Italian neighborhood to the day-to-day duties of soldiers overseas, which he wrote about with irony, frankness, and a good dose of sexual innuendos. Pulp fiction was the ideal conduit for this kind of salacious conversation, especially for those seeking to experiment with non-traditional gender and sexual roles. Pulp’s relevance for the emergence of queer identities cannot be overstated. Around midcentury pulp provided stories with gay and lesbian characters that were impossible to find elsewhere. Even if such depictions were, for the most part, negative, their circulation allowed for the possibility of 12  For The Invisible Glass see Slide, Lost Gay Novels, 178–179. For Confetti for Gino see Rose Basile Green, The Italian-American Novel: A Document of the Interaction of Two Cultures, (Madison-Teaneck: Fairleigh-Dickinson University Press, 1974), 179, and Scambray, “America’s Americas,” 64. 13  Madalena, “Pulp Writing 1A,” El Palenque (Fall 1940): 26. https://digitallibrary.sdsu. edu/islandora/object/sdsu%3A78469#page/1/mode/2up. 14  Madalena, “Pulp,” 26. 15  Madalena, “Pulp,” 26.

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identification, recognition, and gratification at a time when the public repression of homosexuality was violently enforced on the national stage as much as policed  in local bars.16 Likewise, pulp magazines were ­responsible for the establishment of a mass male readership and the creation of new forms of consumer masculinity.17 Madalena was obviously familiar with the hyperbolic and sensationalistic conventions of pulp, which he readily incorporated in his novels. He paid homage to the genre intertextually by explicitly citing magazines by name in his works. While in The Invisible Glass there is only a fleeting mention of Esquire magazine, from whose pages the soldiers tore out pin-up women’s photos to plaster on their barracks’ walls, in Confetti for Gino Madalena describes in detail the pulp reading habits of the Italian American fishermen out at sea, where, in a noticeably homosocial environment, they exchanged pulp comics and magazine publications without much subgenre discrimination. Over the span of three pages, the author lists more than 20 such titles, real and fictional, including Detective Comics, Batman, Jungle Comics, Terror Tales, G.I. Stories, True Love, Sweetheart Stories, and Space Tales.18 16  In Queer Pulp: Perverted Passions from the Golden Age of the Paperback (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2001), Susan Stryker writes that, “paperbacks in the 1940s and ‘50s were undoubtedly the venue of choice for exploring and exploiting certain taboo topics disallowed in movies and radio and the pages of reputable hardcover books. Before the sexual revolution of the 1960s, and the explosion of soft- and hard-core pornographic magazines that came in its wake, paperback books were pretty much the only game in town when it came to explicit portrayals of sexuality in the mass media,” 7–8. See also Michael Bronski, Pulp Friction: Uncovering the Golden Age of Gay Male Pulps (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2003); Amy Villarejo, “Forbidden Love: Pulp as Lesbian History,” in Out Takes: Essay on Queer Theory and Film, ed. Ellis Hanson (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 316–345; Jennifer Worley, “The Mid-century Pulp Novel and the Imagining of a Lesbian Community,” in Invisible Suburbs: Recovering Protest Fiction in the 1950s United States, ed. Josh Lukin (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2008), 104–123; Paula Rabinowitz, American Pulp: How Paperback Brought Modernism to Main Street (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 184–208. 17  See Jean-Paul Gabilliet, Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic Books, trans. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2010). 18  Wahl, The Invisible Glass, 26; Madalena, Confetti for Gino, 216–218. On Esquire’s influence on the construction of masculine identities and male readerships see Kenon Breazeale, “In Spite of Women: ‘Esquire’ Magazine and the Construction of the Male Consumer,” Signs 20, no 1 (1994): 1–22. In his correspondence with the Doubleday editor, Madalena recommended that they place reviews in “male magazines (Playboy, Esquire, etc.) considering the emphasis on fishing and sex in the novel.” Letter of August 29, 1959. Lawrence J. Madalena’s papers. SDSU Special Collections.

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In addition to these direct references, pulp also literally materialized through the different paperback editions that Madalena’s novels enjoyed, that were probably responsible for their national circulation and international distribution in multiple venues and among a variety of audiences. Originally published in hardback by the gay-friendly Greenberg press in 1950, with an abstract cover design and a surprisingly candid synopsis in the folded flaps, The Invisible Glass was quickly reprinted in two separate pocketbook editions: the first came out with Berkley Books as early as 1950 as Take Me As I Am, while the second was published in 1952 by Avon Books with the title If This Be Sin.19 A paperback edition of Confetti for Gino, simply titled Gino, was also printed by the UK-based Corgi Books, part of Transworld Publishers, which guaranteed “British Empire rights” and distribution across the Commonwealth.20 Like for all pulps, in these paperback editions the cover illustrations are an essential spectacle.21 Since their purpose was to attract potential readers, pulp covers became a veritable transmedia popular art, combining suggestive, eroticized images with sensationalistic messages, often advertising the stories in deceptive ways. Illustrated by Rudy Nappi, “one of the greatest pulp fiction artists of his time,”22 the cover of Take Me As I Am (the 1950 paperback edition of The Invisible Glass) depicts a soldier embracing an ecstatic woman from behind and kissing her exposed 19  The original Greenberg edition’s summary of The Invisible Glass reads: “Against a complex background of homosexuality and race prejudice, this novel of love, violence, hate and relentless tragedy unfolds swiftly and with rapier-like strokes.” The paperback editions credit the novels to the same author: Loren Wahl, Take Me As I Am (New York: Berkley, 1950); Loren Wahl, If This Be Sin (New York: Avon, 1952). In addition to these paperback editions, The Invisible Glass was also reprinted in 1965 in hardback by the prominent gay publisher Guild Press based in Washington D.C.  See Philip Clark, “Come Again: A History of the Reprinting of Gay Novels,” in The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered, ed. Tom Cardamone (Bayonne, NJ: Haiduk Press, 2010), 213–219, and Bergman, “Selling Gay Literature Before Stonewall,” 49–51. 20  Lorenzo Madalena, Gino, (London: Corgi Books, 1960). Madalena tried unsuccessfully to have a paperback edition of Confetti for Gino published in the US. See Letters from 25 April 1960, which noted the “British Empire rights,” 11 June 1961, 13 June 1961, and 26 December 1961 in the Lawrence J. Madalena’s papers. SDSU Special Collections. For a brief but insightful mention of “pulp’s global invasion,” particularly India, see Rabinowitz, American Pulp, 11–12. 21  Stryker, Queer Pulp, 7; Rabinowitz, American Pulp, 4, 42. See also Nicole Matthews and Nickianne Moody, eds, Judging a Book by Its Cover: Fans, Publishers, Designers, and the Marketing of Fiction (Hampshire UK and Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2007), and John Sutherland, “Fiction and the Erotic Cover,” Critical Quarterly 33, no 2 (1991): 3–18. 22  The National Museum of American Illustration, Artists, “Rudy Nappi,” https://americanillustration.org/project/rudy-nappi/

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décolleté, seemingly referring to Chick Johnson and his Italian lover Anna Castiglione, though the blackness of the former is far from obvious. The caption above the title misleadingly describes the novel as being about “women-hungry GIs and the girls who fed their hunger.” (Fig. 4.1) The back cover reinforces the heterosexual narrative by stressing the “hard-boiled, hard-hitting” quality of the story about “the men who go to

Fig. 4.1  Loren Wahl, Take Me As I Am (New York: Berkley Books, 1950)

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war and the women they meet and love behind the battlefield.”23 There is no mention of race, racism, ethnicity, or of the interracial queer and straight romantic relationships portrayed  in the novel. While deceiving, and presumably targeting a straight, white audience, this strategy may also have inadvertently reached a wider and unsuspecting readership otherwise unaware of the deeper implications of the novel. In contrast, the cover of the Avon edition plays with the love triangle between La Cava, Chick, and Anna, and is more revealing of queer interracial desire, anticipated by the new title: If This Be Sin. At a table decorated with an Italian-style red-checkered cloth, a darkskinned man laughs with a voluptuous and uncovered young woman while a blond-haired man in uniform looks at them in envy. The caption above the title reads, “A violent story—disturbing in theme, realistic in detail.” (Fig. 4.2) The back cover intriguingly warns that, “After reading this searching study of prejudices and twisted emotions, we guarantee you’ll stop and think—no matter what your beliefs!” The description also raises the issues of race and sexuality and their impact on the soldiers shipped overseas, seemingly alluding to the segregation within the military: “This is a probing study into the heart of the problems confronting fighting men in alien lands when their desires and color differ from those they serve with.” Perhaps, it is not by chance that Negro Digest was one of the publications used to endorse the book with the seductive line “the yarn is bound to leave most readers breathless,” suggesting a crossover attempt to appeal to a diverse readership.24 Confetti for Gino’s covers offer a similarly enlightening case study in visual storytelling. While the first Doubleday edition, illustrated by Don Bolognese, portrayed a captain at the helm of his boat with the title accompanied by the caption, “A vivid novel of the lives and loves of the San Diego fishermen,” the 1960 Corgi paperback cover for Gino, painted by James E. McConnell, decidedly pulped up the story (Figs. 4.3 and 4.4).25 23  Wahl, Take Me As I Am, 1950. See the book details here: https://www.librarything. com/work/10319314/workdetails 24  Loren Wahl, If This Be Sin, 1952. See the book details here: https://www.librarything. com/work/10304615 25  Madalena liked the Doubleday cover by Don Bolognese, but noted that his “fishing friends” commented that it did not “present a picture of a tuna fishing boat.” Letter from 10 July 1959. Lawrence J. Madalena’s papers. SDSU Special Collections.

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Fig. 4.2  Loren Wahl, If This Be Sin (New York: Avon Publishing, 1952)

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Fig. 4.3  Lorenzo Madalena, Confetti for Gino (New York: Doubleday, 1959)

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Fig. 4.4  Lorenzo Madalena, Gino (London: Corgi Books, 1960)

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On the cover of the British edition, the captain, dressed like Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront (1954), is joined by a luscious Marilyn Monroe lookalike in a strapless red dress, sitting in a cross legged pose in the foreground, with her ample bosom well on display.26 The two figures are meant to represent Gino DeMarino  and his blond WASP paramour Vicky. The caption accompanying the title titillatingly made sure to advertise that he was “Handsome, virile—any woman in San Diego was his for the taking—except for the one girl he wanted.” Not only is the description sensationalistic and full of not-so-subtle erotic allusions, but it is also false and misleading, since Gino’s real conflict in the book is not so much about love, sex, and their unfulfillment, but about his rebellious impulse to resist the pressure to conform to the ways of life of his Italian heritage by assimilating, instead, into American white society.27 In their overt voyeuristic intent to attract readers, these pulp covers represent a tangible sign of the increasing visibility of sexuality in the public debates of the postwar period, exemplified by the groundbreaking Kinsey Reports on Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in 1947 and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female in 1953. Madalena’s novels, in their intended and amplified pulp versions, and as reflections of the author’s own lived experience as a (closeted) gay man, speak to this critical historical moment. Michael Bronski writes that, “It is impossible to overestimate the effect of World War II on American culture, and in particular on lesbians and gay men.”28 Many youths found themselves away from home for the first time, mostly surrounded by peers of the same sex. As “the largest mobilization of personnel in human history,” Susan Stryker reminds us that “[t]he war brought an unprecedented number of people together in sex-segregated settings, which helped foster new gay and lesbian social 26  Madalena, Gino. For the image on the cover see also http://adventures-of-the-­ blackgang.tumblr.com/post/3536779055/saturday-night-sirens-lorenzo-madalena-ginocorgi-books. Significantly, I Cover the Waterfront (1932) by the San Diego Sun journalist Max Miller was a popular book that Madalena admired and served as inspiration for Confetti for Gino. Miller also championed Madalena’s book. See Madalena’s biography and the letter of 13 December 1960. Lawrence J. Madalena’s papers. SDSU Special Collections. 27  In his Afterword to the 2011 Guernica edition of Confetti for Gino, Pasquale Verdicchio recounts having read the book for the first time in 1980 on the island of Formentera in a “pulpish” paperback version owned by a Dutch friend that represented two fishermen on the cover: “one in a boat and the other overboard with a shark at his heels” (403). Unfortunately, I was not able to locate this edition anywhere, so far. 28  Bronski, A Queer History of the United States, (Boston: Beacon Press, 2011), 152.

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networks, both in the military itself and in the domestic war industries.”29 Preoccupied by the close intimacies that could develop, the military tried to first screen out, and then punish and discharge gays. It also actively looked for healthy ways to distract soldiers during the many idle intervals of the war. In so doing, it became partially responsible for the reading habits and the not-so-chaste tastes of millions of Americans for generations. Its commissioned Armed Services Editions, “cheaply produced and ingeniously designed books, almost all complete and unabridged,” inspired by Penguin and Pocket Books originally introduced in 1939, not only provided literacy and entertainment to servicemen and women but helped popularize the pulp format that would later be successfully replicated by commercial publishers.30 With its symbiotic synthesis of form and content, pulp fiction is a perfect example of McLuhan’s dictum that “the medium is the message,” one that in the postwar period continued to thrive and circulate widely in unexpected ways.31 Despite the increasing paranoia of the McCarthy era, when gay titles disappeared from the catalogs of most trade publishers, effectively censored and banned by court orders, pulp books provided a welcome lifeline to many readers, since, like pornography, they were handled by magazine distributors and not by book distributors. As David Bergman explains, “Magazine distributors had entirely different networks. Relatively few towns had bookstores, but all bus stations had magazine racks, and so these magazine distributors placed gay muscle magazines and pulp fiction in remote corners of America.”32 It may not have been possible to find a gay title in a local bookstore, but any town had a bus, or a gas station filled with magazines and pulp paperbacks. It is impossible to know how many copies of The Invisible Glass in its Take Me As I Am and If This Be Sin paperback editions circulated this way, but we can speculate that 29  Stryker, Queer Pulp, 7, 11. The Invisible Glass also alludes to the WACs (Women’s Army Corps), which La Cava’s former “boyish” girlfriend Katy has joined, with not-so-subtle lesbian insinuations (182–183). On the relevance of these female corps for lesbians see Worley, “The Mid-century Pulp Novel and the Imagining of Lesbian Community,” 120, note 3. 30  Rabinowitz, American Pulp, 112–113. 31  Marshall McLuhan, Chapter 1 of Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964). 32  Bergman, “Selling Gay Literature Before Stonewall” 48–49.

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they reached a broad national audience beyond a restricted niche. It is plausible that the circulation of these pulps among a diverse readership enabled, at least symbolically, the creation of alternative communities of readers no matter how negated their identities were by the deadly ending of most queer pulp stories.33 In light of these considerations, Madalena’s novels’ association with pulp is not a minor detail but is central to their interpretation, preservation, and dissemination. Indeed, pulp’s expansive archive brings to our attention aspects of the Italian American experience that may not be found elsewhere and that are still seldom discussed, as in the case of the queer, interracial, diasporic, and transcultural elements pervading Madalena’s narrative. Pulp provided a platform for the representation of a variety of nonhegemonic, non-normative, and intersectional identities otherwise canceled from or lost to history. While often dismissed and denigrated by literary criticism, and at the same time coveted by the masses, pulp’s wide distribution afforded unexpected possibilities for diverse constituencies of readers to come into contact with or be exposed to other lifestyles and identities. Likewise, it is also possible to reclaim an Italian American presence in pulp, one that deserves to be better scrutinized for the insights that it can bring to bear on the genre’s queer, ethnic, and transnational impulses.34 The Invisible Glass confirms some common expectations and stereotypes already partially examined by WWII historiography, but it disrupts others by including same-sex interracial and intercultural love affairs, as well as the representation of relationships between Italian local women and African American soldiers in unsuspected parts of the Italian peninsula, and it does so from a 33  See also Worley, “The Mid-century Pulp Novel and the Imagining of a Lesbian Community.” 34  Another interesting case involving the intersections of race, sexuality, and ethnicity is that of African American gay writer Willard Motley, author of Knock on Any Door, originally published in hardback in 1947 by Appleton-Century-Crofts, featuring an Italian American protagonist in Chicago. The cover of the 1950 Signet paperback edition of the book, published by the New American Library, which specialized in pulp reprints, read “The Shocking Story of Youth in the Slums.”

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distinctly Italian American perspective. Minor novels—considered trashy and pulpy, sensationalistic, and mollifying—represent invaluable sources to recover this type of information. It is thanks to an Italian American diasporic pulp novel like The Invisible Glass that we can imagine a queer past made of potentially alternative families and identities. Despite its title, The Invisible Glass, makes visible those connections and subjectivities that, although defeated to the point of elimination, have survived in the margins, and deserve to be remembered. A closer look at the novel will help illustrate the unpredicted work of pulp fiction discussed so far.

Dangerous Liaisons in Black and White with Shades of Gray Part 1: The Queer Plot Given its gay plot and Italian WWII setting, The Invisible Glass has been likened to John Horne Burns’ classic The Gallery.35 More stylistically sophisticated, the latter is set in the summer of 1944 in Allied-occupied Naples and focuses on the vicissitudes of US service personnel passing through the Galleria Umberto I, and its Momma’s gay bar, in particular. The Invisible Glass also revolves around an American battalion stationed in Italy, but its inclusion of Italian American and African American co-­ protagonists and its specific setting in the North complicates an established geography of race and sex relations that, at least in the Italian collective imaginary, has traditionally been relegated to the South. Unlike more common racist depictions of African and African American soldiers occupying the South and the center of the country and violating Italian women in the process, The Invisible Glass moves some of these dynamics

35  Slide, Lost Gay Novels, 178; Scambray, “America’s Americas,” 52; Bronski, A Queer History of the United States, 167–168.

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further up the peninsula, while also debunking other assumptions about wartime gay and interracial relationships.36 The story of The Invisible Glass takes place at the tail end of WWII, between April 29 and May 4, 1945, in Bassano del Grappa, in the Veneto region, where an African American outfit has set up camp. The two co-­ protagonists meet in the second chapter, when Chick Johnson, an African American private, is sent to Verona to pick up a new officer: Italian American Lieutenant Steve La Cava. While Chick is initially standoffish and understandably guarded vis-à-vis La Cava, given the racism that he is regularly subjected to in the military, the other is immediately, if unconsciously, attracted to him. In his highly racialized first impression of the African American soldier, La Cava takes in and admires Chick’s physical appearance: “A good-looking colored lad. His nose and his lips weren’t as broad and large as with most Negroes he had seen. Slender, not particularly tall, and solidly built. He could tell that from the way the soldier’s sweat-soaked woolen shirt clung to his arms and chest.”37 From the onset, 36  Relations between Italian women and African American soldiers occurred throughout Italy, and their offspring were considered a problem everywhere, but at the cultural level these relationships were especially imagined taking place in the South. Among the cultural productions of this period that alluded to the African and African American military presence in the South of Italy are films like Paisá (1945), Il Mulatto (1950), and La ciociara (Two Women, 1960), based on the 1957 novel of the same title by Alberto Moravia, and songs like “Tammuriata nera.” For further discussion see Gaia Giuliani, ed., Il colore della nazione (Florence: Le Monnier Università, 2015), especially the chapters by Liliana Ellena, “Geografie della razza nel cinema italiano del primo dopoguerra 1945–1955,” 17–31, Silvana Patriarca, “‘Gli italiani non sono razzisti’: costruzione dell’italianità tra gli anni Cinquanta e il 1968,” 32–45, and Vincenza Perilli, “Relazioni pericolose. Asimmetrie dell’interrelazione tra ‘razza’ e genere e sessualità interraziale,” 143–156. For a similar argument see also Vincenza Perilli, “Tammuriata nera. Sessualità interraziale nel secondo dopoguerra italiano,” Iperstoria no 6 (2015): 126–142, https://doi.org/10.13136/2281-4582/2015.i6.299. For a discussion of race in Italian cinema see Shelleen Green, Equivocal Subjects. Between Italy and Africa: Construction of Racial and National Identity in the Italian Cinema (New York: Continuum, 2012), Leonardo De Franceschi, L’Africa in Italia. Per una controstoria postcoloniale del cinema italiano (Rome: Aracne, 2013). For the case of African American soldiers in Tuscany see Charles Leavitt IV, “The Forbidden City: Tombolo Between American Occupation and Italian Imagination,” in Cultural Change Through Language and Narrative: Italy and the US, ed. Guido Bonsaver, Alessandro Carlucci, Matthew Reza (London: Legenda, 2019), 143–155. On Italian American soldiers in Italy see Matteo Pretelli and Francesco Fusi, “Fighting Alongside the Allies in Italy: The War of Soldiers of Italian Descent Against the Land of their Ancestors” in Italy and the Second World War: Alternative Perspectives, ed. Emanuela Sica and Richard Carrier, (Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2018), 299–324. 37  Wahl, The Invisible Glass, 25.

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La Cava’s lustful observations about the muscles and body of his subordinate alert us to his queer desire for another man in the fetishistic, exotic, and seductive manner that attracted masses of readers in search of provocative cheap thrills to midcentury pulp fiction.38 His observations about the African American soldier’s nose and lips not being as large as those of other Black folks also betray an obsession with racial traits and racist hierarchies of beauty. What distinguishes Chick in the eyes of La Cava seems to be that he looks less Black than most. In fact, the narrative will make clear later that Chick reminds La Cava of his late white lover Phil. The friendly, nonchalant, seemingly color-blind, demeanor of La Cava intrigues Chick who tests him by agreeing to drink from the same bottle of whisky, certain that out of fear of racial contamination the Lieutenant will clean it before taking his sip. Instead, Chick is surprised by the man’s behavior: “The damn Lieutenant hadn’t even run his hand over the mouth of the bottle! He had drunk without first wiping it clean, as if he’d been sharing the quart with another white man.”39 When La Cava lights a cigarette and offers it to Chick, the soldier is sold on the white officer’s good intentions: “The Lieutenant wasn’t just trying to be nice. He meant it. It didn’t mean anything to light a cigarette for a soldier, a colored soldier, or give him a drink of bourbon. White lips and black lips and it didn’t mean a thing.”40 Seemingly neutral actions as those of lighting a cigarette and drinking from the same bottle, very much in the tradition of hard-boiled fiction, become an opportunity, and an excuse, to reinforce the erotic tension of the scene, exemplified by the suggestion of lips touching through the transfer of objects, and made more intense by the transgression of the interracial taboo. The two men bond over their common California origins—somehow naively seen as more progressive than the Southern states where most of the other Black troopers, and the unit’s white supremacist Captain, hail from—and over their shared passion for jazz. When La Cava expresses his intention to visit his Italian side of the family in San Rocco di Pavia, he does not hesitate to invite Chick to come along. The chapter closes with the two arriving at the Bassano military camp and with La Cava strangely possessed by “a nameless panic,” for he realizes that “[E]xcept for the color,” Chick brings to his memory someone he once knew, Phil,

 Stryker, Queer Pulp, 7–8.  Wahl, 30. 40  Wahl, 34. 38 39

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his best friend and lover, who was killed in the Battle of the Rapido River.41 Quite dramatically, and suspensefully, a stiff La Cava murmurs to himself that “it wasn’t going to happen again. He wouldn’t let it happen. It mustn’t, it couldn’t!” foreshadowing the internal conflict over his queerness that will unfold in the last few chapters.42 The two men finally get on the road to Pavia to meet La Cava’s Italian family only toward the end of the novel, when, after spending a drunken night together, the reality of their sexual encounter, accompanied by Chick’s resolute rejection of the Lieutenant, will set them on their separate tragic finales. It is during this trip that the concept of “invisible glass” posited by Du Bois in Dusk of Dawn comes to the fore. While they drive from Bassano through Cittadella, Vicenza, Verona, Desenzano, Brescia, Bergamo, Milano, and eventually Pavia, in a detailed topography that allows us to literally follow them on a map, and that reveals Madalena’s own familiarity with this trip, Chick and La Cava engage in a serious discussion about racial inequality in the United States.43 They talk about the established racial hierarchies maintained and reinforced by the war and the military, and the perceived impossibility of any real societal change even after they go back to civilian life. At one point La Cava asks Chick upfront “what it feels like to be a Negro,” to ride in segregated street cars, to be careful not to brush against white men and women on the sidewalk, to be prohibited from entering certain theaters and restaurants, and recognizes that the consequences of systemic racism “must go much deeper. [I]t must affect you some way that we whites can’t possibly realize.”44 While clearly identifying as Italian American and hinting at the history of migration in his family, there is no question that La Cava understands himself as white, especially vis-à-vis African Americans. This contrasts with Confetti for Gino when Madalena places far more emphasis on the complexity and prejudices of Italian and Sicilian ethnicities, and problematizes whiteness as a privilege acquired through assimilation at the expense of one’s cultural identity.

 Wahl, 46.  Wahl, 47. 43  By the end of the war Madalena was stationed in this part of the country and got to know it well. Like La Cava, he also had family near Milan and was planning to visit them. See his letter from May 17, 1945, in the WWII Servicemen’s Correspondence, 1941–1945, of SDSU Digital Archives: https://digitallibrary.sdsu.edu/islandora/object/sdsu%3A64216 44  Wahl, The Invisible Glass, 177. 41 42

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Touched by these questions, Chick unfolds from his wallet a page he had torn from Du Bois’ Dusk of Dawn, and reads it aloud to La Cava: It is difficult to let others see the full psychological meaning of caste segregation. It is as though one, looking out from a dark cave in a side of an impending mountain, sees the world passing and speaks to it; speaks courteously and persuasively, showing them how these entombed souls are hindered in their natural movement, expression, and development; and how their loosening from prison would be a matter not simply of courtesy, sympathy, and help to them, but aid to all the world. One talks on evenly and logically in this way but notices that the passing throng does not even turn its head, or if it does, glances curiously and walks on. It gradually penetrates the minds of the prisoners that the people passing do not hear; that some thick sheet of invisible but horribly tangible plate glass is between them and the world.45

Taken from the best-known chapter of Du Bois’ book, entitled “The Concept of Race,” this passage makes the case for the devastating psychological, and material, damage that racial segregation inflicts on African Americans. Madalena wanted readers to be aware of the origin of this reference from the inception of the book, and specifically used the sentence “…some thick sheet of invisible but horribly tangible plate glass is between them and the world” as epigraph for his novel, citing both author and title of the quotation. There is no question that Madalena intended to make a statement about race and a pledge to racial justice. His postwar studies, teaching, and commitment to civil rights tell us as much.46 He also saw the degrading experience of African Americans as comparable to that of gays. In fact, Madalena appropriates the concept of the invisible glass used by Du Bois for Blacks and repurposes it for gays as well, in an attempt to show how despite their differences, their similar rejection from society led to the same tragic conclusion. La Cava seems to perfectly grasp the perniciousness of racial segregation and names the concept that gives the title to the book: “‘The invisible 45  Wahl, 177–178. In addition to explaining the title of the book, this passage also makes clear the symbolism of La Cava’s last name, associated, albeit for different reasons, with the condition of the Black people living in a “dark cave.” The original text can be found in W.E.B Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1940), 130–131. 46  See note 2. Madalena’s master’s thesis in support of African American voting rights was entitled “The Effect upon Negro Suffrage of Recent United States Supreme Court Decisions Interpreting the Fifteenth Amendment,” Scambray, 51.

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glass.’ I like that. We can see each other, see what we’re doing, and yet never get to know one another… An invisible glass separating the white and the Negro worlds that no one can break through.”47 While La Cava cannot see any way out of this system, perhaps projecting his own still latent queer identity onto this race concept, Chick points out that the invisible glass is still “plate glass. [T]ough and hard, but not shatterproof. All it takes is one person to make a crack and break through the glass, and others will follow.”48 It is, he suggests to La Cava’s delight, what has happened with them by becoming true friends. Encouraged by the Black soldier’s words, the Italian American Lieutenant “felt a warm shudder course through his body” as if “Chick were speaking his own secret thoughts.”49 The rest of the day and evening continues with La Cava’s misplaced exhilaration that has been building up for the entirety of the story. They meet Zio Tony’s family and get drunk on his “Dago red” until their beyond-­ inebriated bodies will take over and seal not a new beginning free from obstructing barriers, but an insurmountable wall and their very demise.50 In the room they share for the night, exhausted by the travel and the wine, the Lieutenant observes Chick’s body with the unmistakable homoerotic desire that had characterized his leering since the first time he set eyes on the African American soldier a few days prior. But this time he is more uninhibited and aware of it: “He doesn’t have underwear, La Cava was astonished to find himself noticing. Only a brown, smooth body. Slender. Beautifully proportioned. Slender but muscular. Strong, well-­ developed arms. A hard abdomen, furrowed with ridges of muscle. Hardly any hair.”51 This explicit description of carnal desire for another man, prefiguring the allusion of the sexual interracial intercourse to follow, had dire consequences for the novel’s publisher. In 1953 Greenberg was sued for obscenity by the federal government for the publication of The Invisible Glass and other similar books. Gay titles disappeared from its catalog. The result of these legal actions was crushing on the industry. Most commercial publishers stopped carrying these novels and turned down others, such as James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, which was rejected by Alfred

 Wahl, 178.  Wahl, 178–179. 49  Wahl, 179. 50  Wahl, 186. 51  Wahl, 196. 47 48

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Knopf, his first publisher, in 1955.52 Not surprisingly, gay books went underground as pulp, which really meant that they were under everybody’s nose, hiding in plain sight in a different guise. As Paula Rabinowitz writes in American Pulp, “Reading pulp, in the form of the eroticized paperback objects of postwar America, meant entering the frontier, the contact zone, in Mary Louise Pratt’s formulation of colonial encounters, between high and low, secrecy and disclosure, forging a collective intimacy at once mass mediated and private.”53 The Invisible Glass made readers privy to gay male confidential effusions by bringing them voyeuristically into the bedroom. It also provided an intense, pleasurable fantasy of interracial queer intimacy, turning the forbidden into foreplay. Quite literally under the covers, the two intoxicated men begin to lightly touch each other, with La Cava, who “could feel a maddening pounding in his chest,”54 clearly the more conscious of the two: Their faces met. Their breaths, smelling sweet from wine, came in heavy, drawn sighs. La Cava grasped the soldier about the waist and drew him tightly to his body. His mouth pressed down as he felt Chick’s lips part. For a long moment they lay quietly, holding one another with strained arms. The Lieutenant could feel Chick’s fingers squeezing firmly upon his back. With an effort La Cava broke from the soldier’s embrace. His mouth searched for the soldier’s ear. His fingers grasped the tight, kinky hair. He kissed the neck. The shoulders. Now his mouth worked downward, past the muscular breasts, over the panting abdomen, and came to rest on the warm, bony thighs. He could feel the soldier quiver in response. “Chick, Chick!” he murmured. “I love you.” Lieutenant La Cava trembled as the soldier’s strong, lean fingers caressed his face and hair.55

Despite the fact that sex was only ever hinted at between the lines, the novel’s teasing with quivering, panting, and caressing was more than enough to make a judge declare it “to be among the dirtiest things the

52  Bergman, “Selling Gay Literature Before Stonewall,” 47–48. It is worth noting that The Invisible Glass was also “banned in Australia from 1953 to 1971.” National Archives of Australia, https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/the-invisible-glass-1950-by-lorenwahl-greenberg-new-york/GwGAKvBn48Ff8w. 53  Rabinowitz, American Pulp, 42. 54  Wahl, 199. 55  Wahl, 200.

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court had ever seen.”56 The legal suppression that followed all but mimicked what was already embedded in the story itself. With a gap in the narrative, the plot jumps to Chick waking up in the middle of the night, realizing what happened, and moving to sleep on the floor. The next day it is full-blown denial and avoidance, with Chick “sullen” as they drive back from San Rocco di Pavia to Milan, without exchanging a word.57 The penultimate chapter takes place entirely in Milan where the two men part ways for the day and La Cava finally admits his queerness to himself after an enlightening visit to the “Yankee Bar,” a homosexual hangout full of gay American soldiers, much like the Neapolitan Momma’s Bar in Burns’ The Gallery, a novel which enjoyed commercial success in the US and was first translated into Italian in 1949, in spite of some censorship:58 He was a damn fool not to have admitted it sooner. He was as queer as all the others in the Yankee Bar. … He hadn’t really ‘come out’ yet, although he’d had various affairs. He was still fighting it off. That was why he kept running. Each time he came face to face with the fact that he was gay, he took off in terror, refusing to realize that he was a homo.59

Shaken by this self-revelation, La Cava takes refuge in the Duomo, but instead of finding solace, he is enraged at his own Catholic upbringing: “He wanted to shout at the top of his voice and yell. He wanted to scream at the altar and cry out his rage and curse God for letting him be queer… That was it, by God! Too much religion! What a dirty trick had been pulled on him!”60 The return to Bassano depicted in the final chapter is a veritable agony, with La Cava confessing his love to Chick and the African American soldier categorically rejecting him in the most spiteful way. Caught between guilt, anger, and homophobia, Chick insults La Cava by suggesting to him that if he is so crazy about “black meat” he can “pimp” for him, referring to the fact that other soldiers in the outfit are also queer.61 For La Cava it  Bergman, “Selling Gay Literature Before Stonewall,” 48.  Wahl, 203. 58  See John Horne Burns, La Galleria: Un americano a Napoli (Milan: Baldini&Castoldi, 1992), originally published by Garzanti in 1949. See also Slide, Lost Gay Novels, 46–50. 59  Wahl, 213. 60  Wahl, 217. 61  Wahl, 224. 56 57

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is confirmation that he was right; the invisible glass cannot really be broken, it affects our very humanity, keeping people apart through a series of never-ending invisible barriers that prevent other forms of intersectional alignment: He’d met the soldier, become his friend. He’d broken through the invisible glass that separated the Negro and white worlds only to find another invisible glass still separated them. Not as Negro against white. But as man against man. An invisible glass that could never be cracked.62

Faced with this unbearable realization and tired of running away from himself, upon arrival at the camp, as Chick is walking away from the Jeep, La Cava kills himself with the Beretta pistol his uncle had given him, ending his own life, but symbolically also that of Chick who will predictably be accused of his murder. In the homophobic, misogynistic, and repressive 1950s this was not just a plausible tragic finale, but an unavoidable one. After an entire novel spent implying that the racial barrier between Blacks and whites could potentially be broken, while also obliquely pairing and comparing race with homosexuality, the ultimate conclusion firmly retreats from this suggestion and veers abruptly away from the possibility of any positive resolution in which race and queerness can be both cherished and reconciled.63 Indeed, such an option in The Invisible Glass, as in many other gay and lesbian pulp novels of its time, was so precluded as to invite, paradoxically, not only a queer reappraisal of the genre to recover an imagined LGBT community, but also a meaningful mourning for the historical losses and failures that pulp registered (including queer identities and actual lives), to which we are still indebted in the present.64

 Wahl, The Invisible Glass, 225.  For a detailed, historically situated analysis of this novel, see James Polchin, “‘Why Do They Strike Us?’ Representing Violence and Sexuality, 1930–1950,” (PhD diss., New York University, 2002), 193–213. 64  On queer loss and failure see Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007) and Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). The verisimilitude of the story narrated in The Invisible Glass seems to be reinforced by its dedication: “to Eddie, who is Chick, and George, who was Steve.” 62 63

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Part 2: The Straight Plot While tragic, the relationship between Chick and La Cava is not the only dangerous and fatal one in The Invisible Glass. The central chapters of the novel are dedicated to showing the pervasive racism of the US military, and to portraying the Italian civilian population’s interaction with and dependency on the American troops, as exemplified by the relationship between Chick and Anna Castiglione, his Italian lover. Chick is having an affair with Anna, the daughter of the owners of the local “bottiglieria;” her parents seem to condone the couple’s relationship, providing them privacy in exchange for coveted, otherwise unattainable, goods like coffee and sugar.65 It is hard not to infer an allusion to prostitution in these sexual transactions, more explicitly addressed in the novel through the presence of a nearby brothel, yet Chick and Anna also seem to be genuinely in love across the color line. During most of its unfolding, The Invisible Glass seems to suggest, albeit in ambiguous and contradictory terms, that race is not an issue in Italy and that the liaison between an African American man and a white Italian woman is perfectly acceptable, unlike in the United States, where Chick considers bringing Anna: “Black and white. The black one and the white one. Here it was all right, but how about back home?”66 While Chick worries about the implication of their union and repeats in Italian “Negro e bianco” to be better understood by Anna, she naively replies that, “No importance here. Qui non c’è nessuna difference, Chick.”67 Later in the novel, when Chick proposes to Anna, the same naive and unsubstantiated concept will be reiterated: What was he doing, asking an Italian girl, a white woman, to let him become her husband? He had no right to take her from a country that cared nothing for differences between races and ask her to join him in another land where mocking discrimination would taunt them. And yet he wanted her, he needed her.68

Contrary to what is indicated here and elsewhere in the novel, Italy was hardly color blind. Racial differences did matter, starting from those  Wahl, The Invisible Glass, 28.  Wahl, The Invisible Glass, 11. 67  Wahl, The Invisible Glass, 11. 68  Wahl, The Invisible Glass, 135. 65 66

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established by decades of Italian colonialism in Africa, and subsequently removed from collective memory, to the antisemitic racial laws of 1938, through WWII and beyond, when the Black soldiers of the Allied troops, not just Americans, but African and Indian as well, were invariably perceived as a sexual threat.69 It is precisely this alleged racial indifference voiced through Chick and Anna that makes the novel also an important case study for what Tatiana Petrovich Njegosh has called “the presumption of Italy’s innocence vis-à-­vis racism, a phenomenon presented as extraneous or very recent.”70 It is noteworthy that this supposed color blindness and immunity to racism was picked up in a lowbrow novel by an Italian American author, and a G.I., with experience in occupied Italy. This sentiment echoes a widespread biased  attitude  in Italy, both during and after fascism, reproduced in various media, including cinema that posited a “natural Italian a­ ntiracism” in opposition to American society’s systemic racism against African Americans.71 According to this logic, racism was absent in Italy before the arrival of African American troops during WWII. As Lilliana Ellena noted, “The criticism of another people’s racism emerged concurrently with the evacuation of ‘race’ from within the national boundaries. The binary categories of white and black considered typical of the American color line were particularly suitable to avoid any engagement with Italy’s specific genealogy, domestic and colonial, of the racial question.”72 This claim of racial neutrality was obviously a rhetorical ploy to displace the problem elsewhere. Denouncing American racism, while common in postwar Italian public opinion, as it had been during fascism, did not imply the absence of racist practices in Italy. Despite the assumption of racial innocence that The Invisible Glass seems to selectively perpetrate, the virulence of racism toward Blacks is powerfully represented in the novel. 69  In addition to the respective essays by Ellena, Patriarca, and Perilli already mentioned in note 36, see also Giulia Grechi and Viviana Gravano, eds., Presente Imperfetto: Eredità coloniali e immaginari razziali contemporanei (Milan: Mimesis, 2016). 70  Tatiana Petrovic Njegosh, “Gli italiani sono bianchi? Per una storia culturale della linea del colore in Italia,” in Parlare di razza: La lingua del colore tra Italia e Stati Uniti, ed. Tatiana Petrovic Njegosh and Anna Scacchi (Verona: Ombre Corte, 2012), 13. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from Italian are my own. 71  Ellena, “Geografie della razza nel cinema italiano del primo dopoguerra,” 22. 72  Ellena, 22.

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This bigotry is all the more striking because it is embodied by Anna’s partisan brother, Angelo. Upon his return to Bassano, after years of fighting alongside the antifascist resistance in the mountains, Angelo does not accept the relationship between his sister and Chick and categorically condemns it. He also rebukes his parents for their enabling, singling out Naples as the site for these professed interracial aberrations that he had deemed unthinkable in his Northern hometown: And is this what I return to find in my home? My very mother and father selling their daughter to a black man in return for coffee and sugar. Have you no shame? I had heard many stories of what has happened to the Neapolitans, but always I was proud and told myself that in Bassano, in my home, such things would never happen.73

Comfortable in policing the boundaries of morality when it comes to women and Black men, Angelo lashes out against his sister’s sexual conduct in an outburst reminiscent of the sexist double standard of the protagonist of Confetti for Gino. In that novel, Gino has a similar blow-up when he finds out that his sister, also named Anna, who is separated, but not divorced, from her husband, is seeing his best friend. In The Invisible Glass Angelo reprimands Anna for foolishly believing that in America she will be welcomed alongside a Black man: “A Negro is not better than a dog in America. If you were to marry this soldier, you would be ridiculed and thrown from the streets. It is shameful to be the wife of a Negro in that country.”74 Italy, it turns out, is no less racist than America, even after the fall of the fascist dictatorship. At the end of the novel, it is Angelo who seals Chick’s fate by refusing to shelter him after La Cava’s suicide, spitting in his face and calling him “Cane nero!”75 Angelo’s nasty reaction is even more hypocritical because his own sexual conduct is not exactly impeccable. Indeed, he himself has had a fling 73  Wahl, The Invisible Glass, 138. Madalena had spent several months stationed in Naples and was familiar with the condition of the city. See his letter from May 17, 1945 in the SDSU Digital collection, as well as one addressed to his family dated October 12, 1944 and published in The Southern Cross, the newspaper of the diocese of San Diego, entitled “Lieutenant Madalena Describes Condition of Rome and Naples; Narrates German Atrocities,” November 3, 1944. 74  Wahl, 139. Curiously, Angelo was also the name of Madalena’s older brother. See Moramarco, “The Man Who Turned Fact into Fiction.” 75  Wahl, 230.

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with La Cava since his homecoming. In a rather implausible twist, we learn that Angelo had already spotted La Cava prior to meeting him in person in Bassano, when, in keeping with pulp’s voyeuristic tropes, he spied on the Lieutenant’s love tryst with another man during a battle in the mountains of Cassino. The character of Angelo Castiglione, a racist partisan who has sex with men, allows us to draw a few considerations about his significance in the story. On the one hand, his racism makes explicit that being gay, or engaging in gay sexual behavior, does not necessarily guarantee solidarity with, or empathy toward, other marginalized groups, as the friendship fallout between Chick and La Cava also implies. This is especially the case for a (white) Italian man, and a respected freedom fighter, who is clearly intent on maintaining his male privilege.76 On the other hand, despite all complications and contradictions, the fact that Angelo expresses a non-normative sexual orientation opens up the possibility that such  sexual relations and attractions existed within partisan groups, as WWII historiography has documented for other comparable homosocial military environments.77 The Invisible Glass, then, forces us to pay more attention also to the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality in the study of Italian history. This would help not only to better research, and more accurately rewrite, some crucial aspects of our past, like World War II, but it would also encourage a reassessment and rethinking of the entire history of Italy since then, with its omissions, its prohibitions, and its preconceptions, all strictly white and heteronormative.

76  It is important to note that homosexuality in this time period is always represented in negative terms regardless of ideological persuasion. Suffice it to mention an iconic and foundational film like Roberto Rossellini’s Roma città aperta (1945), in which the ferocious German SS commander in chief, Major Bergmann, is portrayed as an effeminate gay man and his female counterpart, Ingrid, is depicted as a masculine predatory lesbian. See Kriss Ravetto, The Unmaking of Fascist Aesthetics (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 77. Significantly, Ravetto adds that, “characters who espouse the rhetoric of resistance, communism, socialism, or any other form of antifascism are also depicted as weak.” In Roma città aperta, Manfredi, the resistance fighter, is indeed portrayed, not unlike Angelo, as “inhuman—married only to political ideals rather than the society or people for whom he fights” (Ravetto, 76). 77  See Allan Bérubé, Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II, (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010) and Michael Bronski, A Queer History of the United States, 152–175.

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Invisibilities That B(l)ind: Some Concluding Remarks Madalena’s two published novels invite us to consider the concurrent study of areas of research that are often kept apart by disciplinary boundaries: Italian American Studies, Italian Studies, Diaspora, Postcolonial, and Transnational Studies, Ethnic and Africana Studies, Critical Race Theory, and Queer Studies. The trope of invisibility illuminates all of these missed connections. In drawing its title from Dusk of Dawn, W.E.B.  Du Bois’ essay about the irreparable damages caused by racial segregation and the inequalities between whites and Blacks, The Invisible Glass is clearly aligned with African American antiracism. In 1952, two years after the publication of Madalena’s book, Ralph Ellison published the novel The Invisible Man, where in the Prologue the protagonist famously stated that, “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.”78 According to Fred Gardaphé, who uses the same quote in his Introduction to Anti-­ Italianism: Essays on a Prejudice: Italian Americans are invisible people. Not because people refuse to see them, but because, for the most part, they refuse to be seen. Italian Americans became invisible the moment they could pass themselves off as being white. And since then they have gone to great extremes to avoid being identified as anything but white, they have even hidden the history of being people of color.79

In this version, invisibility has allowed Italian Americans to assimilate into whiteness in the United States, but to the detriment of their very cultural and ethnic identity, a danger that Madalena recognized at the end of Confetti for Gino, when the protagonist decides to remain within his local ethnic enclave rather than submit to Americanization. However, the rules of integration into white American society and those of the Italian community that opposes it impose the same social constraints and rigidities: they do not admit any deviation from the accepted  ethnic norms and

 Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Random House, 1952), 1.  Fred Gardaphé, “Introduction. Invisible People: Shadows and Light in Italian American Culture,” in Anti-Italianism: Essays on a Prejudice, eds. William J.  Connell and Fred Gardaphé (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 1. On Italian Americans and race see also Jennifer Guglielmo and Salvatore Salerno, eds., Are Italians White? How Race is Made in America (London and New York: Routledge, 2003). 78 79

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gender roles, and thus prevent Italian Americans from identifying and empathizing with other minorities. Madalena’s novels emphasize specific forms of social control and discipline shared between the two respective Italian American protagonists, Steve La Cava and Gino DeMarino. For both, shame becomes the most prominent tool of surveillance and censorship, one that leads La Cava to the ultimate self-inflicted punishment of death, and Gino to a hasty acceptance of his prescribed masculine role in the community. Similarly, Madalena mobilizes shame within the Italian context when in The Invisible Glass the partisan Angelo Castiglione reproaches his parents for having welcomed an African American man in the family, and scorns his sister for imagining a life with him, effectively acknowledging the “invisible whiteness” at the core of Italian national identity.80 All these various iterations of invisibility have the potential to illuminate each other and to generate fruitful insights, comparisons, and interconnections especially when considered within a postcolonial and diasporic framework attentive to the multiple levels of positionality produced by the encounter between different ethnic, racial, gender, and sexual identities in different locales. These contacts and intersections across various geographical, historical, cultural, and emotional borders—as precarious as they may be—open up new forms of identification to diverse types of families and communities. Madalena’s Italian American diasporic pulp novels, with their flaws and failures, may inhabit a different queer time from our own, but it is one that binds us. In this sense, they belong to what Elizabeth Freeman has called “queer temporalities” found “within lost moments of official history,” and recorded in texts, objects, and bodies that “may be invisible to the 80  Despite the insistence on the absence of racial prejudice in Italy in The Invisible Glass, Italian identity is premised precisely on the invisibility of whiteness. The claim to racial indifference or colorblindness is unsustainable for a nation like Italy that was never racially pure and that continues to deny its racist colonial past. See Gaia Giuliani, “Introduzione,” in Il colore della nazione, ed. Giuliani, 11. On race in Italy see also Gaia Giuliani and Cristina Lombardi-Diop, Bianco e nero. Storia dell’identità razziale degli italiani (Florence: Le Monnier, 2013); Tatiana Petrovich Njegosh and Anna Scacchi, eds., Parlare di razza; Elisa Bordin and Stefano Bosco, eds., A fior di pelle. Bianchezza, nerezza, visualità (Verona: Ombre Corte, 2017); Tatiana Petrovich Njegosh, ed., “La ‘realtà’ transnazionale della razza. Dinamiche di razzializzazione in prospettiva comparata,” special issue of Iperstoria 6 (Fall 2015): 1–211, https://iperstoria.it/issue/view/26; Annalisa Oboe, ed., “Archivi del futuro: il postcoloniale, l’Italia e il tempo a venire,” From the European South. A Transdisciplinary Journal of Postcolonial Humanities 1 (2016): 3–314. http://europeansouth.postcolonialitalia.it/archive/11-journal-issue/contents/4-1-2016-contents.

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historicist eye.”81 As sentimental and sensational as they may be, these books serve as Italian and Italian American counternarratives that challenge official histories of upwardly mobile integration, and heteronormative whiteness. Instead, Madalena’s works engage us in “feeling backward” in order to value, as Heather Love suggests, those aspects of our gay past “that have been diminished or dismissed with successive waves of liberation.”82 In contradistinction to the “cruel optimism” of corporate pride parades celebrating the apparent fait accompli of LGBTQ+ recognition, yet still fraught with systemic racism, it is precisely the long history of association of queerness with failure and loss that makes the impossible love of midcentury gay and lesbian pulp particularly insightful, for it forces us to reckon with the continuities, discontinuities, and difficulties in the construction of intersectional sexual identities and communities pre and post Stonewall.83 With their unattainable and unrealized relationships, The Invisible Glass and Confetti for Gino speak to these binding contradictions, then and now, and do so from a distinctly pulp sensibility that reminds us of the extraordinary variety of the Italian American queer archive.

Works Cited Basile, Rose Green. The Italian-American Novel: A Document of the Interaction of Two Cultures. Madison-Teaneck: Fairleigh-Dickinson University Press, 1974. Bergman, David. “Selling Gay Literature Before Stonewall.” In A Sea of Stories: The Shaping Power of Narrative in Gay and Lesbian Cultures: A Festschrift for John P. De Cecco, edited by Sonya L. Jones, 43–52. New York: Harrington Park Press, 2000. Berlant, Laurent. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Bérubé, Allan. Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. Bordin, Elisa, and Bosco, Stefano, eds. A fior di pelle. Bianchezza, nerezza, visualità. Verona: Ombre Corte, 2017. Breazeale, Kenon. “In Spite of Women: ‘Esquire’ Magazine and the Construction of the Male Consumer,” Signs 20, no 1 (1994): 1–22. 81  Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), xi. On the same topic see also Elizabeth Freeman, ed., Queer Temporalities, special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 13 no 2–3 (2007): 159–367. 82  Love, Feeling Backward, 23. 83  Love, Feeling Backward, 21, 23–24. Laurent Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).

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Bronski, Michael. A Queer History of the United States. Boston: Beacon Press, 2011. ———. Pulp Friction: Uncovering the Golden Age of Gay Male Pulps. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2003. Burns, John Horne, The Gallery. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1947. ———. La Galleria: Un americano a Napoli. Milan: Baldini&Castoldi, 1992. Originally published by Garzanti in 1949. Clark, Philip. “Come Again: A History of the Reprinting of Gay Novels.” In The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered, ed. Tom Cardamone, 213–219. Bayonne, NJ: Haiduk Press, 2010. Clò, Clarissa. “Passioni pulp e famiglie impossibili: diaspora, razza e sessualità in The Invisible Glass di Loren Wahl e Confetti for Gino di Lorenzo Madalena.” Famiglie queer, special issue of Ácoma: Rivista internazionale di Studi Nordamericani anno XXV, no. 16 nuova serie, (primavera-estate 2019): 47–64. http://www.acoma.it/it/content/famiglie-­queer; http://www.acoma.it/ sites/default/files/pdf-­articoli/05Clo.pdf De Franceschi, Leonardo. L’Africa in Italia. Per una controstoria postcoloniale del cinema italiano. Rome: Aracne, 2013. Du Bois, W.E.B. Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1940. Ellena, Liliana. “Geografie della razza nel cinema italiano del primo dopoguerra 1945–1955.” In Il colore della nazione, edited by Gaia Giuliani, 17–31. Florence: Le Monnier Università, 2015. Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Random House, 1952. Freeman, Elizabeth. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. ———. ed., Queer Temporalities, special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 13 no 2–3 (2007): 159–367. Gabilliet, Jean-Paul. Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic Books. Trans. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2010. Gardaphé, Fred. Introduction. “Invisible People: Shadows and Light in Italian American Culture.” In Anti-Italianism: Essays on a Prejudice, edited by William J. Connell and Fred Gardaphé, 1–10. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Giuliani, Gaia ed., Il colore della nazione. Florence: Le Monnier Università, 2015a. ———. “Introduzione.” In Il colore della nazione, edited by Gaia Giuliani, 1–14. Florence: Le Monnier Università, 2015b. ———, and Lombardi-Diop, Cristina. Bianco e nero. Storia dell’identità razziale degli italiani. Florence: Le Monnier, 2013. Grechi, Giulia and Gravano, Viviana, eds. Presente Imperfetto: Eredità coloniali e immaginari razziali contemporanei. Milan: Mimesis, 2016. Green, Rose Basile. The Italian-American Novel: A Document of the Interaction of Two Cultures. Madison-Teaneck: Fairleigh-Dickinson University Press, 1974.

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Green, Shelleen. Equivocal Subjects. Between Italy and Africa: Construction of Racial and National Identity in the Italian Cinema. New  York: Continuum, 2012. Guglielmo, Jennifer, and Salerno Salvatore, eds. Are Italians White? How Race is Made in America. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. Halberstam, Jack. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Leavitt, Charles IV. “The Forbidden City: Tombolo Between American Occupation and Italian Imagination.” In Cultural Change Through Language and Narrative: Italy and the US, ed. Guido Bonsaver, Alessandro Carlucci, Matthew Reza, 143–155. London: Legenda, 2019. “Lieutenant Madalena Describes Condition of Rome and Naples; Narrates German Atrocities,” The Southern Cross, November 3, 1944. Love, Heather. Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Lubrano, Gina. “Italy Begins Along India Street,” The San Diego Union, October 4, 1976, B1, B3. Madalena, Lorenzo. Confetti for Gino. Doubleday: New  York, 1959. Full text accessible at: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/003091153. ———. Gino. London: Corgi Books, 1960. ———. Confetti for Gino. Toronto: Guernica, 2011. ———. “Pulp Writing 1A.” El Palenque (Fall 1940): 26. https://digitallibrary. sdsu.edu/islandora/object/sdsu%3A78469#page/1/mode/2up Madalena, Lawrence J. WWII Servicemen’s Correspondence, 1941–1945. SDSU Digital Archives. San Diego State University. ———. Letter from May 17, 1945. https://digitallibrary.sdsu.edu/islandora/ object/sdsu%3A64216 Madalena, Lawrence J. Papers. Special Collections. San Diego State University. ———. Claremont Graduate School’s employment application, 22 February 1966. ———. Letter from 10 July 1959a. ———. Letter from 17 August 1959b. ———. Letter from 29 August 1959c. ———. Letter from 25 April 1960a. ———. Letter from 13 December 1960b. ———. Letter from 11 June 1961a. ———. Letter from 13 June 1961b. ———. Letter from 26 December 1961c. Matthews, Nicole and Nickianne Moody, eds, Judging a Book by Its Cover: Fans, Publishers, Designers, and the Marketing of Fiction. Hampshire UK and Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2007. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New  York: McGraw-Hill, 1964.

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McWorther, John. “I Can’t Brook the Idea of Banning ‘Negro’,” The New York Times, January 7, 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/07/opinion/ negro-­ban-­word-­dont.html Moramarco, Fred. “The Man Who Turned Fact into Fiction,” San Diego Reader, 7 September 2000a, https://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/2000/sep/07/ man-­who-­turned-­fact-­fiction/?page=1&# ———. “The Novel about San Diego Little Italy: Lorenzo Madalena’s Confetti for Gino,” San Diego Reader, 7 September 2000b, https://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/2000/sep/07/confetti-­gino/ Motley, Willard. Knock on Any Door. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1947. ———. Knock on Any Door. New York: Signet, 1950. National Museum of American Illustration, Artists, “Rudy Nappi,” https://americanillustration.org/project/rudy-­nappi/ Niceforo, Marina. “Italian Fishermen, American Sea: Fishing Language in Lorenzo Madalena’s Confetti for Gino (1959).” In Navigating Maritime Languages and Narratives, ed. Raffaella Antinucci and Maria Giovanna Petrillo, 191–201. Oxford and Bern: Peter Lang, 2017. Njegosh, Tatiana Petrovic. “Gli italiani sono bianchi? Per una storia culturale della linea del colore in Italia.” In Parlare di razza: La lingua del colore tra Italia e Stati Uniti, ed. Tatiana Petrovic Njegosh and Anna Scacchi, 13–45. Verona: Ombre Corte, 2012a. ——— ed., “La ‘realtà’ transnazionale della razza. Dinamiche di razzializzazione in prospettiva comparata,” special issues of Iperstoria no 6 (Fall 2015): 1–211. https://iperstoria.it/issue/view/26; ———, and Scacchi Anna, eds. Parlare di razza: La lingua del colore tra Italia e Stati Uniti. Verona: Ombre Corte, 2012b. Oboe, Annalisa ed. “Archivi del futuro: il postcoloniale, l’Italia e il tempo a venire.” From the European South. A Transdisciplinary Journal of Postcolonial Humanities no 1 (2016): 3–314. http://europeansouth.postcolonialitalia.it/ archive/11-­journal-­issue/contents/4-­1-­2016-­contents. Patriarca, Silvana. “‘Gli italiani non sono razzisti’: costruzione dell’italianità tra gli anni Cinquanta e il 1968.” In Il colore della nazione, edited by Gaia Giuliani, 32–45. Florence: Le Monnier Università, 2015. Perilli, Vincenza. “Relazioni pericolose. Asimmetrie dell’interrelazione tra ‘razza’ e genere e sessualità interraziale.” In Il colore della nazione, edited by Gaia Giuliani, 143–156. Florence: Le Monnier Università, 2015a. ———. “Tammuriata nera. Sessualità interraziale nel secondo dopoguerra italiano.” Iperstoria no 6 (2015b): 126–142, https://doi.org/10.13136/2281­4582/2015.i6.299. Pretelli, Matteo and Francesco Fusi, “Fighting Alongside the Allies in Italy: The War of Soldiers of Italian Descent Against the Land of their Ancestors.” In Italy

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and the Second World War: Alternative Perspectives, ed. Emanuela Sica and Richard Carrier, 299–324. Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2018. Polchin, James. “‘Why Do They Strike Us?’ Representing Violence and Sexuality, 1930–1950.” PhD diss., New York University, 2002. Rabinowitz, Paula. American Pulp: How Paperback Brought Modernism to Main Street. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014. Ravetto, Kriss. The Unmaking of Fascist Aesthetics. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Scambray, Kenneth. “America’s Americas: The Melting Pot Begins to Cool.” In Queen Calafia’s Paradise: California and the Italian American Novel, 51–66. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2007. Slide, Anthony. Lost Gay Novels. A Reference Guide to Fifty Works from the First Half of the Twentieth Century. New York: Harrington Park Press, 174–179, 2003. Sutherland, John. “Fiction and the Erotic Cover.” Critical Quarterly 33, no 2 (1991): 3–18. Stryker, Susan. Queer Pulp: Perverted Passions from the Golden Age of the Paperback. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2001. Verdicchio, Pasquale. “Fishing for Complements in Lorenzo Madalena’s Confetti for Gino.” In Confetti for Gino, Lorenzo Madalena, 403–420. Toronto: Guernica, 2011. Villarejo, Amy. “Forbidden Love: Pulp as Lesbian History,” in Out Takes: Essay on Queer Theory and Film, ed. Ellis Hanson, 316–345. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1999. Wahl, Loren. The Invisible Glass. Greenberg: New York, 1950a. Full text accessible at https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/003086657. ———. Take Me As I Am. New York: Berkley, 1950b. ———. If This Be Sin. New York: Avon, 1952. ———. The Invisible Glass. Washington D.C.: Guild Press, 1965. Worley, Jennifer. “The Mid-century Pulp Novel and the Imagining of a Lesbian Community,” in Invisible Suburbs: Recovering Protest Fiction in the 1950s United States, ed. Josh Lukin, 104–123. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2008.

CHAPTER 5

Spotlight: Dana Piccoli Dana Piccoli

Being Italian has always been something precious to me. My father is from Udine, and I grew up the only Italian kid with an immigrant parent at my small Catholic school. When you grow up with a last name like Piccoli, you can’t help but advertise your ethnicity. Some kids used it against me, but I imagine it’s a familiar story to most second-generation kids. We would spend a lot of time in Windsor Ontario’s Italian neighborhood when I was young, listening to Italian music on the rickety tableside jukeboxes. I’d drink a Chinoto and the foam from my dad’s cappuccinos, and it felt like a very normal and welcoming space for us. I think the Italian experience really differs depending on where you grew up. My wife, who is also 3rd generation Italian on both sides, really grew up with an Italian American aesthetic. I never really connected my Italian heritage and my American upbringing together until I was much older. My father became an American citizen when I was in my thirties and I retain dual citizenship to both the US and Italy. I didn’t grow up around any other Italian families unless we sought it out, like Italian clubs and

D. Piccoli (*) Vancouver, WA, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Heim, S. Anatrone (eds.), Spaghetti Sissies Queering Italian American Media, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10197-7_5

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whatnot. Also, my dad was very reluctant to teach me Italian, though my mother learned when she started seeing him. I think the Italian American experience we see in media is often a caricature, and never something I really connected with. My grandfather, my father, they were and are soft-­ spoken men. We didn’t spend all Sunday over a pot of gravy. Our experience was one of being very aware of our Italianness, but never really seeing our own lives portrayed accurately. Being an out queer person is a huge part of my life. My queerness informs the way I look at things in this world. I came out in my late teens and have been working as an advocate for representation for over a decade. [My queerness and my Italianness] are pieces of who I am, that make up the greater part of me. I’m proud to be both! My father wasn’t much of the machismo sort, so my parents split childcare, and so on. My upbringing was very liberal and open, so I guess you could say that I see my Italianness and my queerness as complimentary. I know that wasn’t the case for every queer kid growing up, but it was mine. I am definitely not a celebrity, but I have been lucky enough to have made an impact in some ways. When I was younger, I considered using a stage name since no one can pronounce my last name correctly, but I thought better of it. I think it matters that my name links me to a strong Italian heritage. Even if I have to correct people, it’s a part of who I am. I am the daughter and granddaughter of Italian immigrants. My grandfather stood at Ellis Island as a teenager, ready to make his way in the world. My father fell in love with an Italian American and settled in this country. My name is my story, and their stories (Fig. 5.1).

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Fig. 5.1  Dana Piccoli, a white woman with pink hair and a leopard print jacket, stand on a stage holding a microphone and laughing. (Copyright: ClexaCon photo staff, 2019)

CHAPTER 6

Queer Categorical Miscegenation: Sexuality, Race, Gender, Class, and Ethnicity in Victor Bumbalo’s Niagara Falls and Questa John Champagne

Introduction Rather than continuing to understand the late Victorian invention of homosexuality as a moment of singular and absolute abjection, let us consider the possibility of the homosexual as a practical, if accidental, agent of neocolonial expansion.…serviceable both to modern nation building and to transnational flows of capital. —Hiram Pérez, A Taste for Brown Bodies1

1  Hiram Pérez, A Taste for Brown Bodies, Gay Modernity and Cosmopolitan Desire (New York: NYU Press, 2015), 27.

J. Champagne (*) Penn State Erie, The Behrend College, Erie, PA, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Heim, S. Anatrone (eds.), Spaghetti Sissies Queering Italian American Media, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10197-7_6

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How might analyses of queer Italian American media engage with critical race theory? In this essay, I hope to use insights from such theory both to further the investigation of the history of modern Italian and Italian American racial identity and to consider how works of queer Italian American media might be haunted by this history. My primary objects of analysis will be two plays by gay white Italian American playwright Victor Bumbalo: Niagara Falls and Questa. Each of these plays seeks to represent race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality, and so seems particularly suited to being read alongside (queer) critical race theory.2 Both were also nominated for the prestigious Lambda Literary Award for Drama: Questa in 2006 and, following its republication, Niagara Falls in 2007. (This republication was accompanied by the play’s Philadelphia premiere.)3 Recognized, then, for their value by an institution of LGBTQ Anglophone US literary culture, they bear a certain representational weight.4 Niagara Falls is composed of two one-acts, American Coffee and The Shangri-La Motor Inn. American Coffee was first produced in 1981 by the Theater Rhinoceros, characterized by one critic as “a gay company.”5 This same company produced Niagara Falls in 1983.6 American Coffee overtly refers to Italian American identity, but that identity is clearly “intersectional” in the sense of being imbricated with gender, class, sexuality, and, although much more subtly than these other identity markers, race. 2  Throughout, I will use the term queer capaciously, but I particularly want to avoid dividing critical race theory into “queer” and “non queer” approaches, given my interest in those critical race theorists who have argued that any analysis of race beholden to Michel Foucault’s notion of biopower must also be an analysis of gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity, and nation. See in particular Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995); Kyla Schuller, The Biopolitics of Feeling, Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018); Jasbir K.  Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017). On biopower, see, for example, Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978), and, concerning the Italian context, Andrea Righi, Biopolitics and Social Change in Italy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 3  Caitlin Meals, “Steady Current,” South Philly Review, July 10, 2008. https://southphillyreview.com/2008/07/10/steady-current/. Accessed 30 July, 2021. 4  On the Lambda Literary Awards, see Lambda Literary, Mission & History . Accessed 31 July, 2021. 5  Erik L. MacDonald, “Theatre Rhinoceros: A Gay Company,” TDR (1988–) 33, no. 1 (1989): 79. Accessed May 17, 2021. doi:10.2307/1145946. 6  MacDonald, Theatre Rhinoceros, 83. The company also produced Bumbalo’s After Eleven in 1984.

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Produced in 2005 at the Court Theatre in Los Angeles and then again at Chicago’s Heartland Studio Theater in 2008, Questa does not feature characters explicitly identified as Italian American; however, it does include a queer Black male character and queer white male characters. An actor, director, screenwriter, and playwright, Bumbalo was born in 1946 in Utica, New York, and is of the generation who experienced both the advent of HIV disease and the transition in nomenclature from “gay” to “queer”: while a 1982 article in London’s Gay News quotes Bumbalo referring to himself as a gay writer,7 a 2008 article describes Niagara Falls as Tony N’ Tina’s Wedding meets Queer as Folk.8 Given the long trajectory of his career, it is not surprising that we should see in Bumbalo’s works both an increasing engagement with HIV and more ethnically diverse casts: Bumbalo’s 1989 Adam and The Experts has been compared to Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart and William Hoffman’s As Is,9 and subsequent plays—the 1992 Show, the 1993 Tell, and the 2010 What Are Tuesdays Like?—also deal with HIV; Questa and What Are Tuesdays Like? both feature Black characters, absent from the earlier plays like Niagara Falls.10 From its beginnings, Bumbalo’s works were publicized as exploring what was then called “diversity:” as one enthusiastic critic put it in 1981, “Bumbalo’s stock-in-trade is diversity—both inside the auditorium

7  “Kitchen Duty,” Gay News, London, 10 June 1982: 20. . Accessed 30 July, 2021. 8  “Classical Music, Relaxed Setting,” Courier Post, Cherry Hill, New Jersey, 18 July 2008. . Accessed 30 July, 2021. Tony N’ Tina’s Wedding is an interactive, immersive, and improvisational theater experience that replicates a middle-class Italian American wedding between the title characters; Queer as Folk was first a British and then US TV series exploring the intersecting lives of several gay men; both US and UK casts were almost exclusively white. 9  Stephen Holden, “How the Hysteria of Denial Conceals Fears and Denials,” New York Times, 23 November 1989 C.20 https://www-proquest-com.ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/ docview/427428339/fulltext/65165E68E48B4767PQ/1?accountid=13158. Accessed 30 July, 2021. 10  Victor Bumbalo, Adam and the Experts (New York: Broadway Play Publishing, 1990); Tell, in Gay and Lesbian Plays Today, ed. Terry Helbing (Portsmouth NH: Heinemann, 1993), 213–234; Show, in Tough Acts to Follow, One-Act Plays on the Gay/Lesbian Experience, ed. Noreen C.  Barnes and Nicholas Deutsch (San Francisco: Alamo Square Press, 1992), 59–68; What Are Tuesdays Like? (New York: Broadway Play Publishing, 2010).

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and out, in the ethnic melting pots that nourish his favorite subject: working-­class America.”11 Although I read these plays for their portrayals of difference, my goal is not to call out the playwright on any representational inaccuracies. Representations are exactly that, portraits, and it is counter-productive to demand that portrayals be anything but what they are; the search for a “true,” “authentic,” or “accurate” representation is always doomed. I also heed Gayatri Spivak’s warning not to conflate the idea of representation by portrait with representation by proxy.12 That is, I do not assume that the increasing “visibility” of cultural minorities in plays, films, and television is de facto politically progressive. One of the most immediate responses to the antiracist street protests that occurred in the US in 2020 seems to be a greater diversity in the casting of television advertisements, such that one would think that interracial or inter-ethnic couples, gay or straight, were no longer subject to stigma. Whether it is wishful thinking to believe that the increased television presence of “mixed” couples will result in greater social power to minoritized subjects, it is startling to see how rapidly capitalism makes use of even moments of crisis to increase processes of commodification. The immediate context in which I interpret Bumbalo’s plays is in the wake of the terrible incidents of the spring of 2020 alluded to above:13 specifically, the COVID-19 pandemic, its disproportionate devastation to communities of color, and the murder of George Floyd by members of the 11  James M.  Saslow, “Victor Bumbalo, Gay Theater with Working Class Roots,” The Advocate 326 (September 17, 1981): 39. http://ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/ login?url=https://www-proquest-com.ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/magazines/victor-­ bumbalo-­gay-theater-with-working-class/docview/2465394433/se-2?accountid=13158. Accessed July 30, 2021. Not surprisingly, the article’s racial politics are painful to read today. For example, Saslow describes Bumbalo’s job as the only Caucasian working in a Chinese mattress factory as “broaden[ing] his ethnic horizons” and highlights his role as assistant director and acting coach to Maryat Lee’s “gaggle of black and Hispanic 14–22 year olds,” Bumbalo being “the company’s once-again sole white person.” 12  On this difference, see Gayatri Spivak, “Practical Politics of the Open End,” interview with Sarah Harasym, The Postcolonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, edited by Sarah Harasym (New York: Routledge, 1990), 95–112. 13  “In the midst of so much death and the fact of Black life as proximate to death, how do we attend to physical, social, and figurative death and also to the largeness that is Black life, Black life insisted from death? I want to suggest that that might look something like wake work.” Christina Sharpe, In the Wake, on Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 17.

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Minneapolis Police Department.14 One consequence of these c­ ircumstances was the successful effort of critical race theorists to highlight, for a population tuned in to social media in particular, both whiteness and the daily suffering to which Black people in the US are subject.15 Of course, neither of these were “news” to critical race theorists themselves. However, thanks to the historical convergence of COVID, several highly publicized murders of Black people by police, and public demonstrations in response to those murders, these theorists managed to turn the cultural conversation to whiteness to an unprecedented degree—so much so that, in this particular cultural moment, in an anthology bearing the name “queer,” one cannot but also address issues of race, class, gender, and ethnicity. The racial politics of the present moment are so contradictory that, to speak only of voluntary identifications, some Italian Americans claim (admittedly with some ambivalence) an ethnic identity other than white16—an identity that I will, following Hiram Pérez, strategically call “brown”—while others vehemently oppose such a practice, as their eager

14  On these circumstances, see Oxiris Barbot, “George Floyd and Our Collective Moral Injury,” American Journal of Public Health (2020)110: 1253_1253, https://doi. org/10.2105/AJPH.2020.305850. . Accessed 4 August, 2021. 15  As an example of the broad dissemination of the concept of whiteness, see Savala Nolan, “Black and Brown People Have Been Protesting for Centuries. It’s White People Who Are Responsible for What Happens Next,” Time (June 1, 2020). . Accessed 4 August, 2021. 16  Rosette Capotorto explores the identifications of some Sicilian Americans with Africa— including her own young daughter’s. See Ronnie Mae Painter and Rosette Capotorto, “Italiani/Africani,” in Jennifer Guglielmo and Salvatore Salerno, eds. Are Italians White? How Race is Made in America (New York: Routledge, 2003) 250–58. See 255 in particular. In many historical analyses of Italian American racial identity, anti-racist Italian American writing emphasizes the “dark” past of Italian Americans: as one scholar writes, “Italian Americans have become white, but a different kind of white than those of the dominant Anglo/Saxon culture. Italians have become whites on a leash.” Fred L. Gardaphé, “We Weren’t Always White: Race and Ethnicity in Italian/American Literature,” CUNY Academic Works, 2002. . Accessed 1 August 2021. In her memoirs, Louise DeSalvo often expresses an ethnic pride tied also to her working-class background and her recognition that southern Italians were construed as “dark.” See in particular “Color/White: Complexion/Dark,” in Guglielmo and Salerno, Are Italians White? 17–28.

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support of former president Donald Trump attests.17 Still others—myself included—accept that Italian Americans have “achieved” whiteness and so resist identifying as non-white—my assumption being that it is unwise to conflate past racial constructions of Italians as “dark” with the present, when arguably few Italian Americans find themselves subject to significant ethnic prejudice.18 I myself am not racially “innocent” but am aware that, in the case of my own subjectivity, Sicilian-Americanness primarily provided me in my youth with a way to identify “against” my so-called fellow white Americans—their lack of emotional warmth, Puritanism, right-wing politics, lack of interest in the arts, close-mindedness, and willingness to eat bad food. I realize that this Sicilian-Americanness is largely an act of my imagination and highly romanticized, ignoring in particularly that Sicilians and Italians can be as judgmental and narrowminded as any other population—a fact to which, say, with their emphasis on restrictive, even stultifying social mores, many of Pirandello’s works attest.19 Combined with my queerness, at a very young age, I understood myself as possessing a diasporic identity that translated into a conscious sense of not having a spatial location that I would call home. Revealing these identifications, I hope not only to signal my racial privilege but to remind myself that all of our hands are dirty, as well as to try to catch a glimpse of the way that whiteness is constructed in unexpected places. The de-naturalization of racial categories is a goal all work in critical race studies shares. As Ta-Nehisi Coates has argued, for example, “Race is the child of racism, not the father”—meaning that racial categories are not pre-existing entities but rather historical and cultural constructions designed to assign meaning to what are otherwise meaningless differences in physical characteristics.20 They are retrospective efforts to justify violence and oppression. Whiteness is not something natural or even empirical. As Coates insists, some of us are raised to be, and come to believe 17  Christine Grimaldi, “The Paesano of Shame: Trump’s Italian American Consiglieres,” The Los Angeles Review of Books (November 2, 2020). . Accessed 24 May 2021. 18  This is not to deny the way in which constructions of Italian Americanness as “brown” still circulate in the media and popular imaginary, as we saw in some of the vitriol directed toward Anthony Fauci. 19  For just one example, see his L’esclusa. Luigi Pirandello, L’esclusa (Milano: Mondadori, 1992). Bumbalo’s Niagara in particular explores restrictive social mores among Italian Americans. 20  Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me, (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015), 7.

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ourselves as, white.21 One way to dislodge that belief is de-mystify it, recognizing it as a form of subject constitution that, to “work,” must mask itself as “natural” and therefore ahistorical.

Italians, Queers, and Brownness In A Taste for Brown Bodies, Hiram Pérez challenges queer theory to attend to the roles race and racism played in the nineteenth-century invention of the modern homosexual. Pérez insists that race, gender, sexuality, nationhood, and class cannot be understood in isolation from one another. However, rather than define intersectional analysis as an exploration of “multiple axes of oppression,”22 Pérez instead interrogates historical processes of subject constitution. Moving beyond a specification of identities, he concludes that race and sexuality are not discrete, even if intersecting, but instead “mutually constitutive operations.”23 Pérez’s analysis is indebted to Rey Chow, who proposes the term “categorical miscegenation” to indicate that modern race and sex do not simply intersect but are for the most part “indistinguishable and undifferentiable from each other.”24 Re-reading Michel Foucault, Ann Laura Stoler insists that it is impossible to comprehend the late nineteenth-century inventions of race and sexuality minus one another.25 Pérez’s work extends, develops, and is in dialogue with that of Chow, Jasbir K.  Puar, Stoler, Riley C. Snorton, Kyla Schuller, and Antonio Viego, all of whom have produced rich re-readings of Michel Foucault’s notion of biopower so as to take account of race.26 As Chow argues,

 Coates, Between, 10.  This phrase on intersectional analysis comes from C. Riley Snorton, Nobody is Supposed to Know, Black Sexuality on the Down Low (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 23. 23  Pérez, Brown Body, 36. 24  This is a paraphrase of Chow from Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, 206. Rey Chow, The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). 25  Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire. 26  Chow, Protestant Ethnic, 1–17  in particular; Puar, Terrorist Assemblages; Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire; Riley C. Snorton, Nobody is Supposed to Know, Black Sexuality on the Down Low (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); Schuller, The Biopolitics of Feeling; Antonio Viego, Dead Subjects, Towards a Politics of Loss in Latino Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). 21 22

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Seen in the light of biopower, sexuality is no longer clearly distinguishable from the entire problematic of the reproduction of human life that is, in modern times, always racially and ethnically inflected. Race and ethnicity are thus coterminous with sexuality, just as sexuality is implicated in race and ethnicity.27

Building on this insight, Pérez argues that the late Victorian (white) homosexual found its conditions of possibility in a “range of mobilities, transformed or generated by industrialization (i.e., class privilege, whiteness, transportation technology, mass media, tourism)”—historical circumstances tied to what is often called modernization.28 Crucial to the formation of this homosexual subject is what he terms “the brown body,” a figure to signal the fluidity and racial ambiguity at work in the way a gay cosmopolitan imagines an idealized primitive figure that functions both as an object of desire and as the repository of disowned projections cast temporally and spatially backward.29

Playing a constitutive role in “the formation of a cosmopolitan” male homosexual identity,30 that brown body “is alternately (or simultaneously) primitive, exotic, savage, pansexual, and abject.”31 Given his location in the US academy, Pérez explores how the modern homosexual might assist the Anglophone world in its colonialist and neocolonialist adventures. How might these insights apply, however, to modern Italy and its diasporas? Concerning the co-constitution of Italianness, race, and homosexuality, clearly, the Italian context was not identical to that of Northern Europe or the US, because Italy was a site where this late Victorian personage called the homosexual consolidated his sexuality, national identity, and whiteness. That is, Italians were perceived by other Europeans and Americans as “brown”—“a position of essential itinerancy relative to naturalized, positivist classes such as white, black, Asian.”32

 Chow, Protestant Ethnic, 7.  Pérez, Brown Bodies, 104. 29  Pérez, Brown Bodies, 25. 30  Pérez, Brown Bodies, 1. 31  Pérez, Brown Bodies, 25. 32  Pérez, Brown Bodies, 103. 27 28

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It was to Sicily, for example, that gentlemen travelers like Wilhelm von Gloeden went in search of brown bodies to photograph; it was to Italy that J. J. Winkelmann went in search of sex with working-class men. For, as Roberto M.  Dainotto has argued, around the eighteenth century, Europeans, seeking to produce a knowledge of themselves minus any externalized other like the so-called Orient, turned to Italy: “the deviant, the internal Other of Europe, is a southerner.”33 Italy was construed as primitive, non-modern, a site of backwardness and underdevelopment right in the heart of Europe, but also a site of nostalgia for an arcadian homoerotics—according to Pérez, nostalgia being a signal characteristic of the modern homosexual male subject.34 Additionally, recent work in queer theory, including my own, has sought to understand how Italian modes of male same-sex attraction might include but also deviate from that late nineteenth-century Victorian personage called the homosexual.35 To return to Pérez’s argument, then, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some Italian men (and boys) were neither white, nor homosexual, nor cosmopolitan in the ways that the traveling gentlemen with whom they had sex were. Were Italian American immigrants to the US similarly construed as “brown”? Italian American racial identity has already begun to be explored—most pointedly, in the anthology entitled Are Italians White?36 Given Pérez’s insights, I pose here the question differently: are (or were) Italian Americans brown? What strikes me as particularly valuable in the term is precisely what Pérez calls its itinerancy. He adds: I make use of ‘brown’ provisionally myself—and tactically—to demystify how bodies are situated outside white/black or white/Asian binaries to consolidate cosmopolitan, first world identities…It is black and not black, Asian and not Asian, white and not white.37

33  Roberto M. Dainotto, Europe (In Theory), (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 54. According to Dainotto, the concept of Eurocentrism logically depends upon this attempt by Europe to define itself minus references to an external other. 34  Pérez, Brown Body, 7. 35  John Champagne, Queer Ventennio, Italian Fascism, Homoerotic Art, and the Nonmodern in the Modern (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2019). 36  Jennifer Guglielmo and Salvatore Salerno, editors, Are Italians White? How Race is Made in America (New York: Routledge, 2003). The anthology does not pose a single answer to this question. 37  Pérez, Brown Body, 103–04.

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The latter phrase in particular, white and not white, captures the well-­ remarked upon status of Italian Americans in the early twentieth century US. One scholar reminds us, for example, that “in 1911, the U.S. House Committee on Immigration openly debated and seriously questioned whether one should regard ‘the south Italian as a full-blooded Caucasian.’”38 And, as a recent column in the New York Times put it, “Italians who had come to the country as ‘free white persons’ were often marked as black because they accepted ‘black’ jobs in the Louisiana sugar fields or because they chose to live among African-Americans.”39 Italian immigrants to the US were racially suspect, possessing, as one theorist has put it, “whiteness of a different color.”40 It is for his reason that I follow Pérez and propose that, at particular moments in history, Italians and Italian Americans were construed as “brown.” In what follows, I read two of Bumbalo’s plays for the ways they figure not only homosexuality but also race, gender, ethnicity, and class. My argument is that, despite what was undoubtedly an attempt on the part of the author to render his work more “inclusive,” both Niagara Falls and Questa articulate “difference” in contradictory and often problematic ways. I will be particularly attentive to something that, when both plays were first written, was admittedly rarely brought to bear on analyses of Anglophone American theater: the racialization of queer sexuality.

Niagara Falls: We’re Here, We’re Queer, We’re Going to an Italian Wedding Set in Utica, New York, at 5 AM in June of 1971, American Coffee consists of a conversation between Connie and Johnny Poletti, a white Italian American working-class couple whose daughter Jackie is getting married that day. Figuring the mobility Pérez suggests is constitutive of modern 38  Thomas A.  Guglielmo, “‘NO COLOR BARRIER,’ Italians, Race, and Power in the United States,” in Guglielmo and Salerno, Are Italians White?, 36. 39  Brent Staples, “How Italians Became ‘White,’” New York Times (October 12, 2019), . Accessed 31 July, 2021. On Italian immigrants to the US as non-­ White, see, for example, Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998); David R.  Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs (New York: Basic Books, 2006) 40  Jacobson, Whiteness.

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gay identity,41 Connie and Johnny’s gay son has returned from Los Angeles the previous evening unannounced, his lover in tow, to attend his sister’s wedding back home. Agonizing over how the other guests might react to their son and his lover’s presence, and unsure of how their son and his partner in turn will act, Johnny plans to drug them with sleeping pills in their coffee so that they will sleep through the wedding—this drugged coffee providing one reference to the play’s title. (They also spend the majority of the play drinking what, given the amount they consume, is presumably American coffee.) At the end of the play, Connie concludes that she wants her son and his lover at the wedding and threatens Johnny with a scene if he tries to follow through on his plans. Connie and Johnny’s Italian American identity is signaled in a variety of obvious ways, via references to food, the Catholic church, Italian surnames, the evil eye, bingo, a concern with “la bella figura” that includes talking behind the backs of those who do not measure up, and a reference to the setting for voice of the Ave Maria.42 In the hopes that he can “make those boys act normal” at the wedding, Connie uses a few words of Italian in a prayer to a deceased acquaintance who was gay, Dominic Fucci.43 The family’s status as working-class Italians, however, is contrasted with that of their future in-laws, “the Venturas of Park Lane,” who are “the biggest furriers in Utica.”44 One of Johnny’s fears is that he will be laughed at by “old man Williams,” someone whom he works under, is wealthy, and, according to Johnny looks down on him. In a more subtle manner, the play references Johnny’s emotionality— he “proudly” tells us that he will break down and cry “in front of everybody” at his daughter’s wedding reception45—and Connie’s fears around not measuring up as a cook and housekeeper to her own family’s expectations. While the play does not explicitly link being Italian American either to Johnny’s emotional effusiveness or Connie’s fear of not being as good a housekeeper as her mother, the play’s miscegenation of gender and  Pérez, Brown Bodies, 104.  The play does not specify whether it is referring to Schubert’s setting or the Gounod/ Bach, but, anecdotally, I have performed as a piano accompanist for both—typically, Schubert at Italian American funerals, Gounod/Bach at Italian American weddings, 43  Bumbalo, Niagara Falls, 16. Connie is initially worried that her son’s sexuality is the result of Dominic’s having “put the evil eye” on Connie and Johnny for not wanting him, “a queer,” to sing at their wedding (and for Johnny’s having said so); 8. 44  Bumbalo, Niagara Falls, 10. 45  Bumbalo, Niagara Falls, 3. 41 42

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ethnicity makes separating out the two difficult and perhaps even beside the point: when the play speaks “about” gender, it is also speaking “about” Italian American identity, and vice versa. Additionally, the stereotype of Italian men as emotionally effusive puts pressure on the audience to read Johnny’s statement as connected to his ethnic identity.46 In a similar manner, the stereotype of the Italian daughter as not measuring up to her mother’s standards, specifically around cooking, is sufficiently familiar—at least to Italian American audiences—to propose this connection. Johnny uses a variety of terms to discuss homosexuality, from referring to his son’s boyfriend as a “fairy,”47 to calling the deceased Dominic Fucci “queer,”48 to referring to his son as a “powder puff”49 and “sissy,”50 to the more neutral “it,”51 “these kind of people”52 and “a homosexual.”53 From a book he’s read, Johnny has learned about “the different varieties of homosexuals,”54 including, apparently, leather men, and what he calls “military gays,” namely, advocates for gay rights.55 Except when she is mocking Johnny, Connie uses more value-neutral terms to refer to her son’s sexuality: although she speaks of “those boys,” for example, this does not read as infantilizing but rather as customary in Italian American households,56 and she stresses the masculinity of both her son and his lover. The play recounts Connie’s feminist “emancipation,” an emancipation linked to her acceptance of her gay son. While Johnny tells us that he loves his son, he also hates “who he is.”57 According to Johnny, Connie is described by others as both “Connie the Good” and “Connie the Goof.”58 Having arrived at his plan and heard Connie’s objections, Johnny attempts to put his foot down. In exchange for being willing to cook him zuppa di pesce every Friday and manicotti every Sunday, however, Connie pleads 46  On this stereotype, see John Champagne, Italian Masculinity as Queer Melodrama, Puccini, Caravaggio, Contemporary Cinema (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 47  Bumbalo, Niagara Falls, 7. 48  Bumbalo, Niagara Falls, 8. Elsewhere, he describes another gay man as a “fruit”; 21. 49  Bumbalo, Niagara Falls, 9. 50  Bumbalo, Niagara Falls, 19. 51  Bumbalo, Niagara Falls, 6 52  Bumbalo, Niagara Falls, 10. 53  Bumbalo, Niagara Falls, 11. 54  Bumbalo, Niagara Falls, 14. 55  Bumbalo, Niagara Falls, 23. 56  N.B.—my own aunts still refer to my brothers and me in this way. 57  Bumbalo, Niagara Falls, 12. 58  Bumbalo, Niagara Falls, 5.

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with him, “Please let the boys come to the wedding.”59 Johnny instead tells her that if she doesn’t do what he says, he’ll never let her go to bingo again.60 For Connie, this is the last straw: exclaiming that bingo is “her only pleasure” and the only time she manages to get out of her house, she stands up to Johnny and anyone else who has ever bad-mouthed her for not being good enough. Noting the kindness with which her son and daughter treat her, she insists, “I want to be with those two people today, and the people that they love. Everybody else can go take a flying shit.”61

Are/Were Italian Americans Brown? In a posthumously published work, Jose Esteban Muñoz has offered an understanding of brownness that is somewhat differently inflected from Pérez’s. I am struck, however, by the way Southern Italians and Italian American immigrants correspond to Muñoz’s definition. For example, according to his analysis, people are rendered brown “by their personal and familial participation in South-to-North migration patterns;” their “accents and linguistic orientations…convey a certain difference;” their “spatial coordinates are contested;” their “right to residency is challenged by those who make false claims to nativity;” and their “everyday customs and everyday styles of living…connote a sense of illegitimacy.”62 According to these terms, Italian Americans were once brown, but, according to the logic of the Lega North and “Padanian Nationalism,” the Italian south is “still” too brown for comfort. Around the issue of Italian brownness, what is perhaps most pertinent to a discussion of American Coffee is the portrayal of Connie and Johnny’s son’s lover. When Connie describes him as tall, strong, and good-looking, Johnny asks, “An American?”63 Connie’s reply is equally telling: “Yes. Blond, blue eyes, everything.” She then adds that she wishes her future (Italian American) son-in-law “were a little good-looking like that.” Later, Johnny refers to the lover as “the blond bombshell,”64 and still later, as

 Bumbalo, Niagara Falls, 28  Bumbalo, Niagara Falls, 29. 61  Bumbalo, Niagara Falls, 33. 62  Jose Estaban Muñoz, The Sense of Brown (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), 3. 63  Bumbalo, Niagara Falls, 11. 64  Bumbalo, Niagara Falls, 12. He repeats this particular phrase near the end of the play; 35. 59 60

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“the American.”65 Insisting that, if there were any justice in the world, “God would have made the rich have all the fairy sons,” Johnny declares, “This way when we poor people have to look up to them and kiss their lily-white asses we could at least get in a few laughs.”66 The implication here is that Italian Americanness equates with being not blond, blue-eyed, or lily-white—that is, brown. The pressure Italian Americans put on themselves to “whiten” their identity is represented by the dead character of Dominic; in the midst of her prayer to him, Connie recalls that he didn’t speak Italian because his mother wanted him to be “one hundred percent American.”67 The play’s treatment of Italian Americans as “brown” also suggests the way in which certain racial categories are more historically mutable than others. If we understand race, as Immanuel Wallerstein does, as a means of coding and socializing subjects into a transnational, hierarchized division of labor, racial and ethnic categories can shift in response to changes in capitalism.68 As a result, the question “Are Italians Brown?” can only be answered in specific historical moments.

The Shangri-La Motor Inn: My Gay Bestie The Shangri-La Motor Inn continues the narrative of American Coffee but shifts the focus to the wedding night of Connie and Johnny’s daughter Jackie. The characters in the play include Jackie, her new husband Vinnie, and the clerk of the motor inn where the two are staying. His name is Fred, and he is gay. The play’s narrative concerns Jackie’s doubts about her decision to marry. While she is in love with Vinnie, she fears the stultifying heteronormative script that awaits them. Jackie explains that the restrictiveness of that script was made clear to her thanks to the conversation she had at the wedding reception with her gay brother. Comparing her life with his, she recognizes how stereotypical gender roles risk trapping both her and her new husband. At the play’s conclusion, she and Vinnie decide to take the risk of living a life more adventurous and less

 Bumbalo, Niagara Falls, 17.  Bumbalo, Niagara Falls, 25. 67  Bumbalo, Niagara Falls, 16 68  Immanuel Wallerstein, Historical Capitalism with Capitalist Civilization (London: Verso, 2003). 65 66

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beholden to other people’s expectations than they had originally envisioned. Concerning Italian Americanness, the play employs stereotypes similar to American Coffee. According to Vinnie, God also balances the good and the bad in Italian American lives: “Because most of our people are peasants, he makes us jolly and good cooks.”69 As in the previous play, there are references to Catholicism, the evil eye, other Italian Americans (in this case, “Bobby De Nero and Ally Pacino,”70 and “Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon,”71 as well as friends and neighbors), Italian words, the importance and obligation of family relationships, and, once again, a portrayal of Italian American culture as so consumed with “la bella figura” as to frequently resort to back-biting gossip. As Jackie insists, “The Polettis, my family, usually just say a few things behind your back… But those Venturas—that’s the family I married into—I heard some of them have mouths.”72 In both plays, the gay characters, on and offstage, act as Proppian “helpers” to the women, quasi-magical figures—fairy godmothers?—who assist them on their quest to free themselves from sexist social norms and expectations.73 Recall that, in American Coffee, Connie’s (offstage) gay son serves as a vehicle for her liberation; he provides a role model that inspires her to stand up to Johnny’s unreasonable demands and speak freely to him about her lack of satisfaction with her life. In The Shangri-La Motor Inn, Fred the clerk serves a similar function. Jackie’s recognition that Fred is gay opens the door to her talking to him about her brother and his friend’s presence at the wedding. Fred then exits the scene so that Jackie and Vinnie can have a private conversation in the motel’s lobby, one in which she tells Vinnie that seeing her brother opened her eyes to how unsatisfied she is with her life.74 Fred returns, and Jackie opens up to him, enumerating the gendered expectations that she believes will trap her and Vinnie in an unhappy life.75 After recounting the many  Bumbalo, Niagara Falls, 60.  Bumbalo, Niagara Falls, 47. 71  Bumbalo, Niagara Falls, 55. 72  Bumbalo, Niagara Falls, 44. 73  Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folk Tale, Second Edition (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968), 45. 74  Bumbalo, Niagara Falls, 53. 75  Bumbalo, Niagara Falls, 57–58. 69 70

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things she and Vinnie are “supposed” to do—have children, settle for a life of drudgery, drink too much, have affairs—she asks Fred, “Now, what are you supposed to do?”76 When he answers, “Nothing like that I hope,” Jackie “breaks down” and says, “You see. They have the best lives”—Fred acting as her ego ideal. Fred continues to aid the couple, helping them to discuss sex and then assisting Jackie in voicing what she loves about Vinnie and in turn helping Vinnie to embrace the fact that Fred and Vinnie are both a dufus, dork, or citrullo.77 Vinnie literally says, “There’s something relaxing about coming out,” and the stage directions suggest that the two men ape one another’s physical position. Now he is Vinnie’s ego ideal, too. Fred counsels Vinnie on how to improve his life: “Start doing unexpected things. Shock yourself, and then start shocking other people.”78 Fred then literally proposes to Jackie and Vinnie a model of companionship culled from gay life: “Partners, who aren’t afraid of showing affection,” or what Jackie describes as “like my brother and his friend. You know, gay buddies.”79 Written decades before gay marriage was legal, the play suggests the relative ease with which gay and straight couples can model themselves after one another. While in this instance the straight married couple finds inspiration in the gay one, the fact that this is even possible suggests a certain “homonormativity” in the play’s construction of the gay couple.80 As Puar has suggested, in some cases, “Gay marriage… is not simply a demand for equality with heterosexual norms, but more importantly a demand for reinstatement of white privileges and rights—rights of property and inheritance in particular.”81 As their ego ideal, Fred encourages Jackie and Vinnie to reclaim their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, rights that historically accrued to whites as free property owners.

 Bumbalo, Niagara Falls, 58.  Bumbalo, Niagara Falls, 66. Citrullo is an Italian noun indicating someone who is an idiot, moron, or jerk. 78  Bumbalo, Niagara Falls, 68. 79  Bumbalo, Niagara Falls, 72. While Jackie’s words actually come before Fred’s, she interprets a previous suggestion Fred made—that the two “travel like [gay] buddies”—to include sex. American, 70. 80  On homonormativity, see Puar, Terrorist. According to Puar, “Some homosexual subjects are complicit with heterosexual nationalist formations [such as marriage] rather than inherently or automatically excluded from or opposed to them,” 4. 81  Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, 29. 76 77

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The Primitive Gay White Male Beyond being an aide to heterosexual coupling, Fred represents an “alternative” model of being gay to Jackie’s unnamed brother, and, not coincidentally, that model is working-class, embodying modes of primitivity, as Pérez might say. Pérez’s argument suggests that the working-class white figure can himself represent brownness via his class difference: while it might seem that the modern cosmopolitan homosexual subject is embodied exclusively in the so-called gentleman traveler, this emergent species also included itinerant working-class figures (e.g., sailors and cowboys) who: convey the brown body to the traveling eye of gay modernity. They do so through their legendary encounters with the primitive, by themselves embodying brownness (or modes of primitivity), and by acting as intermediaries for cosmopolitan identification.82

In addition to his work as a hotel clerk, Fred pumps gas.83 Referring to it as his “real occupation” and the clerking as his “extra job,” he furthers this portrait of himself as “brown” (in the sense of providing an alternative to the privileged Victorian white gentleman traveler) by telling us of how he does not fit in to normative white gay culture. Recounting his experience of a visit to gay New York, he admits, “They never let me into any of the places I wanted to go. I was never dressed right. One of the bars I was desperate to get into even accused me of not being gay.”84 Fred’s “brownness” is seconded by his presumably wealthier friends, who tell him that “it’s much hotter being a grease monkey” than a motel clerk.85 He reinforces his own status as other by suggesting that, thanks to his job, he smells different from his friends—“like the inside of an engine”—and, thanks to his “filthy” nails, he looks different, too.86 We also learn that Fred is Irish,87—like Italian Americans, Irish Americans were also once

 Pérez, Brown Body, 2.  Bumbalo, Niagara Falls, 42. 84  Bumbalo, Niagara Falls, 42. 85  Bumbalo, Niagara Falls, 59 86  Bumbalo, Niagara Falls, 59. 87  Bumbalo, Niagara Falls, 41. 82 83

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considered “brown”88—and, comparing himself to Jackie’s brother and his partner, Fred calls himself “a deprived gay.”89 While some readers might see the play’s emphasis on class difference among gays as laudable, that difference requires that the white privilege that links Fred, Jackie’s brother, and his lover, be defined simply as class difference. In other words, the whiteness of all three is occluded via the insistence on the class differences between Fred on the one hand and Jackie’s brother and his lover on the other. But, paradoxically, the categorical miscegenation of modern sexuality also “taints” his working-class sexuality with an imaginary brownness that (paradoxically) renders the brother and his lover “whiter” than Fred. As for actual references to race and ethnicity, Jackie refers to Vinnie’s fur-clad relatives as looking like “Italian Eskimos.”90 Later in the play, proposing that God shows his fairness to all humanity by balancing the good and the bad, Vinnie suggests that, while men have more power, women live longer, and that while gay men have tough lives, they also have good sex.91 He then immediately wonders “what he [God] does for the Blacks and the Polish people.” Obviously, the play is suggesting that women, gays, Poles, Blacks, and Italians are all similar in their status as stigmatized but different from one another. That one might be a Black Italian, for example, is not entertained.

88  See, for example, Catherine M. Eagan, “‘White,’ If ‘Not Quite’: Irish Whiteness in the Nineteenth-Century Irish-American Novel,” Éire-Ireland 36, no. 1 (2001): 66–81. https:// doi.org/10.1353/eir.2001.0004; Gregory B.  Lee, “Dirty, Diseased and Demented: The Irish, the Chinese, and Racist Representation,” Transtext(e)s Transcultures 跨文本跨文化 12, 2017, published online 24 October 2018. Accessed 17 May, 2022, ; https://doi.org/10.4000/transtexts.1011. While the thesis of the Irish as having been constituted as non-white has been disputed, even those critics who (however defensively) question it argue, for example that, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, “people believed there were subraces within the white category.” Such a formulation suggests the efficacy of using a term like “brown” to capture types of racism beyond the white/black binary. David Bernstein, “Sorry, but the Irish were always ‘white’ (and so were Italians, Jews, and so on),” The Washington Post, March 22, 2017, . Accessed 18 May, 2022. 89  Bumbalo, Niagara Falls, 57. 90  Bumbalo, Niagara Falls, 50. The implication here is that such miscegenation would be absurd. 91  Bumbalo, Niagara Falls, 60.

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An analysis of Niagara Falls’ categorical miscegenation exposes the limitations of the search for “positive images” of marginalized subjects. No one would call the images of gay men presented in these plays “negative,” but noting the way they may resist certain offensive or homophobic stereotypes only gets us so far in thinking about the play’s portrayals of gay men as white (even if that whiteness also references brownness). Yet, however necessary it might still be in certain disciplinary locales (and I believe that, in Italian American Studies, it is still necessary), simply pointing out that there are no Black characters in Niagara Falls is also a limited strategy. Given that there are black characters in some of his other plays—like his work Questa, for example—one cannot help but wonder if Bumbalo himself was aware of the “whiteness” of Niagara Falls.

Questa and The Dignified Black Queen A play about loss, memory, and mourning, Questa is structured around a particular conceit: what if a potential fag basher is killed by his intended victim, and everyone wrongly concludes that the basher was himself gay? And what if, out of a sense of guilt and remorse, the intended victim sought out the mother of the basher and then played along with her desire that he be her son’s lover? Questa is set in the wake of the devastation of HIV and September eleventh, both of which are referenced directly. The play begins with the character Paul confessing to his sister Susan that he accidentally killed his would-be basher, Will.92 Susan is married to Nicholas, the best friend of Paul’s late lover Kevin, who died of AIDS. Lori is the victim’s mother; she is having an affair with a priest, Father James. The other characters in the play include Richard, Lori’s boss at the hair salon in Greenwich Village (whose lover has also died, presumably from AIDS; he and Paul have several encounters, one sexual), and a Black “street person” (to use the term delineated in the character breakdown) named Daniel.93 Unbeknownst to Paul, Daniel witnessed Will’s death. None of Questa’s characters are identified as Italian American, though Lori and Father James are Catholic, and Paul appears to have been raised Catholic, as, despite being an atheist, he sometimes goes to a Catholic

 Bumbalo, Questa, 3.  The other characters’ races are not provided, but, given Daniel’s “difference,” presumably, they are white. 92 93

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church.94 The play’s title Questa does not refer to the Italian word “this one”—at least not according to its dialogue—but instead to a city in New Mexico that Paul and Susan visited just before their parents were killed.95 Paul tells us that when he was a scared little boy, “I used to close my eyes and picture it,”96 and so it represents a comforting memory. The majority of the time addressing the audience, Daniel acts as a kind of Greek Chorus. The first time he speaks, he narrates the specifics of the altercation between Paul and Will, confirming Paul’s account.97 He then tells us that he was the one who characterized the incident as a gay bashing, and that he deliberately gave the police a misleading description of Paul. He adds that he has “the disease” and has had it for years.98 Beyond also fulfilling the role of the Proppian “helper” to Paul, Daniel constitutes a romantic portrait of a “spoiled” identity.99 He’s Black, gay, has HIV, is homeless and a drug addict, and someone who has survived trauma: the death of his mother and brother; an abusive step-father; subject to racism; living on the street as a sex worker who “was passed around.”100 As Goffman might have it, “He is thus reduced in our minds from a whole and usual person to a tainted, discounted one.”101 Yet his dignity is intact: as the stage directions suggest, “He speaks in an elegant, slightly lethargic manner,”102 and he demonstrates street smarts and dispenses folk wisdom. When Paul mistakes Daniel’s speaking to him as a request for money, he throws the change back at Paul, saying, “How dare you?”103 Is he the common primitivist fantasy of the noble savage? The hooker with the heart of gold? The wise, suffering Black elder of the

94  Susan “reminds” him that he is an atheist; Bumbalo, Questa, 35. Bumbalo’s Show is about a Catholic priest with HIV. 95  Bumbalo, Questa, 68. 96  Bumbalo, Questa, 68. 97  Bumbalo, Questa, 8. 98  Bumbalo, Questa, 9. 99  Erving Goffman, Stigma, Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (New York: Touchstone, 1963). 100  Bumbalo, Questa, 23. 101  Goffman, Stigma, 3. 102  Bumbalo, Questa, 8. 103  Bumbalo, Questa, 64.

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television series Pose fame?104 (The character breakdown tells us that he is in his mid-forties, about a decade older than Paul.) All of the above? Daniel sees what the other characters cannot and so occupies a liminal space between the play and its audience; he is not “of” the world of the play, but also not “outside” it. He also does not appear to belong to any sort of community: he is largely alone, aside from the cops, “who sometimes pretend they’re friends with me,”105 and a transgender woman who asks him to “do a job with her” in which they “get in a car with this white dude and call him all sorts of names while he took care of himself.”106 Daniel begins to follow Paul, eventually either falling in love with him or first pretending to be in love with him and then talking himself into believing the fantasy; he proposes both.107 In the last two scenes of the play, he and Paul meet. Telling Paul, “I know you better than you think,” Daniel reveals to Paul both that he saw him kill Will and lied to the police about it.108 The two forge a connection, Daniel explaining Paul to himself: You’re lonely like I am. I understand you. And if you took the time, you’d understand me. We’re both stuck. Stuck yearning for dead things. It’s sad when it’s only the dead you want to be with. All I want from you is a thank you.109

Paul tells Daniel that he has stopped following Lori; he wants Daniel to stop following him. The last scene of the play crosscuts between Susan and Nicholas, Lori and Father James, and Paul and Daniel, each “couple” acknowledging the 104  Throughout the three seasons of the series, older queer and trans people of color act as role models for the younger generation. Pray Tell, the character played by Billy Porter, both suffers from HIV disease (and, eventually, AIDS) and serves as a source of wisdom and advice, and the term “elder” is employed both in the series itself and related PR material. For just one example of the latter, see Hannah Giorgis, “Pray Tell and the Church of Pose,” The Atlantic, June 7, 2021, . Accessed 30 July, 2021. 105  Bumbalo, Questa, 9. 106  Bumbalo, Questa, 33. There is something weirdly sex-phobic about this cliché of sex work that does not involve sex—as if this kind of john is so sexually depraved, he doesn’t even want anyone to touch him, and as if this kind of sex work is “better” than any that actually involves sexual contact. Daniel himself confides to us that he is “not partial” to sex work but was willing to make “a quick buck,” given that no touching was involved. 107  Bumbalo Questa, 57–58. 108  Bumbalo, Questa, 64. 109  Bumbalo, Questa, 64.

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pain of loss and then agreeing, in the face of that loss, to “just sit here” in silence together; significantly, the phrase is first said in the previous scene by the wise Daniel110 and is then repeated in the final scene by Nicholas, Lori, and Daniel.111 Eating a meal together in a restaurant, Daniel and Paul share memories, and Daniel continues to act as Paul’s spiritual guide. When Paul expresses a desire to move to Questa, Daniel counsels, “Don’t be enamored by the streets.”112 Clearly, the play wants to deal not only with racial difference but with racism. Not surprisingly, it is Daniel who raises the issue. In his very first monologue, he recounts the ugly racial and sexual epithets to which he has been subject for being Black and queer.113 In another, he acknowledges his sense of being “erased” by the other members of his AA meeting114 and then imagines himself as “the big-dicked black man that those white boys dream about.”115 He then recounts how, as a runaway, he was taken in by a “Mister Jarowsky” who ultimately “realized what he really wanted was a young thug or just a little black boy.”116 In yet another monologue, he describes an incident in which he tried to assist an injured baby but was told by its mother to “Stay away from him!”—the implication being that she did not want a Black street person laying a hand on her child.117 And while he and Paul eat, he is certain that the waiter is looking at him for not being well-dressed enough.118 Of course, in some of these instances, it is difficult to know if the prejudice to which he is subject is a matter of his race or class position, but, obviously, as intersectionality reminds us, Daniel is not just Black, or gay, or poor, but all of the above, and the play is clearly aware of this, too. Whiteness is again specifically referenced by Daniel when he says to Paul, “The only problem with loving you is that you’re white. I’m not very partial to white people.”119

 Bumbalo, Questa, 66.  Bumbalo, Questa, 69–70. 112  Bumbalo, Questa, 70. 113  Bumbalo, Questa, 8. 114  Bumbalo, Questa, 22. 115  Bumbalo, Questa, 23. 116  Bumbalo, Questa, 23. 117  Bumbalo, Questa, 47. 118  Bumbalo, Questa, 67. 119  Bumbalo, Questa, 65. 110 111

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Coercive Mimeticism and Spoiled Identities Daniel’s compulsion to narrate the horrors of his life is perfectly in keeping with his role as the one with the “most spoiled” identity. As Goffman remarks, Apparently in middle class circles today, the more there is about the individual that deviates in an undesirable direction from what might have been expected to be true of him, the more he is obliged to volunteer information about himself, even though the cost to him of candor may have increased proportionately.120

This portrait of Daniel raises the issue of what Rey Chow has called “coercive mimeticism”—the way that the demands for more (and more convincing) portraiture necessarily involve a disciplining of the marginalized subject.121 If images interpellate, any image is not simply a trace of a pre-­ existing subject; rather, it calls to us and asks us to respond with “It is I to whom you are speaking.” It plays a role in subject constitution. The logic of coercive mimeticism demands that Daniel reveal his abjection to the fullest extent possible. The price of the play’s attempt to remake the stigmatized subject into one worthy of dignity is to render him transparent to the audience; Daniel’s attempt to render himself visible is not an escape from discipline but rather evidence of its efficient functioning. Asking cultural minorities to recognize themselves—and make themselves visibly recognizable—is coercive, and, as Puar has argued, cannot be understood minus a consideration of what she terms “the ascendency of whiteness” and the role this ascendency plays in, for example, “a class, race, and sexual fraction projected to the market as the homonormative gay or queer consumer.”122 This “good” gay subject increasingly stakes its claims to legitimacy in relation to “populations of sexual-racial others who need not apply.”123 Does Questa’s Daniel, even as a fictional representation, participate in this process? In the earnestness of his portrayal, Daniel represents a kind of poster child for intersectionality. In the world of the play, he has won the race to the bottom. But, as “most abject,” his role is primarily to help Paul—and  Goffman, Stigma, 64.  Chow, The Protestant Ethnic. 122  Puar, Terrorist, 28. 123  Puar, Terrorist, 2. Italics in the original. 120 121

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the white audience—make sense of this painful world. His wisdom is a resource on which white people—in the play and in the audience—draw. While this “positive” image of a Black person might fulfill certain pieties around the need to portray the intersecting oppressions of racism, homophobia, and poverty, Daniel’s structural role in the play is problematic.124

“Dark” Fantasies: Categorical Miscegenation and S/M As for gay sex, in the world of the play, public homosex is what you resort to when your lover has died of HIV and you are “getting worse” emotionally and lapsing into a pathological melancholy.125 Paul tells Susan that “the only kind of sex I can handle these days” is in an alley behind a bar called Trucking.126 This is where he meets his attacker. Daniel later tells us that he’s seen Paul before in that same alley.127 Near the play’s conclusion, Paul explains to Susan that, in the wake of Kevin’s death, he used sex in the alley as an “antidote” to her and her husband’s happiness.128 He explains that it was the only way he could get close to men. Some nights, that alley was “beyond boring.” “But other nights, the alley would be filled with hope and youth and sweat. Even the old war horses on such a night would radiate youth.”129 The emphasis on youth reminds us of when the play was made—2005—as it was clearly written before gay culture decided that daddies were sexy, too. In this scene, we learn that Will did in fact make a “pass” at Paul, as that night in the alley, Will “whipped his dick out, stroked it a bit, and then 124  In Bumbalo’s What Are Tuesdays Like, the supporting Black character is a woman named Denise. Like most of the other characters in the play, she is living with HIV disease. Modeled after the stereotype of the sassy Black woman, she calls at one point for “a good old-fashioned public hanging” of a social service bureaucratic; Bumbalo, What? 20. Reading this line, I was reminded again of how our present moment—one in which we cannot so conveniently forget the lynching to which Blacks were subject in the US—shapes my reading of these works. Today, the idea of a Black female character proposing a lynching is almost unthinkable. 125  Bumbalo, Questa, 21. 126  Bumbalo, Questa, 3. 127  Bumbalo, Questa, 12. 128  Bumbalo, Questa, 56. 129  Bumbalo, Questa, 56. Ellipses in the original.

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began to talk.”130 But what came out of his mouth was “S/M talk” (Paul’s words) that, as Paul conceives it, Will actually meant: “He spit hate. It was no game. Then he walked over and shoved me.”131 The scene replicates the familiar trope of the fag basher who is secretly gay. Daniel turns out to have been preternaturally right: it was a gay bashing. It was not exactly an instance of “fags bash back” against heterosexual violence, however, but rather one fag bashing another, the latter a closeted, homophobic one who represents “everyone who ever demeaned me… us… my dead brothers.”132 Those queers really are their own worst enemies. The play portrays a world in which the death of Paul’s lover from AIDS has literally turned him into a killer, and sex is now a means to anesthetize oneself against grief and to explore unnamed but “bizarre” fantasies: “The darker, the better,” as Paul says.133 Paul tries to co-opt Richard to these fantasies—once, successfully. The second time, however, Paul entreats Richard with Tell me a wilder fantasy than the one we did the other night. Tell me what it is you want done to you, and I’ll do it. I’ll do almost anything… Please! I really need to forget tonight. Go really dark.134

Richard, however, refuses, saying, “My heart’s not dead yet.”135 In the world of the play, S/M is linked to internalized homophobia (via the scene with Will), death, forgetting, melancholia, and “heartlessness.”136 Given the long association of the word “dark” with both evil and Blackness, the choice of the adjective is particularly telling,137 as is Daniel’s confession in one of his monologues: “Oooh, I am feeling evil today.”138  Bumbalo, Questa, 56.  Bumbalo, Questa, 56. 132  Bumbalo, Questa, 56. Ellipses in the original. 133  Bubalo, Questa, 43. 134  Bumbalo, Questa, 45. 135  Bumbalo, Questa, 46. 136  While the term S/M is not used by either Richard or Paul to describe their “bizarre” fantasies, in discussing pursuing one with Paul, Richard says, “I used to be very vanilla.” Bumbalo, Questa, 42. 137  On the association of dark skin with evil, see, for example, Daisy Grewal, “The ‘Bad is Black’ Effect,” Scientific American (January 17, 2017). Accessed 3 August, 2021. 138  Bumbalo, Questa, 46. 130 131

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Without wishing to sanitize S/M, I would still argue that the portrait which Questa provides has unfortunate political ramifications.139 First, it risks erasing from historical memory the hours of queer labor employed in inventing safer sex practices, themselves dependent upon fantasies a heteronormative culture often understood as “bizarre;” that there might be something healthy in “wild” fantasies is not something the play feels it necessary to consider. Second, it misreads S/M as Freud did, for sadism and masochism are not complementary perversions but two very different sexual practices with wildly different aesthetics.140 Third, it reinforces the homophobic portrayal of S/M practices as bizarre, “dark,” excessive, and anesthetizing, the kind of sex in which “primitive, exotic, savage, pansexual, and abject”141 peoples—bad queers, non-whites—engage,142 as well as maintaining the heteronormative conceit of something called “just sex”: in trying to seduce Richard into another round of the pursuit of “really dark” fantasies, Paul asks him not to spoil the memory of their last foray into the bizarre “by telling me you felt a connection. That you felt something other than sex.”143 The link between fantasy and reality the play is drawing here is also disturbing if familiar: one turns to S/M because of trauma. “Dark,” bizarre, and wild sexual fantasies are what gay men resort to when they are desperate to connect with other men but are too damaged and grief stricken to have “vanilla” sex. S/M is the sign of a pathology. In this sense, it is tainted with brownness—as its opposite, “vanilla,” makes clear.144  For a summary of these debates, see Champagne, Queer Ventennio, 84–85.  See, for example, Gilles Deleuze, Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty in Venus in Furs (New York: Zone, 1989), and John Champagne, Italian Masculinity. 141  Pérez, Brown Bodies, 25. 142  As I suggest below, the play links Daniel (and his Blackness) to S/M by casting him as the voyeur in the violent confrontation between the two white men, Paul and Will; as Daniel says, in his imagination, to Paul, “I’m the witness. I saw it all.” Bumbalo, Questa, 22. 143  Bumbalo, Questa, 45. 144  I am seeking to begin to work through here the proposal that S/M is queer (and not gay) and that queerness and blackness are linked. On queerness and/as blackness, see Snorton, Nobody, 3 and Roderick Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). I realize that I risk erasing the very thing I sought to highlight—race—by conflating S/M with “brownness,” but I hope to mitigate that risk precisely by employing brown rather than black. For an important meditation on race, S/M, and time that is grounded in a reading of Isaac Julien’s The Attendant, see Elizabeth Freeman, “Turn the Beat Around: Sadomasochism, Temporality, History,” in Time Binds, Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 137–69. 139 140

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Given this “taintedness,” it is no coincidence, then, that it is Daniel the Black man who witnesses the S/M scene between Paul and his potential gay basher Will—as if the three constituted a menage à trois, with Daniel acting as willing voyeur—or that the scene takes place in the alley behind the bar where Daniel just happens to be pissing. Daniel admits that he hangs out in the alley behind the bar, that he’s seen Paul there before, and that Daniel once even propositioned Paul: “I offered myself to him a couple of times… He’s got a nice dick. Saw it once,”145 and Daniel confesses that he enjoyed “seeing the ‘queer’ [Paul] beating the shit out of that boy.”146 As the representative of “abject” queer sex, violence, and cross-­ racial desire, in the piss-smelling alley behind the bar, Daniel is right where he is supposed to be. The play makes clear that, while grief has driven Paul to pursue back-alley sex, Daniel’s spoiled identity renders him at home in this environment. Furthermore, Daniel explicitly tells us that, when Will subjected Paul to homophobic slurs, Daniel identified with Paul—but as both gay and Black: “‘Will’ said ‘faggot’ with such contempt. Know that contempt. Felt it all my life. Felt it in a variety of so many names. Nigger. Queer. Faggot. Cocksucker. Coon. Fairy. Jungle bunny. Nignog. Fruit.”147 In this monologue, homophobic and racist epithets miscegenate, as if they are the same thing. But in so equating Paul’s having been called “faggot” with his own having been subject to sexual and racial epithets, Daniel confers on Paul an imaginary blackness—at least while Paul is being made to participate, however unwittingly, in an S/M scene. Hence, it is not only S/M that is “tainted” with brownness, but, thanks in particular to the presence of Daniel, Paul himself. In an imaginary conversation with Paul, Daniel insists, “We’re twins in this.”148 Of course, Paul’s whiteness provides the conditions of possibility of his being tainted—by Will’s desire for S/M, by Daniel—in the first place. Regardless, then, of the categorical miscegenation that occurs in the alley, Paul is cast as innocent white victim: of HIV (via the death of his lover), of Will and his potentially lethal S/M, and even of Daniel, who not only knows Paul’s secret but loves him and insists upon their similarity. As he says to Paul, “I understand you.”149 In that  Bumbalo, Questa, 12.  Bumbalo, Questa, 8 147  Bulbalo, Questa, 8. 148  Bumbalo, Questa, 22. 149  Bumbalo, Questa, 64. 145 146

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piss-soaked alley where violent S/M scenes and murder occur, Blackness is catching.150 Let me be clear here: I am not negating the way S/M promises what Candace Vogler has called “de-personalized intimacy,” sex as a forgetting of the well-tempered, proper, everyday self.151 In fact, the opposite. I am noting the way in which we are being presented here with a very partial, moralizing, and troublingly familiar portrait of S/M, not as something creative or something that can forge a connection between two or more participants, a connection based on something other than ego identifications. Additionally, the understanding of S/M—or any sexual practices, queer or otherwise—as “just sex” reinforces that dusty mind/body split we inherited from the Greeks, a split that falsely suggests that, during sex, our entire psychical apparatus—including our unconscious—goes some other place while our body does its dirty work. It is the ego that “needs” to maintain something like “just sex” so that it can continue its happy fictions about itself—as in “I am not the kind of person who really wants that, or takes pleasure in that, or treats another person like that.” Queer culture proposes that there can be something richly life-­affirming about the temporary abnegation of the self that sex promises, however much it can never once and for all make good on that promise (for the ego is a necessary evil, and one cannot “live” in the unconscious). Paul recognizes this: “On such a night… in the alley… you could forget everything but the hunt. In the alley…you have no history. You’re only a pair of

150  Admittedly, Daniel, too, is cast as a victim, but one who, unlike Paul, is beyond redemption. For the suggestion at the end of the play is that, regardless of Daniel’s concerns, Paul will “move on” by traveling to the city of Questa in search of happiness, while Daniel will stay put. On mobility, white masculinity, and modern gay subjectivity, see Pérez, Brown Bodies, and Marlon Ross, “Beyond the Closet as Raceless Paradigm,” in Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology, ed. E. Patrick Johnson and Mae G. Henderson (Duke University Press, 2005), 161–189. 151  Candace Vogler, “Sex and Talk,” Critical Inquiry 24 (2):328–365 (1998).

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eyes…a cute face… a beautiful dick… an inviting mouth… perfect dick.”152 But casting this desire to sidestep the ego as a turn to the “dark”—and situating the scene of its potential fulfillment in a urine-soaked alley where a Black man is waiting for you—reinforces the idea that it is to dark bodies that we white people should turn to fulfill our most thrilling masochistic fantasies. And this is exactly what the racist stereotype of the “big black dick” Daniel references also suggests. Clearly, race—and racism—can be co-opted to sexual fantasy. In a racist society, this coopting will be inevitable. As long as sex is defined as the forbidden, and people of color are associated with the primitive, race will be sexualized. But, as some queer of color theorists have argued, that erotic racialization goes “both ways,”153 and there is nothing “progressive” about telling people that their racialized sexual fantasies should be a source of shame.154 If fantasy has its own autonomy (as I believe it does), we cannot draw a simple and simpleminded connection between, say, rape fantasies and what someone “really” wants. As queer theory has taught us, the sexual is not the social; each have their own specific temporalities, spaces, and modes of being. Althusser’s notion of “relative autonomy” was an attempt to get at the way in which something like the sexual can be the product of history but also not so overdetermined by history as to be free of the contradictions of capitalism—contradictions that can be pressed upon in order to bring about social change.155 152  Bumbalo, Questa, 56. Tellingly, however, he does not see the connection between S/M and this potential dissolution of the ego. In fact, the opposite: when he tells Susan of Will’s behavior that fateful night in the alley, he assures her that he was not looking for S/M: “I was so disappointed. S/M talk in the alley? Get real, kid.” Questa 56. Given in particular his pursuit of “dark” fantasies, these phrases read as an odd disavowal, and from a psychoanalytic standpoint, it is difficult not to interpret the way he “flew into a [literally murderous] rage” (his words) at Will’s homophobic taunting—“He called me a little girl”—as symptomatic of this disavowal. Questa, 56. Given my argument later in the paragraph, it also might be read as a reassertion of his whiteness. The alley becomes the place where categorical miscegenations—gender, race, sexuality, class—multiply. 153  See, for example, Eng-Beng Lim, Brown Boys and Rice Queens, Spellbinding Performances in the Asias (New York: NYU Press, 2014). 154  In Questa, however, it precisely does not go both ways; while Daniel desires Paul, Paul expresses no desire for him. Daniel is his Proppian helper, and racism dictates that you never have consensual sex with the help. 155   On relative autonomy, see Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and other Essays, translated by Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 121–176.

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White gay culture has often practiced both obvious and insidious forms of racism. White gay men in particular need to work against the way in which black (and brown) bodies have been culturally and historically constructed and construed in the ways Pérez suggests. But that work involves not purging oneself of sexual fantasies—even racist ones—but reorienting oneself in the social sphere by combating racism and bringing into relief whiteness and its accompanying privilege.

Concluding Thoughts People cannot directly control what arouses them, but, if living to be a white queer man of 60 who now makes a comfortable income has taught me anything, it is that we can in fact learn to be attracted to kinds of bodies we once were not, to activities we once were not, and even to fantasies we once were not. One of the best lessons of Freud is that the libido is sufficiently mobile that it can find an almost infinite number of objects; that is, the object does not “cause” the libido; rather, the capacious quality of the libido leads it to pursue a great many objects—providing consciousness and ego are not getting in the way of that pursuit. That is, one must work against racism (or ageism, or the perpetual cultural vilification of fatness, or ableism, or even, as some gay men now finding themselves attracted to trans bodies have discovered, sexism). For white gay men, that means neither categorically refusing to be intimate with anyone of another race nor conflating sexual fantasy with social reality. Concerning the latter, yes, all differences can be fetishized: that is how the sexual works. But we don’t just live in the sexual; the social should not be the realm in which one mindlessly replicates the power differentials that fuel sexual fantasy. Or perhaps if power differentials were as fluid and reversible in social life as they are during sex, the world would be a more just and happier place. This is why I have tried to articulate some of the problems with these two plays and their representations of race, gender, sexual identity, and class. For however the work of art may engage unconscious fantasies—and however appropriate it might be to consider art as works of collective fantasy—the meaning of the artwork is not exhausted by its status as a form of social fantasy. Yes, art has some autonomy. But that autonomy is always relative to the specific society in which it circulates. Artmaking is also a social act, as is art viewing.

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Niagara Falls is often funny; Questa is often moving—as are Bumbalo’s other plays, particularly those about people living with HIV.156 But reading Questa and Niagara Falls as discursive acts that reveal the categorial miscegenation that informs modern biopower can help us to recognize that the work of unthinking racism is never done. In light of the complicated history of Italian American racial identity, media texts, queer and otherwise, might reveal unexpected ways in which whiteness is both achieved and resisted. Even our most sincere efforts to avoid racism can inadvertently reproduce non-anti-racist effects. This is part of what it means to recognize racism as structural. And in this particular historical moment, this seems an urgent goal to pursue.

Works Cited Bumbalo, Victor. Adam and the Experts. New York: Broadway Play Publishing, 1990. ———. Niagara Falls. New York: Broadway Play Publishing, 2007. ———. Questa. New York: Broadway Play Publishing, 2006. ———. Show. In Tough Acts to Follow, One-Act Plays on the Gay/Lesbian Experience. Ed. Noreen C.  Barnes and Nicholas Deutsch, 59–68. San Francisco: Alamo Square Press, 1992. ———. Tell. In Gay and Lesbian Plays Today. Ed. Terry Helbing, 213–234. Portsmouth (NH): Heinemann, 1993. ———. What Are Tuesdays Like? New York: Broadway Play Publishing, 2010. Champagne, John. Italian Masculinity as Queer Melodrama, Caravaggio, Puccini, Contemporary Cinema. New York: Palgrave, 2015. ———. Queer Ventennio, Italian Fascism, Homoerotic Art, and the Nonmodern in the Modern. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2019. Chow, Ray. The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. “Classical Music, Relaxed Setting.” Courier Post. Cherry Hill, New Jersey, 18 July 2008. . Accessed 30 July, 2021. Coates, Ta-Nehisi. Between the World and Me. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015. Dainotto, Roberto M. Europe (In Theory). Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. Deleuze, Gilles. Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty in Venus in Furs. New  York: Zone, 1989.

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 See, for example, Bumbalo, Adam and the Experts.

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DeSalvo, Louise. “Color/White: Complexion/Dark,” in Guglielmo, Jennifer and Salvatore Salerno, eds. Are Italians White? How Race is Made in America. New York: Routledge, 2003. 17–28. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. NY: Pantheon, 1978. Gardaphé, Fred L. “We Weren’t Always White: Race and Ethnicity in Italian/ American Literature.” CUNY Academic Works, 2002. . Accessed 1 August 2021. Goffman, Erving. Stigma, Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. New York: Touchstone, 1963. Grimaldi, Christine. “The Paesano of Shame: Trump’s Italian American Consiglieres.” The Los Angeles Review of Books (November 2, 2020). . Accessed 3 August, 2021. Guglielmo, Jennifer and Salvatore Salerno, eds. Are Italians White? How Race is Made in America. New York: Routledge, 2003. Guglielmo, Thomas A. “‘NO COLOR BARRIER,’ Italians, Race, and Power in the United States.” In Guglielmo, Jennifer and Salvatore Salerno, eds. Are Italians White? How Race is Made in America. New  York: Routledge, 2003. 29–43. Holden, Stephen. “How the Hysteria of Denial Conceals Fears and Denials.” New York Times, 23 November 1989. C.20 https://www-­proquest-­com.ezaccess. libraries.psu.edu/docview/427428339/fulltext/65165E68E48B4767PQ/1? accountid=13158. Accessed 30 July, 2021. Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Whiteness of a Different Color, European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. “Kitchen Duty.” Gay News. London, 10 June 1982: 20. . Accessed 30 July, 2021. Lambda Literary. “Mission & History.” . Accessed 31 July, 2021. MacDonald, Erik L. “Theatre Rhinoceros: A Gay Company.” TDR (1988–) 33, no. 1 (1989): 79–93. Accessed May 17, 2021. https://doi. org/10.2307/1145946. Meals, Caitlin. “Steady Current.” South Philly Review (July 10, 2008). https:// southphillyreview.com/2008/07/10/steady-­current/. Accessed 30 July, 2021. Muñoz, Jose Estaban. The Sense of Brown. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020. Pérez, Hiram. A Taste for Brown Bodies, Gay Modernity and Cosmopolitan Desire. New York: NYU Press, 2015. Pirandello, Luigi. L’esclusa. Milano: Mondadori, 1992.

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Propp, Vladimir. Morphology of the Folk Tale, Second Edition. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968. Puar, Jasbir K. Terrorist Assemblages, Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. Saslow, James M. “Victor Bumbalo, Gay Theater with Working Class Roots.” The Advocate 326 (September 17, 1981): 39. http://ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/ login?url=https://www-­proquest-­com.ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/magazines/ victor-­b umbalo-­g ay-­t heater-­w ith-­w orking-­c lass/docview/2465394433/ se-­2?accountid=13158. Accessed July 30, 2021. Schuller, Kyla. The Biopolitics of Feeling, Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018. Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake, on Blackness and Being. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Snorton, C. Riley. Nobody is Supposed to Know, Black Sexuality on the Down Low. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. Spivak, Gayatri. “Practical Politics of the Open End.” Interview with Sarah Harasym. The Postcolonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, edited by Sarah Harasym, New York: Routledge, 1990. 95–112. Staples, Brent. “How Italians Became ‘White.’” New York Times (October 12, 2019). . Accessed 31 July, 2021. Stoler, Ann Laura. Race and the Education of Desire. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. Viego, Antonio. Dead Subjects, Towards a Politics of Loss in Latino Studies. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. Vogler, Candace. “Sex and Talk.” Critical Inquiry 24 (2):328–365 (1998).

CHAPTER 7

Spotlight: Katelynn Cusanelli Katelynn Cusanelli

My family emigrated to America in the early 1900s, so I’m third-­generation American Italian. Every generation of my family has served in the US Armed Forces so we do see ourselves as American first and foremost, but Americans of Italian heritage and descent. It seems like a minor distinction, but I feel like the nuance is important. When I think about my American Italianness three things immediately come to mind: First, growing up, one of the things I heard the most (besides “I love you” and “have you eaten?”) was “la famiglia è tutto” and to this day that resonates with me. My family is very close. My brothers live with me, and my sister and I talk as often as our busy schedules allow. And even though we don’t always agree politically, my more conservative family members and I still love and care about each other very much. To me, it would be impossible to conceive of being an Italian American without Family being the foundation. The second thing I think of when I think about my Italian American heritage is food. Stereotypical, I know, but I come from a family of AMAZING cooks. Growing up, my family owned a diner, and my aunt K. Cusanelli (*) Pacific Northwest, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Heim, S. Anatrone (eds.), Spaghetti Sissies Queering Italian American Media, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10197-7_7

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currently owns and operates a café. Some of my earliest memories are in the kitchen with my grandmother, learning how to roll meatballs; I’m pretty sure the first solid food I ever ate was a stuffed artichoke leaf. To this day, every other Sunday I still make a pot of sauce using more or less the same recipe that has been handed down in my family for generations, and you can bet there is gonna be a baked ziti every Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas dinner. As I grow older I connect more with the cooking traditions I grew up with, and there’s comfort in knowing that the recipes I use have been passed down and will continue to be passed down. I realize now that growing up in an Italian American household the kitchen was the center of the universe in the home. Every cherished memory, every moment of celebration, every hard conversation I’ve had with my parents, everything seemed to happen in the kitchen. The kitchen was just where all the action was, whether it was company coming over—“Come! Sit! I’ll start a pot of coffee. Have you eaten? Here, just a little plate.”—or where the kids did their homework, the kitchen is the center of it all. Third, when I think of Italians or Italian Americans, we’re a funny and talented people: Jay Leno, Janeane Garofalo, Ray Romano, Sebastian Maniscalco, the great Lou Costello, Danny DeVito, Sofia Coppola, Joe Pesci, Stanley Tucci, Gwen Stefani, and of course Frank Sinatra. Even in my own family, we’re all a bunch of characters. I have never laughed as hard with anyone in this world as I do when my family gets together. So the three things I think of when I think of being an Italian American: Family, Food, and Fun. I am of two minds when I think about what it means to be an out queer person. On the one hand, I was raised to never be ashamed of who I am, where I come from, or of the gifts and talents that God has given me. On the other, there is a quintessentially American (especially immigrant-­ American family) focus on “don’t bring shame to the family.” At times I find it hard to reconcile the two together, especially when we still very much so live in a world that sees not fitting in as shameful. I don’t know how to be anything other than unapologetically myself. I’m loud, I hold strong opinions, and arguing is practically a favorite pastime, so it seems impossible that I could be anything other than open and out. That being said, while I do identify as a proud Queer woman, I don’t think that’s a major defining characteristic, at least not any more so than having green eyes, or being right-handed. Yes, I’m Queer. Yes, I’m Trans, but I’m also an engineer, and an advocate. I think media representation matters, so I will always be open and forthright about myself, because to hide or omit

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those parts of my identity would imply that I’m embarrassed or ashamed by them, and I’m not. Besides, if me being open about who I am helps someone else, then all the better. I don’t see my Italianness and my queerness as being connected. Being loud and Italian? Possibly. Being Queer and being Italian? No. It turns out that x% of the population is LGBT, so logically it would follow that around x% of the Italian or Italian American identified groups would also be LGBT. I can recall a very endearing moment however where I was coming out to my grandmother and she turned to me and said, “You just need to find yourself a nice Italian girl!” to which my mother replied, “Ma, I think she is a nice Italian girl.” Now, has being Italian American informed my behaviors or how I perceive myself or gender roles? Unquestionably. I’ve observed that Italian American households especially are very matriarchal, and Nonna sits as the apex of the power structure. I have dedicated my life to making sure that I developed all of the skills that are necessary to continue on as part of that matriarchal hierarchy: learn how to manage a household, keep the home clean, be a damn good cook, know how to host a good dinner party, and look after everybody. Not very progressively feminist of me, I know, but I see my mother and my grandmother as these juggernauts who are so strong and smart and fiercely capable and above all, loving. I couldn’t imagine myself wanting to do anything other than carry on like they have. They’ve set a high bar but they are to this day still my role models. At the end of the day I think both aspects are equally integral to who I am as a person, and while I don’t see a correlation between the two, I can honestly say I wouldn’t be the person that I am today without the influences from both aspects. You asked about how my status as a celebrity has been shaped by these identities. I think referring to my status as “celebrity” is generous, and I appreciate it. For what little modicum of fame I do have I don’t think it’s been shaped by my Italian American heritage other than I’m hilarious, which is something (and I may be a little biased here) I think comes from having a strong Italian family.

CHAPTER 8

“I Would Like to be a Spoiled, Rich, White Girl”: Trans Genealogy, (Self-)Naming and the Entombed Italian American Subjectivity of Venus Xtravaganza Nicholas Boston

Venus Xtravaganza (May 22, 1965 to Dec. 21, 1988) was a prominent transgender member of the Black and Latinx drag ball circuit in New York City of the late 1980s. She gained celebrity status posthumously as a subculture icon following her appearance in Paris is Burning (1990), the celebrated documentary film about the ballroom or ball culture by director Jennie Livingston. In one interview, Venus presciently describes the dangers she and other trans women in the circuit face when engaging in sex work to support themselves. “Most of the drag queens that are involved in the balls - ninety percent of them - are hustlers,” she remarks. “I guess that’s how they make their money to go to the balls and get whatever they need and stuff. I used to hustle in New York to make my money. [One time] I was with a guy and he was playing with my titties till he touched

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me down there. He felt it [my penis] and he seen it and he, like, totally flipped out. He said, ‘You fucking faggot! You’re a freak, you’re a victim of AIDS and you’re trying to give me AIDS! What are you, crazy?!’ So, I just jumped out the window [of his car]. I grabbed my bag and just jumped out the window. But, see, now I don’t like to hustle anymore. I don’t.” Tragically, subsequent to Venus making this statement,  while PiB was still being shot, she was found strangled, shoved under a bed in what her “house mother,” Angie Xtravaganza, described on-camera as “a sleazy hotel room.”1 A postmortem revealed that Venus had been killed four days earlier, on Dec. 21, 1988. Her murder remains unsolved to this day. Angie identified Venus’ body to the authorities, and Venus’ biological family claimed it and laid her to rest in Holy Cross Cemetery in North Arlington, Bergen County, New Jersey. There she lies with her maternal grandparents, Cesare Barrosso and Justina B. Salicrup (Fig. 8.1). The tombstone, pictured above, is inscribed with Venus’ legal birth name: Thomas Pellagatti. She was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, to a Puerto Rican mother and Italian American father. This fact of her Italian American heritage has been elided in the scholarship and journalism about Venus Xtravaganza. Taking the tombstone as both a material and symbolic point of entry, this chapter exhumes an Italianness buried in the narrative construction of Venus Xtravaganza’s identity in order to both locate Venus’s subjectivity within an Italian American narrative and situate her at the intersection of migratory pathways that are not only ethnic but also inter-urban and trans. While scholars have examined the ball culture in general, and Venus Xtravaganza in particular, through a multitude of interpretative prisms—cinematic representation, gender and sexuality, race/racialization and class, among others—no study has considered Venus Xtravaganza in relation to migration. Furthermore, none has moved to step outside the documentary frame of Paris is Burning to consult other sources of knowledge from which other subjectivities might arise. The majority of extant texts fixate on making meaning of Venus’s murder, at least within the parameters established by Livingston’s cinematographic framing. Critiquing this dynamic, film and sexuality scholar Nicholas De Villiers writes, “Witnessing this expropriation of Venus’s death, I am confronted with an ethical quandary: is it at all possible to talk about her, or

1  Darnell New  York, “Venus Xtravaganzas’ Murder,” May 22, 2013, YouTube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ekU2KVP2HE

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Fig. 8.1  Tombstone with an image of Jesus and the inscription: Cesare Barrosso 1883–1949, Thomas Pellagatti 1965–1988, Justina B.  Salicrup 1911–1990. (Photograph by Nicholas Boston)

to listen to her, without turning her into an allegorical figure?”2 This chapter rejects the impulse toward allegory, choosing instead to look at Venus Xtravaganza qua historical subject and to trace the various ways in which her trans journey could be seen as coextensive with the untold Italian American migration story in her genealogy. The chapter draws on an  Nicholas De Villiers, Sexography: Sex Work in Documentary, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: 2017), p. x. 2

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in-depth interview conducted with Mike Pellagatti, Venus’s nephew on her paternal side, who is the designated spokesperson for the Pellagatti family. The interview, on May 3, 2021 (see appendix), addressed the following topics: Venus’s home life with her biological family, the genealogy of the Pellagatti family, their migration from Italy to New York in the late nineteenth century and subsequent relocation to Jersey City, New Jersey, where Venus was born, assigned male at birth and raised to adolescence as a boy. The chapter then engages with the mediatic phenomenon of “family history TV” or “genealogy media,” both terms used to describe a genre of popular television production and programming introduced to American audiences in the early 2000s. Imagining Venus Xtravaganza, an openly transgender subject, appearing as a guest on an episode of one of these shows, how might the project of tracing her ethnic heritage be undertaken without delegitimating her trans journey? Venus belonged to both a biological family and formal chosen family (her “House”), and had elected to replace or displace the Pellagatti surname that marked her belonging to the former unit with the Xtravaganza surname that established her inclusion in the latter. Such a circumstance mounts an implicit challenge to the practice of genealogy or family history. The anthropologist Tom Boellstorff proposes a mode of historical sense-making he terms, “proleptic genealogy.” Prolepsis means to be in a state of anticipation. In rhetorical terms, it can mean the syntactical construction of a statement in a way that anticipates a future act or development by presenting it as already in effect in the present, such as the phrase, “I am a dead man if I do not complete this task on time.” Proleptic genealogy, then, “ask[s] after the consequences of anticipatory histories for untimely selfhoods-in-formation.” In other words, it historicizes or genealogizes the emergence of a concept, discourse, or paradigm in a manner that is, according to Boellstorff, “untimely”—temporally nonlinear, chronologically incompliant. This chapter adopts a proleptic genealogical approach  as a means of turning away from the allegorical paradigm in which, as De Villiers points out, Venus Xtravaganza’s subjectivity has been locked, towards an anticipatory mode, thinking about how the past could be formed in the present or the future, making possible the ideation of other aspects of her subjectivity  possible. “In this sense,” Boellstorff asserts, “any proleptic genealogy is queer in that it destabilizes the

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heteronormative biogenetic logics shaping dominant conceptions of genealogy itself.”3 A proleptic genealogical approach could be useful in reorienting  the mediatic logic of “family history television” and “genealogy media.”4 In television programs belonging to this genre, celebrity or otherwise prominent guests have their family histories researched by professional genealogists with scholars offering historical and sociological context to selected ancestors’ sagas. Finding Your Roots is perhaps the most scholarly in this genre. It was ideated and is produced and hosted by the Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and aired on public broadcast network PBS, as opposed to commercial, cable, or streaming options. At the start of every episode is a silent still screen displaying the text, “The findings presented in this series are based on professional guidance and research. The discovery of additional sources or interpretations may affect the conclusions.” Here we see a nod to methodology. The opening sequence proceeds with a voiceover of Gates, stating, “To uncover their roots, we’ve used every tool available. Genealogists comb through the paper trail their ancestors left behind, while DNA experts utilize the latest advances in genetic analysis to reveal secrets hundreds of years old…hearing stories they’ve never heard before and discovering new facets of their own identities along the way. They’re going to retrace the journeys those ancestors took, hearing stories of courage, sacrifice and survival, all hidden in the branches of their family trees.” Not surprisingly, the prime tool used for tracing lineage is the surname, and in many an episode of Finding Your Roots and other shows in the genre, what often gets uncovered are the sociohistorical tensions, traumas, and transitions behind subjects’ surnames: names having been Anglicized or shed altogether to de-ethnicize and enable the assimilation of their holders; the acquisition by an emancipated ancestor of their former enslaver’s surname, whether or not there were biological ties between them, and so forth.  I offer an analysis that is anticipatory and speculative of how a figure such as Venus Xtravaganza might be granted greater breadth. Given the changes in mediatic visibility for trans people— most notably among these productions is the cable television  series 3  Tom Boellstorff, “But do not identify as gay: A Proleptic Genealogy of the MSM Category,” Cultural Anthropology 26, 2 (2011): 287–312. 4  See Christine Scodari, Alternate Roots: Ethnicity, Race, and Identity in Genealogy Media, (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2018); and Matthew Elliott, “The Inconvenient Ancestor: Slavery and Selective Remembrance on Genealogy Television,” Studies in Popular Culture 39, 2 (2017): 73–90.

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Pose—it is highly conceivable that had she survived, she would have been involved in either or both of these developments as either a producer or a subject, as has been the case with other surviving members of the ball culture followed in the documentary, and been invited to be a guest on a genealogy TV show.5 At the age of 16, Venus Xtravaganza moved from Jersey City to New York City in search of the freedom and community in which to express her gender identity. In her own words, “I used to do it behind my family’s back, just dressing up, till finally they caught on with it and I didn’t want to embarrass them, so that’s when I moved away. I moved to New York and I continued doing it.”6 After taking the PATH7 train from Jersey City and landing on Christopher Street in Manhattan’s West Village, Venus found herself bereft of material resources and emotional support.8 But by hanging out in the queer space of the abandoned Hudson River piers she was introduced to the ball universe, a queer-of-color kinship network organized around aesthetic and performative practices designed to reconstitute the nuclear heterosexual family by and for gender and sexual non-conforming people who had been expelled fromtheir biological families. The organizational center of the ball universe is the house, a formal family unit comprised of a mother, father and children, which provides care, mentoring and a multigenerational lineage that generates a sense of 5  Given the impossibility to listen directly to Venus Xtravaganza, on this or any matter, the chapter is followed by a full transcript of an interview conducted with her nephew, Mike Pellagatti, about their Italian American heritage. 6  Jennie Livingston (dir), Paris is Burning, (Off-White Productions, 1990). 7  PATH: Port Authority Trans-Hudson, is a rapid transit rail system connecting the northeastern New Jersey cities of Newark, Harrison, Jersey City, and Hoboken, with Lower and Midtown Manhattan in New York City. At this time Christopher Street was the main artery of gay street life and nocturnal entertainment in New York, with the stretch running from Hudson Street to the West Side Highway being predominantly Black and Latinx, and the Hudson River piers that extend from the West Village at the end of that stretch, being a queer space and often a place for sex workers. For a discussion of the piers as gay/queer space in the 1980s to early 90s, see Boston “Queer Lens Captured the Queer Village,” in Gay City News, Dec 17, 2019. https://www.gaycitynews.com/queer-lenses-captured-the-queer-village/ 8  In an interview in Rolling Stone magazine on the 30th anniversary of Venus Xtravaganza’s death, her nephew, Mike Pellagatti, said of his paternal grandfather and uncles, “[T]hey were as understanding as they could be, but without being fully an emotional pillar of support.” See: Rebecca Schiller, “Venus Xtravaganza’s Nephew on Her Legacy: ‘She Never envisioned Herself Becoming a Transgender Martyr,’” Billboard, June 25, 2018 https://web.archive. o r g / w e b / 2 0 1 8 0 6 2 5 2 0 2 6 5 7 / h t t p s : / / w w w. b i l l b o a r d . c o m / a r t i c l e s / n e w s / pride/8462404/mike-pellagatti-interview-venus-xtravaganza

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collective identity.  In 1983, Venus  was admitted to the House of Xtravaganza, the first  all-Latinx house—the membership of the other houses being predominantly African American—that had been formed the previous year by Hector Valle (1960–1985), and Afro-Latinx man of Puerto Rican heritage who gave himself and it the name Xtravaganza. Befitting tradition in the ball culture, Venus took Xtravaganza as her surname (and adopted Venus as her first name). Venus herself was never expelled from her biological  family, understood as either physical home or kinship unit. Instead, she traveled back and forth between her biological family home in New Jersey, and her chosen family, her “house,” in New York City, as evidenced by the extensive film footage taken of her in both settings during the same time period. This, her regularized mobility and transitioning between spaces, is one of Venus’s most distinctive epistemological legacies. Of all the subjects followed in PiB, Venus is unique in being shown present in her biological family’s domestic environment. In one scene, she is interviewed in a/her bedroom in her biological family’s home, sitting and lying on a/her bed, narrating the chronology of her initiation into to her chosen family, the Xtravaganzas. However, despite this valuable documentary evidence that Venus had not been expulsed from her biological family, the representation stops short at conveying explicit knowledge and understanding of the ethnic positioning of that family. It is taken for granted that she is uncomplicatedly Latinx as reflective of her house membership. Intentionally or not, one consequence of this sequence of real-life actions and events, as well as documentary constructions, was the effective erasure of public traces of Venus Xtravaganza’s Italian American belonging. This consequence calls out for critical analysis. What bears noting—and one of the purposes of this chapter—is the legacy of Italian migration in whose footsteps she follows. Indeed, Venus’ ultimate goals, as she articulates when speaking about her aspirations on screen, were to get gender reassignment surgery, find and marry a (male) lover, and move someplace “up in Peekskill or maybe in Florida, somewhere far, where nobody knows me.”9 There are connections between these dreams and those of her foreparents, who were among the waves of Italian immigrants and Italian Americans that migrated or relocated internally in pursuit of various forms of self-­ actualization, reinvention, and communal diversification. We might even draw a connection between Venus’ aspiration to marry and move to a 9

 Livingston, Paris.

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place where she is not known with the reluctance of her biological father, John Pellagatti, Sr., to speak Italian in the home—both speak to an impulse toward the safety of assimilation. As Mike Pellagatti pointed out in interview: “As far as him [John Sr.] speaking Italian, considering the context that Italian immigrants wanted to raise their children as ‘American’ while my grandfather knew conversational Italian, he never spoke Italian directly to anyone.”10 In this way, Venus Xtravaganza’s paternal inheritance is one of contradictions: on the one hand, she inherits the cultural ethos of migration that is integral to Italian American identity, and, on the other, she participates in a tradition of cultural erasure by not “speaking the language,” metaphorically, and literally, through the overwriting of her surname, the linguistic appurtenance that suggested an Italianness otherwise unremarked.

The Ethnic Naming of Venus Xtravaganza The majority of scholarly references made to Venus Xtravaganza name her ethnically as Latina. Juana Suarez describes her as “a Latin drag queen,”11 Darren Hutchinson as a “young, poor, Puerto Rican transsexual male,”12 and so forth. Few texts ethnicize Venus Xtravaganza as Italian. When writers have named Venus as an Italian American, their intentions have been to disrupt reductionist understandings of Venus as cinematic figure rooted in Livingston’s directorial agency. For instance, Rebecca Liu writes, “While [Paris is Burning] is well-meaning and gentle, Livingston’s own identity and prejudices she brings with her can be seen through some of the ways she films some of her subjects, namely two trans women: one black and one Italian […] Octavia, a black woman, is framed and lit by Livingston far differently from how Venus, an Italian-American, is lit.”13 In reviewing the corpuses of individual scholars’ treatment of Venus Xtravaganza, we see transformations over time in the language used to  Full interview included at the end of the chapter.  Juana Suarez, “Feminine Desire and Homoerotic Representation in Two Latin American Films: Danzon and La bella del Alhambra,” in Chicano/Latino Homoerotic Identities, edited by D.W. Foster, (New York & London: Garland Publishing, 1999), 13–124. 12  Darren Lenard Hutchinson, “Out Yet Unseen: A Racial Critique of Gay and Lesbian Legal Theory and Political Discourse,” Connecticut Law Review 29, 2 (1997): 573. 13  Rebecca Liu, “Turning to Ashes: Genderfuck in Paris is Burning and Beyond,” Mercer Street 2015–2016, (New York: New  York University Press, 2016), 146. My emphasis in italics. 10 11

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define her, reflective of changes in both academic and public discourses— from, for example, “transsexual” to “transgender.” Ethnic naming also transforms over time. Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes’ 2018 text names Venus as ethnically “Puerto Rican,” but his 2020 contribution refers to her as “Puerto Rican Italian American” without hyphens or commas, which I take as a deliberate identitarian act.14 In “Legendary (1),” by Nicole Sealey, Venus’ identity undergoes additional transformations. The poem is a compilation of statements made by Venus and other characters in Paris is Burning, beginning with, “I’d like to be a spoiled rich white girl.” While the original printing includes a more subtle reference to Venus’ Italian American background  (the Italo-English slang word, “Capeesh,” meaning, “Do you understand?), no explicit ethnoracial decriptor is used: Whatever else white affords, I want. In multiples of white. Two of nothing is something, if they’re white. Never mind another neutral. Off-white won’t do. Capeesh? I want to be white as the unsparing light at tunnel’s end.15

Curiously, however, when the poem was reprinted in 2016 in the journal Callaloo, Venus’s ethnic identity is stated as “Italian-American.”16 It is on non-academic, web-based DIY media—blogs, wikis, Reddit threads—that Venus is most frequently named “Italian” or “Italian-­ American.” A database named Digplanet that is no longer available online, but appears in Google searches, listed Venus Xtravaganza among “American people of Italian descent.”17 Preceding the scripting of these appellations, be they interventionist/ oppositional or not, lies the question of knowledge acquisition. Given the scope and reach of the mediatic construction of Venus Xtravaganza, 14  Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, “Being Mala Mala: Documentary Film and the Cultural Politics of Puerto Rican Drag and Trans Identities,” Caribbean Studies 46.2 (2018): 10; and Translocas: The Politics of Puerto Rican Drag and Trans Performance, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021) 59. 15  Nicole Sealy, “Legendary (1),” Tupelo Quarterly, July 14, 2014. https://www.tupeloquarterly.com/poetry/legendary-1-by-nicole-sealy/ 16  Nicole Sealy, “Legendary (1),” Callaloo 39.2 (2016): 319–320. 17  Digplanet, 2014.

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through which informational channels did scholars or content creators acquire the knowledge of Venus’s Italian heritage? Did they, like I, come across the engraving of her birth name on her tombstone in the course of their research and consider it consequential beyond mere trivia? Did they, like I, seek and make contact with informants who personally knew Venus and could tell them stories about her that Paris is Burning cannot or will not? And what is to be thought critically of remnants or traces of a trans person’s life—a legal name in this instance—that convey knowledge of the subject that subjects themselves wished to unknow? As Peggy Phelan has written of the house names in the ball culture that replace inherited surnames, “‘Venus Xtravaganza.’ ‘Willi Ninja.’18 Names are the literal signs of appropriative knowledge. As metaphors of identity, these renamings serve to make present the absence of the ‘proper’ name—for subjects and for objects. It is this absence that metaphor tries to hide.”19

Deadnaming and The Stakes for Trans Biography Since 2010, the term “deadname” has been entered into several dictionaries of standard English usage, including the Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam Webster. It can be used as a noun and as a verb. In Merriam Webster, the definition of deadname as noun is “the name that a transgender person was given at birth and no longer uses upon transitioning,” and as a verb, “to speak of or address (someone) by their deadname.” In a critique of some of the guiding logics of genealogy TV, Matthew Elliott’s offers the concept of the “inconvenient ancestor,” theat forebear whose revealed actions or beliefs bring shame to the featured guest. By the same token, there can be the “inconvenient descendant” whose blatant nonconformity disrupt not only the specific family narratives of descent but the normative logic of the practice of genealogy itself.20 In doing this biographical study on Venus Xtravaganza, I exhume her birth name in order to expand the discussion about the media representation of her complex subjectivity. This undertaking is not without theoretical and ethical complications. Unlike for cisgender queer subjects, trans  Willi Ninja was another person featured in Paris is Burning.  Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, (New York: Routledge, 1993), 108. 20  Matthew Elliott, “The Inconvenient Ancestor: Slavery and Selective Remembrance on Genealogy Television,” Studies in Popular Culture 39.2(2017):73–90. 18 19

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epistemology and self-fashioning contradict, or at least severely complicate, the logic of biography because transitioning entails a repositioning of the self, both legally and intimately, vis-à-vis the past. While queer theory has, in many ways opened up possibilities for queer subjectivities to be legible within “life writing,” trans studies are operating with different stakes.21 As Heather K. Love observes of the differing research investments between queer studies and trans studies, “While queer studies continues to resist social science methodologies in favor of a more humanistic version of interdisciplinary or cultural studies, trans studies has stronger ties to legal studies, transnational analysis, the history of medicine, architecture and design, ethnography, and political economy.”22 Love’s listing of legal studies first is significant, as “the empirical, the inductive and the grounded” are often precisely the analytic categories deployed by the state to negate or foreclose on the possibilities of/for trans identities As the legal scholar Dean Spade notes, “The myth that birth-assigned gender is the only gender identity that can be recognized also motivates judicial decisions in which courts deny legal name changes to transgender people based on the assertion that such a name change may allow the petitioner to engage in 21  In her 2015 essay arguing for “the promise of queer biography,” literary scholar Wendy Moffatt writes that among her colleagues in the humanities she encountered “a lot of yearning for the empirical, the inductive, the grounded…ways of acknowledging that theory has occluded a part of the story.” Certain methodologies of cultural criticism germane to the field, they feel, far too often leave real lives behind due to the lofty levels of theoretical abstraction on which they operate. This complaint is not new. However, Moffatt’s target is one of the critical-analytical methodologies that has done the most to make lived identities legible in the Academy: queer theory. Moffatt calls upon queer theory to (re)engage with “life writing” as a genre containing methodological approaches that “could be the best ground to explore queer subjectivity.” [Wendy Moffatt, “The Narrative Case for Queer Biography,” in Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions, edited by Robyn Warhol and Susan S. Lanser, 210–226 (Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press, 2015) 210, 211]. Life writing encompasses autobiography, biography, memoir in all media. It can also include genealogical, or family history, practices, and texts. Queer studies have not fully tangled with these complications: the affects and effects of name change, the afterlife of data, and the trauma of authentication processes for trans Americans. Bringing these epistemological stakes to bear specifically on media studies, Billard and Zhang argue, “When queer and feminist theorists read trans media representations as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ based on their amenability to a counter-subordination or anti-normativity paradigm, trans subjectivities become a means to an end in furthering queer and feminist investments. Where is the trans subject in such an approach to media studies?” [Thomas J. Billard, and Erique Zhang. 2020. “Toward a Transgender Critique of Media Representation: Bringing the Sociology of Culture into Trans Media Studies,” Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, 61.2 (2020), 196]. 22  Heather Love, “Queer.” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 1.1–2 (2014): 174–175.

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fraud.”23 The psycho-socio-legal significance of name changing to transgender self-fashioning thus severely complicates the methodologies of biography and genealogy. Biography places crucial importance on a subject’s legal name, both fore- and sur-, and relies on documentary evidence to not only meaningfully trace the life course of the holder of that name from birth to death but identify their connections to the life courses of others. For the trans subject, this is a dangerous prospect—dangerous because it necessitates the exhumation of a personal name and a gender marker that not only defined them incorrectly, but which they exercised agency to discard or overwrite. There are a plethora of reasons, personal and political, why a trans subject might not wish to have this information even disclosed. Changing one’s gender marker and name—be it the forename or the surname or both—on official documentation, and having those changes recognized and normalized within one’s social, professional, and personal lives, continues to be a major battleground for people of trans experience, despite recently acquired legislative protections in the U.S.24 For these reasons, through the very nature of the genre, the ­biographical (and genealogical) method threatens to bring harm to this already vulnerable population. Cautioned by this backdrop, I move to 23  Dean Spade, “Transformation: Three Myths Regarding Transgender Identity Have Led to Conflicting Laws and Policies that Adversely Affect Transgender People,” Los Angeles Lawyer, (2008), 36. 24  These dynamics are U.S.-centric and may manifest differently outside the United States and certainly outside the Global North. Tracing the deeply felt resonances of naming in the works of trans poets J de Leon argues that “[t]he recurring focus on naming in the work of many contemporary trans and nonbinary poets helps articulate the power and precarity of this particular self-indulgence” where “[c]laiming ‘self-indulgence’ in this context is far from an insult: self-indulgence is a virtue when the alternative for minoritized subjects is following a prescribed self-annihilation,” [J. De Leon, J, “Calling Self-Indulgence: Names, Pronouns, Poems,” TSQ 6.4(2019): 620–621]. Lars W. MacKenzie unpacks one of the many material manifestations of this prescribed annihilation in “The Afterlife of Data: Identity, Surveillance, and Capitalism in Trans Credit Reporting.” MacKenzie shows that “When trans people change their first names to better align with their gender identities, they often become illegible to credit reporting systems.” Central to MacKenzie’s conceptualization here is the notion of “authentication”: trans people’s identities get delegitimated by records-keeping systems designed for a presumptively cisgender public [MacKenzie, Lars W. “The Afterlife of Data: Identity, Surveillance, and Capitalism in Trans Credit Reporting.” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 4.1(2017), x]. Extrapolating from this study, we can appreciate the trauma associated with former personal-name identifications for the transgender community at large. In order to not retraumatize, our imperative as scholars is to remain attentive to cisnormative research methods. [See: Garrett Epps, “How Birth Certificates Are Being Weaponized Against Trans People,” The Atlantic, June 8, 2018].

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offer this biographical and genealogical narrative of Venus Xtravaganza’s Italian American heritage in a proleptic effort to engage with her ethnic history without erasing her trans journey. 

The Politics of (Self-)Naming Media workers and media subjects are often the most visible figures of trans histories. Venus Xtravaganza belongs to this important media archive, as both subject and worker; by exhuming her Italian Americaness Venus is situated in yet another more complicated and interesting way, straddling multiple positionalities. One thread that is common to so many in this field is the practice of self-naming, but intentions and strategies differ vastly among these figures. Actresses/actors, directors, producers, and showrunners such as Laverne Cox, Janet Mock, Indiya Moore, Elliot Page, MJ Rodriguez, Shadi Petowsky, Joey Solloway, and Lana and Lilly Wachowski, to name a few, have, owing to different imperatives, changed parts or all of the name they were given at birth. Some changed their forename alone, some changed both forename and surname. Some self-named with traditional forenames that are readily recognized and gender-marked, while some crafted more inventive names that disrupt the gender binary, and disregard orthodox spellings. These decisions and the public identities they created either conserved elements of, or erased completely, a pre-­ transition biography. For some, it belies an effort to scrub the Internet of all references to pre-transition surnames, some not. These decisions served to (re)position the transitioning subject in relation to other subjects to whom they are related by bloodline or cultural heritage, retaining or severing ancestral-familial-genealogical connections and in some cases even ethnoracial membership. As Kandt and Longley observe, “a name very often provides an informative marker of ethnic, linguistic and cultural origin.”25 For white ethnics in the United States, surnames assigned at birth are often, though by far not always, the only outwardly identifiable marker of ethnic particularity that endures through successive generations, while language, custom, and habitus fall away.26 We see from the short list 25  Jens Kandt and Paul A. Longley, “Ethnicity Estimation Using Family Naming Practices,” in PLOS ONE, Published: August 9, 2018: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal. pone.0201774. 26  Mary C.  Waters, “The Everyday Use of Surname to Determine Ethnic Ancestry,” Qualitative Sociology 12(1989): 303–324.

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of names above suggestions of English, Hispanic, Jewish, and Polish ethnicity. It is impossible to say with certainty what Venus Xtravaganza’s self-­ naming practice/strategy was during her lifetime and how it might have transformed over time had her life course progressed. We cannot know the ways that she lived and identified with her Italian Americanness, though through her nephew we learn that in their family “we do acknowledge Italian church feasts: the Feast of St. Rocco, the Feast of San Gennaro. We also have a big fish dinner annually on Christmas Eve. Venus (who was not religious at all) was very much a part of that tradition up until the time of her passing.”27 We do not know if in shedding her dead name she intentionally aimed to shed traces of this ethnicity, but we can mark here the ways that her journey adds to the stories and migratory identities of Italian Americans.

Genealogy and Media Italian American identity is, perhaps more than other American identities, understood through television and other media representations that reinforce a particular mythology, perpetuating certain stereotypes about gender, race, and sexuality, and emphasizing patriarchal lineage as the sole means of intelligibility. While the Americanization of Italians often at the expense of their Italianness was, as Simone Cinotto writes: “achieved at the cost of the marginalization of alternative identities, and occasionally of the exclusion and even victimization of subjects inside and outside the group,”28 Mike Pellagatti remarks that their own family was accepting of Venus: “Sure, at first, there was an adjustment period, but after it was well established that Venus transitioned both sides of the family accepted the fact.”29 Genealogy or family history television offers a particularly rich space for our discussion; it is a genre of television programming that incorporates stylistic conventions of various other genres: documentary, reality-TV, and game show (with the “big reveal”). The genre emerged in the first decade of the twenty-first century concurrent to two major developments: the  Interview Boston and Pellagatti.  Simone Cinotto, “Introduction,” in Making Italian America (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 3. 29  Interview Boston and Pellagatti. 27 28

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widespread digitization of historical archives that were formerly accessible only in person (notably Ellis Island immigration records), and the massification of DNA testing for genealogy in the form of Ancestry.com and 23 and Me home DNA-testing kits. Among the television shows in this genre are Who Do You Think You Are?, Finding Your Roots, The Genealogy Road Show. With the exception of the latter, the genre follows a standard trajectory, as Lunt explains: The celebrity guest embarks on a quest to construct a personalized history of the present as a way of resolving personal problems and understanding the basis of their celebrity. The implications of this analysis are expanded on to aid an understanding of the media representations of genealogy as a social practice and the media representation of the relation between history and memory. The implications of this analysis are expanded on to aid an understanding of the media representations of genealogy as a social practice and the media representation of the relation between history and memory.30

Ethnicity is one of many framing devices these series have used to diversify content and increase audience appeal, and Italian heritage has figured prominently.31 Finding Your Roots, for example,  aired an episode entitled,  “Italian Roots” during its sixth season.32 The narratives of Italian immigrant arrival leading, subsequently, to Italian American identity formation do not depart from familiar nostalgic constructions of presumptively heterosexual extended family belonging and inheritance, reinforcing normative stereotypes about possible iterations of Italian American identity. While there has been an appreciable number of sexual minority-­ identified guests on these shows (Billie Jean King, Anderson Cooper, Andy Cohen, Tony Kushner, David Sedaris, Kehinde Wiley, Queen Latifah, RuPaul, Narciso Rodriguez, Zach Posen, John Waters, etc.), non-­ normative sexuality has yet to be deployed as a framing device. Hence, while presumptively heterosexual guests establish not only familial ties, but affective bonds, with ancestors in heteronormative life course modes, primarily marriage and procreation, such episodes fail to make space for 30  Peter Lunt, “The Media Construction of Family History: An Analysis of ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’” Communications 42.3(2017): 293. 31  Christine Scodari, Alternate Roots: Ethnicity, Race, and Identity in Genealogy Media, (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2018). 32  Season 6 Episode 9 aired on February 17, 2020.

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other modes of bonding, recognition, and belonging. This dynamic is further complicated, or differently articulated, in the episodes featuring transgender guests, Laverne Cox and Janet Mock, as these narratives rely, as does all genealogical research, on the authority—bureaucratic, ethnic, and kinship—of names and naming.33 Critiquing genealogy as a search for origin, Foucault claimed that the “attempt to capture the exact essence of things, their purest possibilities, and their carefully protected identities,” which “assumes the existence of immobile forms that precede the external world of accident and succession.”34 Foucault’s genealogies are concerned with the body which is conceptualized as a material surface, as a flesh upon which the micro-­ physics of power leave their mark. This aspect is particularly stressed when he writes, “The body is the inscribed surface of events […] Genealogy, as an analysis of descent, is thus situated within the articulation of the body and history. Its task is to expose a body totally imprinted by history.”35 Venus’ life story describes an ongoing negotiation with structures of power that try to fix her within different genealogical traditions, but, her body’s signification transcends understandings of ethnicity, race, and gender that rely on normative understandings of genealogy, as is further evidenced by her relationship to whiteness. As Venus herself theorized, whiteness was one of the few forms of capital she was able to access throughout her short life.36 Among her four biological brothers, she was the most Caucasian in appearance. This random genetic inheritance was both condemnation and deliverance. On the one hand, it may have complicated her relationship to her Puerto Rican ethnicity; on the other hand, it enabled, or at least mediated, other sorts of participation and access to different communities. There is an archival photograph of Venus Xtravaganza, rich with meaning, that shows her in the throes of last-minute preparation for a drag ball performance. She is being coiffed by her house father, David Ian Xtravaganza, as they sit in a New York subway train. Seated beside them is 33  Laverne Cox was on Who Do You Think You Are? Season 9 Episode 2, airing May 20, 2018. Janet Mock was on Finding Your Roots, Season 4 Episode 4, airing October 23, 2017. 34  Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” In Donald F.  Bouchard (ed.), Language, Counter-memory, Practice, Trans. D.  F. Bouchard, Sherry Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 142. 35  Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 148. 36  Hutchinson writes, “Venus, a participant in the balls, wants to taste ‘power,’ which life has taught her is clustered around whiteness, wealth, and heterosexuality.” Hutchinson, “Out Yet Unseen,” 574.

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a senior-aged Black woman who holds her purse to her abdomen and looks off in the opposite direction from the Xtravaganzas’ flamboyance in a discernible effort at minding her own business. The image illustrates multiple dynamics at play in defining Venus’ shifting positionality: her mobility across and between socio-cultural spaces; her displacement from and reentry to the family unit; and her gender nonconformity. Another key component of Venus’ identity that is captured in this picture is her “whiteness,” evidential in the difference between Venus and her father’s brownness, as well as their fellow commuter’s blackness. Venus attributed her success at winning favor with prospective clients in the sex work industry to her physical appearance, “the blonde hair, and the light skin and green eyes.” Mike Pellagatti simultaneously confirms and challenges this comment, stating, “I wouldn’t go so far to say that Venus was ‘white presenting,’ if we are going by the cultural definition of ‘white presenting.’ She did not fit within the parameters of a heteronormative, Caucasian, ‘Middle American’ version of ‘whiteness’ as such is interpreted today.”37 Pellagatti points to an understanding of passing that foregrounds forms of self-presentation and self-stylization crucial to the “pass.” Indeed, Venus’ genetic privilege was delimited by class and biological sex. “I would like to be a spoiled, rich, white girl,” she said with a squeaky giggle. “They get what they want, whenever they want it.”38 The ambivalence expressed in Venus’ claim that her whiteness granted her access (to sex work clients), but did not grant her privilege (like a spoiled rich girl), parallels Joseph Anthony LoGuidice’s assertion that gay Italian American men “are only accepted as non-ethnic, white gay men, not as ethnic Italian American Gay men, who can also identify as non-white if they so choose to do so.”39 The contradictory ways Venus inhabits these spaces through  See Interview with Mike Pellagatti in chapter appendix.  Livingston, Paris. 39  Joseph Anthony LoGuidice and Michael Carosone, Our Naked Lives: Essays from Gay Italian-American Men, (New York: Bordighera Press, 2013) 7. There is a robust discussion of Italian American negotiations and relationships with whiteness, involving questions of migration, kinship, embodiment, and memorialization (inter alia Gardaphé, Fred. 2002. “We Weren’t Always White: Race and Ethnicity in Italian American Literature,” Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 13(3): 185–199; Jennifer Guglielmo and Salvatore Salerno (eds), Are Italians White? How Race is Made in America, (New York: Routledge, 2003); Brent Staples, “How Italians Became ‘White,’” New York Times, Oct. 12, 2019, Accessed online April 1, 2020: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/12/opinion/ columbus-day-italian-american-racism.html). The example of Venus Xtravaganza offers a unique perspective on this literature and a bridge to other fields of inquiry. 37 38

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the lenses of gender, sexuality, and race call for more investigation and reflection specifically when it comes to how queer Italian Americans exceed the abundances and practices of categorization historically applied to them. Hers is a journey of migration, a journey of becoming, whose legacy informs and is informed by both trans foreparents and her Italian American ancestors. Venus’s life story is marked by these two narratives/genealogies/cultures of migration: she continues the migratory legacy of her Italian American heritage—and the transatlantic migratory paths of those ancestors—and of the diasporic trans community that welcomed her in the city, incorporating her into a formal familial lineage that is trans and queer, unreliant on biogenetics. By recognizing the confluence of these two genealogies of movement we make space for the Italian American trans journey in a move that is transformative of both the hegemonic Italian American narrative and the necessary transgender project to self-narrate, inviting them to inflect upon one another.

Appendix Interview with Mike Pellagatti, May 3, 2021. (1) How many siblings did Venus Xtravaganza have, and where in the birth order did she fall? Mike Pellagatti: Venus had four other siblings. All cis-male. In terms of birth order Venus was the second youngest, my uncle Louis was the youngest within the birth order. (2) Where was Venus born and where did she grow up? Mike Pellagatti: Venus was born in Jersey City, NJ.  She grew up between Downtown Jersey City and the Greenville neighborhood of Jersey City. (3) Was her father, your grandfather, Italian American? Did he speak any Italian? Was he present in the home when Venus and her siblings were growing up? If it is not through him that your Italian heritage comes, then from whom?

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Mike Pellagatti: My grandfather John Sr. was indeed Italian. Thus where the Pellagatti surname comes from. Grandpa was present (when he could be) it should be understood that having five mouths to feed would require one to be at work whenever present to support their family. Grandpa was involved with carpentry and cab driving. As far as him speaking Italian, considering the context that Italian immigrants wanted to raise their children as “American” while my grandfather knew conversational Italian, he never spoke Italian directly to anyone. In terms of my heritage, my Italian American heritage also comes from my mother’s side. My paternal side is half Italian and half Puerto Rican. (4) From what part of Italy did your family come and which generation immigrated to the U.S.—was it your grandparents, great-­grandparents, or an even earlier generation? Mike Pellagatti: The oldest family member on my father’s side that I can trace to being in the United States is my great-great-grandfather Agostino LeVito (1874–1937), who came from Bari, Italy. Agostino was father to my great-grandmother Angelina LeVito (1897–1976), who married my great-grandfather Frank Pellagatti (1890–1977). That union between Frank and Angelina produced ten children. As to when they came here, the LeVitos arrived together in the New York area in the late nineteenth century. My great-grandfather arrived (alone) in 1912. My family always indicated that they were southern Italian (and most certainly LeVito is a name common south of Rome), but the Pellagatti surname is common in northern Italy. (5) Did/does your family embrace its Italian heritage? If so, how? Did Venus and the family have contact with Italian American relatives or the community? Did she/the family observe any Italian customs or make typically Italian dishes (not Americanized cuisine such as spaghetti or pizza or anything that Americans of all ethnicities would know)? Was there any memorabilia in the family home of the family’s Italian heritage—any decorations, figurines, wall hangings, anything like that? Mike Pellagatti: Absent of hyper religious observance (my folks are liberally Catholic, not overly devout), we do acknowledge Italian church feasts: the Feast of St. Rocco, the Feast of San Gennaro. We also have big

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fish dinner annually on Christmas Eve. Venus (who was not religious at all) was very much a part of that tradition up until the time of her passing. (6) Did Venus or any of her siblings ever visit Italy? Mike Pellagatti: Not to my knowledge. (7) In Paris is Burning, Venus talks about her “light skin and green eyes.” Was she the most “white-presenting” of her siblings or in the family at large and, if so, was that ever commented on, and, if so, in what way? Mike Pellagatti: I wouldn’t go so far to say that Venus was “white presenting” if we are going by the cultural definition of “white presenting.” She did not fit within the parameters of a heteronormative Caucasian, “Middle American” version of “whiteness” as such is interpreted today. [Culturally,] Venus was into the club scene, liked soul music and r&b, surrounded herself with affiliates who were mostly BIPOC.40 That is not saying that Venus didn’t want to be included within the parameters of the mainstream zeitgeist of Middle Class America, but not at the expense of compromising on her identity to fit within the terms of fitting within a cultural framework that was still straight-laced and conservative at the time. (8) Was there ever any conflict or miscommunication between the Italian side of your family and the Puerto Rican side? Which was more challenging for Venus to interact with as herself? Mike Pellagatti: There was no conflict whatsoever. The Italian American side and the Puerto Rican side were very tight and close knit. There was no racial animosity whatsoever. While both sides have lost touch over the years, this was chiefly due to re-location, with my Puerto Rican relatives collectively saving up enough money to move back to Puerto Rico and elsewhere outside of the NYC metro area. These were two working-­class, immigrant families, struggling to survive in postindustrial Jersey City. While I can’t speak for every Italian American family (and it is not lost on me that many Italians became hostile over the years toward BIPOCs who moved into northern urban enclaves during the Great Migration), my family was never outwardly intolerant or hostile toward  BIPOC: Black, Indigenous, and People of Color.

40

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anyone. In fact, my father would stand up to anyone who spoke ill of his neighbors [of color]. As far as Venus—which side was more challenging for Venus to interact with: I would say neither side. Sure, at first, there was an adjustment period, but after it was well established that Venus transitioned—both sides of the family accepted the fact. However, admittedly, Venus was closer with the Puerto Rican side of the family, which was (slightly) more liberal in their philosophy, and also considering that my [Puerto Rican] cousin Frankie was also LBGTQ+, Venus would form a bond with him sharing a similar experience. (9) Did Venus herself identify as Italian American in any way? Do her siblings? Mike Pellagatti: Venus identified equally as Italian American and Puerto Rican, although presented more as Puerto Rican. My father, who was closer with Grandpa, identifies more in line as Italian American. My two living uncles have more of the same approach as Venus, identifying equally as both. (10) Did she have a close relationship to her Italian American father? Mike Pellagatti: Prior to my grandparents splitting up, Grandpa was almost always at work. That’s not to say that Venus did not have a close relationship with her father. Grandpa was present as much as he could be, but as mentioned before, he had five mouths to feed—and was not available all the time. At that point, when the separation between my grandparents occurred, Venus would gravitate toward my grandmother, but that boils down to personalities. Grandpa kept more to himself and internalized his thoughts and feelings. Grandma was more open and externalized her feelings. I can say that Grandpa was utterly distraught when Venus died. So that wasn’t to say that my grandfather didn’t love Venus; his way of expressing emotion and love was just more subtle and indirect. (11) Do you think of your work in the Occupy Wall Street movement as intersecting with the Transgender Rights movement and other social justice movements?

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Mike Pellagatti: The struggle of trans people to find integration and acceptance within society—while wholly unique to them—is also overlaid within a broader economic struggle that is applicable to everyone regardless of their race, gender, creed, or sexual orientation. This struggle is in the form of the ever-rising cost of living interlaced with a combination of public austerity measures, low marginal taxation rates on the wealthy, privatization of utilities and resources, and no standard of a living wage pegged to inflation. The income disparity between the 99% and the 1% ushered in during this era of economic neoliberalism since 1974 has seen upwards of some $50 trillion funneled to the 1%, with this disparity further exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic. While [media representations] of social progress and acceptance of trans and LBGTQ+ individuals is more than evident, the economic struggle for upward mobility has grown ever the more pressing. Until we fully address and mitigate the damages imposed upon the lower levels of capital to increase the profit margins of multinational corporate entities and their individual owners over the past 40 years; and see to it that people’s basic materialistic and healthcare-related needs are met, the tragedy of Venus Xtravaganza will continue to replicate itself.

Works Cited Baldo, Michaela, “Queer in Italian-North American Women Writers.” Graduate Journal of Social Science 5.2(2008):35–62. Billard, Thomas J. and Erique Zhang. “Toward a Transgender Critique of Media Representation: Bringing the Sociology of Culture into Trans Media Studies.” Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 61.2(Winter 2022): 194–199 Boston, Nicholas. “Queer Lenses Captured the Queer Village.” Gay City News. December 17, 2019. Accessed on Wednesday, April 1, 2020: https://www. gaycitynews.com/queer-­lenses-­captured-­the-­queer-­village/ Cinotto, Simone. “Introduction.” In Making Italian America. New  York: Fordham University Press, 2014. De Leon, J. “Calling Self-Indulgence: Names, Pronouns, Poems.” TSQ 6.4(2019): 620–634. De Villiers, Nicholas. Sexography: Sex Work in Documentary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. ———. “How Much Does It Cost for Cinema to Tell the Truth of Sex? Cinéma Vérité and Sexography.” Sexualities 10.3(2007): 341–361. Elliott, Matthew. “The Inconvenient Ancestor: Slavery and Selective Remembrance on Genealogy Television.” Studies in Popular Culture 39.2(2017):73–90.

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Epps, Garrett. “How Birth Certificates Are Being Weaponized Against Trans People.” The Atlantic. June 8, 2018. Foucault, Michel. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” In Donald F. Bouchard (ed.), Language, Counter-memory, Practice, Trans. D.  F. Bouchard, Sherry Simon, 139–164. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977. Gardaphé, Fred. “We Weren’t Always White: Race and Ethnicity in Italian American Literature.” Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 13.3(2002): 185–199. Ginsberg, Elaine. Passing and the Fictions of Identity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. Guglielmo, Jennifer and Salvatore Salerno (Eds). Are Italians White? How Race is Made in America. New York: Routledge, 2003. Hutchinson, Darren Lenard. “Out Yet Unseen: A Racial Critique of Gay and Lesbian Legal Theory and Political Discourse.” Connecticut Law Review 29.2(1997). Kandt, Jens and Paul A.  Longley. “Ethnicity Estimation Using Family Naming Practices.” PLOS ONE. Published: August 9, 2018: https://doi.org/10.1371/ journal.pone.0201774. La Fountain-Stokes, Lawrence. Translocas: The Politics of Puerto Rican Drag and Trans Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021. ———. Translocas: The Politics of Puerto Rican Drag and Trans Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018. “Being Mala Mala: Documentary Film and the Cultural Politics of Puerto Rican Drag and Trans Identities.” Caribbean Studies 46(2): 3–30. Livingston, Jennie (dir). 1990. Paris is Burning. (Off-White Productions, 1990). ——— (dir). 2020. Paris is Burning. (The Criterion Collection) Liu, Rebecca. “Turning to Ashes: Genderfuck in Paris is Burning and Beyond.” Mercer Street 2015–2016, p.145–149. New York: NYU, 2016. LoGuidice, Joseph Anthony and Michael Carosone. Our Naked Lives: Essays from Gay Italian-American Men. New York: Bordighera Press, 2013. Love, Heather. “Queer.” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 1.1–2(2014): 172–176. Lunt, Peter. “The Media Construction of Family History: An Analysis of ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ Communications 42.3(2017): 293–307. MacKenzie, Lars W. “The Afterlife of Data: Identity, Surveillance, and Capitalism in Trans Credit Reporting.” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 4.1(2017): 45–60. Martin, Biddy. “Sexualities Without Genders and Other Queer Utopias.” Diacritics 24.2–3(1994): 104–21. Moffatt, Wendy. Moffat, Wendy. “The Narrative Case for Queer Biography.” In Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions, edited by Robyn Warhol and Susan S.  Lanser, 210–226. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press, 2015.

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Phelan Peggy. Unmarked: the Politics of Performance. New York: Routledge, 1993. Schiller, Rebecca. 2018. “Venus Xtravaganza’s Nephew on Her Legacy: ‘She Never Envisioned Herself Becoming a Transgender Martyr.’” Billboard. June 25, 2018. Accessed June 1, 2021. https://web.archive.org/web/20180625202657/ https://www.billboard.com/articles/news/pride/8462404/mike-­pellagatti­interview-­venus-­xtravaganza Scodari, Christine. Alternate Roots: Ethnicity, Race, and Identity in Genealogy Media. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2018. Sealy, Nicole. “Legendary (1).” Callaloo 39.2(2016): 319–320. ———.“Legendary (1),” Tupelo Quarterly, July 14, 2014. Spade, Dean. “Transformation: Three Myths Regarding Transgender Identity Have Led to Conflicting Laws and Policies that Adversely Affect Transgender People.” Los Angeles Lawyer, 2008. Staples, Brent. “How Italians Became ‘White.’” New York Times. Oct. 12, 2019. Accessed online April 1, 2020: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/ 10/12/opinion/columbus-­day-­italian-­american-­racism.html Suarez, Juana. “Feminine Desire and Homoerotic Representation in Two Latin American Films: Danzon and La bella del Alhambra.” Pp. 13–124 in Chicano/ Latino Homoerotic Identities, edited by D.W.  Foster. New  York & London: Garland Publishing, 1999. Waters, Mary C. “The Everyday Use of Surname to Determine Ethnic Ancestry.” Qualitative Sociology 12(1989):303–324

CHAPTER 9

Spotlight: Norman Korpi Norman Korpi

I come from a third-generation southern Italian mostly Sicilian family that immigrated to northern Michigan in the early part of the twentieth century. Although my grandparents would speak Italian, I knew very few words and it’s hard for me to distinguish between Italians and Italian Americans. Unfortunately, the only time I was in Italy I was on a train and we passed through the middle of the night, so I’m still looking forward to my first trip to Italy; but meeting real Italians living in California, their zest for life and passion for the arts and culture, makes me feel such a kinship that I think they share my creative spirit. Currently I am working in my cousins’ bakery, the Rigoni’s in northern Michigan, and what comes to mind is the loud family passion that we have; we work very loudly and are very supportive and you know we’re always a very “yes, yes let’s try this” kind of group of people. My other half of the family are from northern Europe, from Sweden and Finland, and they’re much more reserved. I always enjoy when we have our weekend picnics at the lake; the two groups together, one is more reserved, and the other is just loud as can be. That being said, I would have to say that my

N. Korpi (*) MI, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Heim, S. Anatrone (eds.), Spaghetti Sissies Queering Italian American Media, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10197-7_9

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Italian side of the family—my cousins, my aunts, and uncles—are very business focused, creating small businesses such as bakeries and local grocery stores. My great-grandparents came to America with the intention of creating something from nothing. There was always this possibility that you could create things; this feeling really distinguishes the Italian side of the family and I like to take that to heart as I am an inventor and an entrepreneur and an artist and those all seem to be accolades of my Italian heritage. Maybe being one of the first openly queer people on television set a big trend and helped express that Italian can-do spirit. I always felt that there was family behind me no matter what, and that always gave me strength. I consider my Italian family to be very strong and we really fight for each other, so this allowed me to be so open, and to go out on a limb because no matter what the world thought of me, I knew that my grandmother would come and beat you with a pasta spoon if you crossed me. Even though I know the church has always been ambivalent, or a big no, on the subject of homosexuality, but not on the question of family, and that’s the most important thing here now so call me a Christmas Catholic. Being Italian to me is like being in a club, you know you belong and when I go to New York or New Jersey and meet other Italians I know immediately there’s a sense of family, and I think their family shared the same struggles as our family did when we left Italy in search of a bigger life. I’d like to think that I’ve changed the world to fit my views and if that is part of the Italian Renaissance spirit then so be it.

CHAPTER 10

Lifestyles of the Gay and Mobster Julia Heim

My daughter, she’s got a problem with my lifestyle, MY LIFESTYLE, now I find out she’s got a lifestyle too. — Caesar Bellafusco (Mitch del Monico [dir], Alto [2015; Miami: Shake the Tree])

At first, one might consider the integration of queer aesthetics and narratives into the mafia film genre a confluence of opposing sensibilities. The machismo that accompanies the brutality of these gangsters’ lives seems oppositional to historical media portrayals of gayness. Furthermore, the genre lends itself well to the common “bury your gays” trope, as murder is par for the course in these films and shows, and homosexuality is just one more reason to pull the trigger.1 As George De Stefano explains, “The 1  The “bury your gays” trope is a mediatic device wherein LGBTQIA+ characters (but primarily lesbian identified characters) are killed off before they can find happiness with the partner they desire. For more on the history of the trope see Haley Hulan (2017) “Bury Your Gays: History, Usage, and Context,” McNair Scholars Journal, Vol. 21: Iss. 1, Article 6. Available at: https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/mcnair/vol21/iss1/6

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culture of the Mafia, patriarchal and authoritarian, strictly polices the unruly realms of gender and sexuality. Its protocols demand that men master, even repress, their emotions. […] They must not hesitate to inflict violence, including murder, if the boss deems it necessary.”2 Mafia rituals, in fact, despite the homoaffectivity of their construction, rely on identity through opposition, they are precisely the opposite of what they are not, namely women or fags.3 The humor of the American LGBTQ+ mobster movies under investigation in this chapter, crime-comedy Friends & Family (2001)4 and mafia rom-com Alto (2015),5 relies on a camping of the films’ straight characters. The queerness and Italianness depicted are connected because they depend on camp—and the comedy of incongruence to which camp adheres—to link them to the mafia characters that make up their narratives. In other words, the Italianness of the mafiosi and their queerness are both performed through an aesthetic and narrative camping. Important for our investigation is not however the originality of these seemingly unusual character and genre combinations, but rather the ways that these films, by highlighting the relationship between queerness and Italianness, reveal that this queerness has always been at the heart of Italian American mob movies. The overtness of these Italian-queer correlations, however, take these representations to a new level, turning what appears to be a comedy of incongruence into, instead, a comedic commentary on the unfounded motivations behind social marginalization. The incorporation of LGBTQ+ characters, and queer plotlines and aesthetics are not innovative to these films; the mafia genre contains an expansive hetero-transgressive lineage. I am not merely referring to gay characters with minor storylines within the larger mafia narrative, as was the case in the Coen brothers’ 1990 neo-noir film Miller’s Crossing, and with Vito Spatafore in the sixth season of The Sopranos.6 As early as the 20s 2  George de Stefano, “A Finook in the Crew,” in The Essential Sopranos Reader, David Laverty et al. (eds), (University of Kentucky Press: Kentucky, 2011), 116. 3  Ibid., 117. 4  Kristen Coury (dir), Family & Friends (2001; New York: Reagent Releasing). 5  Mitch del Monico (dir), Alto (2015; Miami: Shake the Tree). 6  Scholars like George De Stefano have argued the importance of characters like Vito Spatafore for dismantling the compulsory heterosexuality of the mafia genre, but for the purposes of this article characters like Spatafore, and Mink and the Dane in Miller’s Crossing are not main characters and still succumb to the “bury your gays” trope. For more on the queerness of Spatafore in The Sopranos see George De Stefano, “A Finook in the Crew,” in The Essential Sopranos Reader. Eds. David Laverty et. al. (University of Kentucky Press: Kentucky, 2011), 114–126.

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and 30s, as Fred Gardaphé informs us, filmic gangsters were portrayed: “as degenerate and overly feminized men losing their independence in the new capitalist society,” in an effort to showcase the dangers of Italian foreigners.7 Later, more typical displays of gangster toxic masculinity were also matched with equally exaggerated performances of gender play in films like Some Like it Hot (1959).8 Literary representations, like Benedetta in Guysterland (1993) and The Music of the Inferno (1999), which Gardaphé analyzes at length, go even further, challenging “the narrow definitions of masculinity defined by earlier gangster figures.”9 As he explains, “Both novelists use the gangster’s sexuality to draw attention to the absurdity of having the gangster represent an ethnicized version of the iconic John Wayne man.”10 In addition to these disruptive gender and sexuality depictions, viewers may pick up on a queer aesthetic sensibility in many mafia narratives, as in the 1976 all-kid casted musical mafia spoof Bugsy Malone, or the camp aesthetics of the more recent reality TV show Mob Wives (2011–2016). As Jacqueline Reich and Fatima Karim point out: “Mob Wives is also selling a reappropriation of the Italian American mafiosa through performance, camp, and exaggeration.”11 The performance of their identities is heavily reliant on an over-the-topness that evidences gender as artifice; an artifice which for them is dependent on the perfect alchemy of power, money, and mafiosità—one need only look at their plastic surgery (Big Ang’s infamous lips, for example) or their love of fur coats. The ridiculousness of this exaggerated performance and aesthetic is a driving narrative force of the two films analyzed in this chapter. Both Friends & Family and Alto find comedy by placing various mafia archetypes—the hit man, the Don, the dimwitted muscly henchmen, and so on—within a camp context. We have seen above that queerness and hetero-variance have had a historic place in the mafia genre, likewise the  Fred Gardaphé, From Wiseguys to Wise Men, (New York: Routledge, 2006), 4.  Bayman briefly references this performative gender play in: Louis Bayman, “Family Therapy: Harold Ramis’s Analyze This and the Evolution of the Gangster Genre,” in Mafia Movies: A Reader, Dana Renga (ed), (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019), 132–137. 9  Gardaphé. From Wiseguys to Wise Men, 90. 10  Ibid. 11  Jacqueline Reich and Fatima Karim, “Mob Wives: Exploitation or Empowerment?,” in Mafia Movies: A Reader, Dana Renga (ed), (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2019), 164. 7 8

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mutation of the genre—and an accompanying blending with more classically queer formats—is not a novel phenomenon. Indeed, the mafia genre has undergone enormous transformation since the early days of its success in Hollywood. The works under investigation here seem to exemplify the developments mapped out by Louis Bayman in his analysis of Analyze This (1999). Bayman uses Thomas Schatz’s elaboration of genre mutation to explain that: “a genre typically develops through various phases: convention turns to cliché and is then revised until familiarity eventually breeds the contempt of parody.”12 Bayman then goes on to argue that Analyze This uses pastiche to expand the genre and redefine the archetypical characteristics of its characters.13 This parody of the genre and/or its characters has often been used in conjunction with LGBTQ+ narratives or characters, whether they be a very minor characters like Spike’s “dyke” mother in Spike from Bensonhurst (1988), or more central protagonists and narratives, as is the case in the shorts The Gay Mafia: A Musical (2020), The Pink Mafia (2006), and the promo/short The Brothers Sinclair (2011). Like these other works, Friends & Family and Alto use these mafia archetypes though neither necessarily claim the mafia genre as main determinant of their structural form. And what further distinguishes these two works from other gay mafia parodies is their Italian American gay protagonists, and the importance of this cultural identity for the films’ characters and narratives.

Friends & Family Kristen Coury’s 2001 crime-comedy Friends & Family is about gay mafia assassins Stephen and Danny, and the misadventures that ensue when they attempt to keep their profession a secret from Stephen’s parents. To convince Mr. and Mrs. Torcelli that Stephen and Danny are caterers and not mafia assassins, mob boss Don Patrizzi and his henchmen decide to host an engagement party for Patrizzi’s daughter Jenny, combine it with Mr. Torcelli’s birthday party, and have Stephen and Danny pretend to cater the grand affair. Ridiculousness follows, not only because Jenny Patrizzi persuades the oafish henchmen that they must “play gay” to convince the  Louis Bayman, “Family Therapy,” 132.  As Bayman explains: “Analyze This served as a moment when the self-consciousness of pastiche indicated not exhaustion but rather new directions for the genre” (Bayman, “Family Therapy,” 132). 12 13

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Torcellis that the catering service is legitimately run by their son and his partner, but also because Jenny’s fiancé’s adoptive parents are part of an anti-government militia that decides this party is the perfect opportunity to commence their plot to destroy the government. The comedic structure at the foundation of much of the film follows one basic principle: take a stereotype, name it, and prove the opposite. For example, when Jenny, the daughter of mafia boss Patrizzi, introduces her boyfriend to the family for the first time she says to him “you have to worry about Stephen and Danny.” To which he replies, “why, you think they’ll make a pass at me?” playing on the common homophobic misconception that lesbians and gays like all people of their gender. The joke then follows in her reply: “No, they’ll kill you if they don’t think you’re treating me right.” It’s funny because it’s unexpected, because the presumed spectator wouldn’t think that gay men can be violent, or perhaps “manly.” Here and throughout the film the contradiction between our expectations of the gender presentations of mobsters and gay men and those presented to us prove an unending source of comedic material. The very premise of the film itself relies on the comedic structures of incongruity humor, as Leon Rappoport explains: “What the incongruity theory of humor boils down to is our apparently innate tendency to be amused by scenes that are clearly absurd or contradictory;”14 and here, the stereotype-based character expectation (reinforced by the aesthetics and overall structures of the film) is incongruous to the actual characters being presented to us. What we have is a building of artifice upon artifice created by a camping of mafiosi archetypes and a masculinizing (or mafiatizing?) of gayness, all in the service of a humor of incongruity.15 When it comes to the main characters Stephen and Danny, the incongruity of their lived experience works in two directions. On the one hand they do not “fit the profile” of hitmen, as viewers might expect the characters to be ruthless heterosexual muscly sociopathic killers, but Stephen and Danny are a slim, well-dressed, friendly, and seemingly caring couple.  Leon Rappoport. Punchlines (Connecticut: Praeger Publishers, 2005), 17.  I am using archetype to signify a character “form,” a base set of traits and qualities from which to draw when following formulaic mafia genre character depictions; stereotype, to the contrary, is being used to signify a set of generalizing traits that reductively qualify groups of people—generally minorities—in monolithic and often derogatory ways. While mafia representations have historically been used to stereotype Italians and Italian Americans, as the mafia films developed the characters themselves became cinematic archetypes and as such are being read here as fictional archetypes of the mafia movie genre. 14 15

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On the other hand, their sexual orientation is equally incongruous because stereotypical gay men are portrayed as effusive, effeminate, affectionate characters interested in fashion, hair, and other feminine roles and professions, certainly not vendetta, and guns. The other gay characters who do embody these gay stereotypes further aid in visually emphasizing Stephen and Danny’s incongruity with respect to the “gay lifestyle.” The incongruity humor we find in the presentation of their sexual orientation does not serve, however, to make us think critically about our preconceived notions of sexual identity, if anything it is, in some respect, undermined by the fact that Stephen and Danny themselves admit that their choice of profession may in fact be due to some latent internalized homophobia; a notion reinforced by their friend Richard who dismisses their machismo as self-loathing. We might say that the film’s play against stereotypes, for comedic end does not necessarily subvert or dismantle these notions at the root of the stereotypes themselves. Thus, while reliant on a lack of character depth—which we will soon see—the film seems to ultimately double down on the depthless stereotypes on which it depends. The core of the film’s narrative, is, indeed, reliant on the superficiality of the characters themselves, or, more specifically on the ways that both archetypical characters (the mob thugs) and stereotypical characters (gay men) are typified by performance and artifice. As Stephen and Danny prepare for the festivities they are pretending to cater, the mafiosi—who will work the event as part of the catering staff—all agree that they must pretend to be gay, because a catering company in Manhattan run by two gay guys would obviously exclusively employ gay men. Here, as the henchmen learn to be gay the mafia archetype seemingly expands or, as Bayman discusses, what gets revealed is “the underlying similarity beneath a surface opposition,” as the archetypal mafia thug, the dumb brute, becomes compounded with gay stereotypes during the process of this gay schooling.16 The gay school, taught by Stephen and Danny’s flamboyant friend Richard,17 allows its students, and viewers, to explore the embodied archive of gay experience through a crash course on effeminate gender performance, subculturally coded speech, opulent outfits, and gay icons and culture, from Judy Garland to Ellen De Generis, to J. Edgar Hoover,  Bayman, “Family Therapy,” 134.  The character Richard Grayson is played by out actor Edward Hibbert, best known to American audiences for his role as openly gay food critic Gil Chesterton on the NBC primetime sitcom Frasier (1993–2004). 16 17

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to Wishbone the dog; it’s funny because it’s unexpected, because it seems incongruous to see these men willingly and openly attempt to play gay. When it comes time to put their newfound gayness to the test, they spend the evening hitting on the guests at the party and making sexual innuendos; their gayness is performed by exuding sexuality and sexual desire toward everything and everyone, while donning colorful silky shirts. What comes to light here is the way that this very narrative premise is dependent on identity as performative praxis. As Judith Butler notes: “acts, gestures, and desire produce the effect of an internal core or substance, but produce this on the surface of the body… such acts, gestures, enactments, generally construed, are performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means.”18 Understanding identity as performance, we may say that when Don Patrizzi’s henchmen enact the queer connotative codes and performative expressions, they become gay. Camp, as Susan Sontag elaborates, is dependent on character-as-artifice, and “being-as-playing-a-role.”19 Thus, the ease with which these mafiosi can camp themselves into queerness is in part dependent on the superficiality of archetypal characters; both mafia and camp characters rely on the artifice of the archetype, the lack of individuality or development needed for a character constructed through performance-­tropes. The gangsters move easily into these new embodied gay practices and continue them long after the narrative no longer necessitates their performance. When, for example, one of the mobsters says “after a while I felt like I was the purple teletubby,” Richard Grayson responds, “As if a gay man would ever have a body like that!” Upset, the mobster asks: “You think I’m fat?” But as Grayson walks away, his mafia buddy responds in a playful gayification of the popular idiom, “if the pump fits.” To which the mafioso retorts, “Bitch!” What’s clear in this pithy dialogue is that gayness remains within these gangsters, and thus the mafioso archetype remains camped through the rest of the film. Moe Meyer performs insightful intellectual labor to reestablish the connection between camp and queerness, arguing that “broadly defined, Camp refers to  Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990), 185.  Susan Sontag, Notes on Camp, (London: Penguin Modern, 2018), note 10. Sontag’s work on camp remains extremely influential though many—like Moe Meyer and Jack Babuscio, both cited in this work, among others—have worked to undo the queer-stripping her work has performed on the genre and aesthetic. 18 19

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strategies and tactics of queer parody.”20 Here the queer parody of mafia characters is reliant on the appropriation of queer performance when what is expected is a hypermacho exaggeration of heteronormativity. What gets accomplished is two-fold: on the one hand queer visibility enters a space wherein it is not a part of the codified generic standards—in other words, the contemporary generic standards of mafia films rely on hyperbolic straightness, so by camping the genre space is made for queerness; on the other hand the ease with which these characters are camped because of the artificiality of their personae challenges the solidity of the “original” mafioso archetype upon which the queer parody plays. In examining the humor behind this performative-based narrative, we realize that the entirety of the incongruity has been in essence just camp. This, in fact, is precisely what Jack Babuscio emphasizes in “The Cinema of Camp (AKA Camp and the Gay Sensibility)” when he discusses the relationship between camp and irony: “Camp is ironic insofar as an incongruous contrast can be drawn between an individual/thing and its context/association.”21 Camp, as queer parody functions because the social expectation of popular genres relies on heteronormativity, and queerness is incongruous to contemporary normative culture. But, as we have begun to explore, the Italian American hyper masculinity depicted by these mafia figures, is in fact, quite close to its hyper-feminized opposite, thus camp actually reveals a queerness that has always lied within the genre. In 1921 Italian literary critic Giuseppe Prezzolini, in his work Codice della vita italiana separates Italians into the categories of fessi (fools) and furbi (wise guys), noting that fessi have principles, while furbi have goals.22 While fessi aren’t necessarily unintelligent, they walk through life foolishly; their principled natures are, for all intents and purposes, unprofitable. In describing the prevalence of masculinity-messaging within Italian American families, Richard Gambino notes that the fesso, while bound by principles of goodness, brought destruction to his family.23 The archetype of the fool is one of the classic character tropes of Italian and Italian American ­comedy. Spectators find fools funny because of the feeling of superiority they bring  Moe Meyer, The Politics and Poetics of Camp, (New York: Routledge, 1994), 143.  Jack Babuscio, “The Cinema of Camp (AKA Camp and the Gay Sensibility)” in Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: A Reader, Fabio Cleto ed. (Edinburg: Edinburg University Press, 1994), 119. 22  Giuseppe Prezzolini, Il codice della vita italiana, (La voce: Firenze, 1921), 28. 23  Richard Gambino, Blood of My Blood: The Dilemma of the Italian Americans, (Toronto: Guernica, 2000). 20 21

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them; Rappoport reminds us: “at the most basic level, an immediate sense of superiority is presumably what triggers our laughter when we see someone slip on a banana peel or clowns tripping over their feet and other kinds of slapstick humor.”24 In the 30s the character of the fesso was useful to American media because it provided a clear distinction between the Italian foreigner and the American ideal. Jonathan Cavallero explains that the fesso, and the gangster, were used to depict the challenges and threats against “the American Dream and the protestant success ethic;”25 “[t]he fesso’s close proximity to the gangster has allowed critics to ignore his unique characteristics, as the challenges the two characters posed to American ideals were quite similar.”26 Don Patrizzi’s family is indeed made up of these fessi, these stupid but forceful brutes whose job is to provide the brawn to back the brains of Don Patrizzi. The fact that the fessi undergo this queer transformation and perform sissyness to keep Stephen and Danny’s secret, reveals an interesting correlation between the gay sissy and the Italian fool. In his foundational work The Celluloid Closet, Vito Russo explains that: “Early sissies were yardsticks for measuring the virility of the men around them. In almost all American films, from comedies to romantic dramas, working class American men are portrayed as much more valuable and certainly more virile than the rich, effete dandies of Europe, who in spite of their success with women are seen as essentially weak and helpless in a real man’s world.”27 We see this same devalued effeminacy in Friends & Family especially when it comes to Patrizzi’s two biological sons Vito and Frankie, who are more interested in cooking, fashion, and interior design than in the family business. The sub-narrative of these characters revolves specifically around trying to get the family to accept their “feminine” career preferences. Interestingly, Danny and Stephen, more than anyone, are the ones to berate them for their talents and interests. When Frankie is seen sewing for example, Stephen remarks: “you’re supposed to be managing the club […] You’re in the back sewing?! What would your kids say if they saw you?” We might even say that their self-emasculation makes them the “yardstick sissies” Vito Russo was talking about. Stephen and  Rappoport, Punchlines, 15.  Jonathan Cavallero and George Plasketes, “Gangsters, Fessos, Tricksters, and Sopranos: The Historical Roots of Italian American Stereotype Anxiety,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 32 (2004), 54–55. 26  Ibid., 55. 27  Russo, The Celluloid Closet, (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), 16. 24 25

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Danny are compared to Don Patrizzi’s sons more than any of the other mafiosi, and as such, Vito and Frankie’s effeminacy proves the virility of Stephen and Danny. While they can’t take over the family business because they aren’t Sicilian, the brains and brutality of the gay assassins make them more useful than Patrizzi’s hetero-sissy sons. Both here and historically, the fesso and the sissy are destined for failure, one because his goodness and brute force (at least in this gangster iteration) are not enough for him to succeed on his own, and the other because dandies lack the masculine social intelligence for American success. In Cavallero’s elaboration of the fesso, he investigates the trajectory of the character as it separates from the gangster, and in doing so reveals a shift toward an idiocy that is indeed more effeminate. Specifically referring to the Tontelli and Beddini characters in The Gay Divorcee and Top Hat respectively, he remarks, “the films paint both characters as excessively feminine with the use of make-up, wardrobe, and Rhodes’s gestures and movements.”28 Both fesso iterations rely heavily on a stereotypical idea of Italianness as pitted against or antithetical to Americanness, a connection reinforced by the threatening effeminacy of Hollywood star and Italian “Latin lover” Rudolph Valentino.29 Thus the fesso-thug to fesso-sissy mutation in Family & Friends mirrors the mediatic transformation of the archetype in American film more broadly. There are other convergences between gay and mafioso culture that are woven through the narrative, convergences that seem to rely on the mafia’s proximity to representations of Italianness. Both, for example, seem to involve a certain kind of cosmopolitanism. When it comes to the depiction of Stephen and Danny’s gayness, though Stephen’s mother seems to completely accept her son’s sexuality, she expresses certain confusion about his lifestyle. When Stephen and Danny attempt to hide their guns from Stephen’s parents with the help of their maid, and his mother immediately assumes they are having sex as their maid looks on, Mrs. Torcelli dismisses the whole event by saying that there are urban cultural behaviors that she  Cavallero, “Gangsters, Fessos, Tricksters,” 57.  Rudolph Valentino, nicknamed “The Latin Lover,” was an Italian film star working in Hollywood during the Silent Film Era. While Valentino’s sexuality remains ambiguous, he is considered a gay icon by many because of the atypical effeminacy of his gender presentation, his flamboyant clothing, and not least his marriage to two known lesbians. For more on Valentino, and specifically the intersections of his threatening effeminacy and ethnicity see Gaylyn Studlar’s “Discourses of Gender and Ethnicity: the Construction and De(con)struction of Rudolph Valentino as Other,” in Film Criticism 13.2 (1989), 18–35. 28 29

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just couldn’t understand. Later, when they are at the birthday party, Mrs. Torcelli thinks that the performer singing at the event is a drag queen, and when she finds out she isn’t she does not hide her disappointment “plain old women I can see in Indiana, oh well!” Thus, throughout the film gay culture is expressed through expectations of urbanity. Like the portrayal of gayness, the portrayal of Italianness is also heightened by the urban context, and this visibility in many ways brings gay and Italian cosmopolitanism together. The lines between the two identities are blurred, for example, when Stephen and Danny go to the opera to demand that one of the singers pay back some overdue debts. While the opera singer himself, upon realizing that the two have come to collect for Don Patrizzi, manages to get in a few homophobic remarks: “this is what Patrizzi sends me, a couple of fairies in diapers?!” there is a very visible overlap in the communities participating in this cultural event: both Italians and gays are there en masse to celebrate and appreciate the opera, thus, while Stephen and Danny seem to attend the opera with their gay friends, they leave to perform their work duties during intermission, and run into several of their affiliates while attending. We might say that both groups can best live out the fullest extent of their identity within a cosmopolitan environment. Let us consider the fact that though Stephen and Danny are both Italian Americans—as their last names Torcelli and Russo, respectively, would suggest—there is a stark contrast between the ways that the mafiosi family express their Italian heritage and the non-existent ways the Torcellis do. When Stephen says “to my father, buon compleanno,” during his toast at his father’s birthday celebration, more than an expression of love toward his Italian American father it reads as a verbal affirmation of the ties between the “family” and his family, precisely because the socio-cultural and linguistic expressions of Italianness in the film have been presented to us exclusively through Don Patrizzi’s family. The camping of the mafia characters works because of the assumed compulsory heterosexuality of the mafia genre and its archetypes. Camping plays with this expectation, it takes the archetype-as-artifice and replaces it with queer parody, which itself is also dependent on the superficiality of character. The seeming incongruence on which this parody relies, however, reveals a congruence between these minority groups. Throughout the film, however, Stephen and Danny act in opposition to the traits that unite these minority groups: they are not effeminate, and as such are speculated to have internalized homophobia, and their links to Italianness are

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completely dependent upon their relationship to the mafia family. Ultimately, the proximity between performances of Italianness and Italian culture, and gay aesthetic and gay culture is what provides the real stage for the ultimate campy irony, namely the incongruence between Stephen and Danny and the two groups of which they are a part. It’s a gay mafia movie, but the gay Italian American protagonists remain the least gay, least Italian part about it.

Alto Unlike in Family & Friends, the protagonists of Mitch del Monico’s 2015 rom-com Alto live and breathe the intersections between their mafia affiliations and their Italian American identities openly and constantly. The film follows the life of Italian American singer Francesca (“Frankie”) Del Vecchio who attempts to reclaim her Italian roots while rejecting the wildly popular diegetic Italian American reality show Mob Hit. Her life turns upside-down when she and fellow bandmates find a dead body in the trunk of the car they have rented for a gig. The subsequent events open her eyes to her neighborhood’s mafioso underbelly, and her newfound sexuality which just so happen to go hand-in-hand since her love interest Nicolette is the local mafia boss Caesar’s daughter. While in Friends & Family incongruence was used as a comedic mechanism, here it provokes discomfort and ostracization when the cultural expectations of the Italian American community clash with the sexual awakening of the protagonist. The film’s humor is rooted not in this incongruence, but in a similarity of exaggeration. The exaggeration of the machismo represented by the mafiosi is paired with equally exaggerated performances of Italianness that in many ways mirror the performative queer parody of camp, though—as was also true in Friends & Family—not in relation to the sexual orientation of the main character—even if arguments might be made that Nicolette’s open promiscuity clearly matches the bravado of her Italianness (Fig. 10.1). The connections between the Italian-as-camp and queer-as-camp portrayals are indeed similar to those in Family & Friends. From Frankie’s father blasting Dean Martin on a portable cassette tape that he brings into his convertible, the performative grieving of the dead man’s family at the funeral, the large harp in Nicolette’s bedroom, to the bluntness of the way they intermingle discussions of sex, clothing, and Catholicism, they

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Fig. 10.1  Two women with long dark hair play the harp while intimately embracing. (© Alto the Movie, LLC photo credit: Valentina Caniglia, AIC IMAGO, director: Mitch del Monico, producer: Toni D’Antonio)

perform a camp that, as Chuck Kleinhans explains, “celebrates casual excess through a deliberately crude and offensive content.”30 The campy excess of Italian American culture is precisely what confirms the link between Italianness and the mafia. The more flamboyantly mafiosi the characters are, the more Italian they will be considered. This Italian-­ mafia correlation is made at the very beginning of the film when Frankie is upset that no one came to her Italian Pizzica dance class; her sister Heather blames the film’s diegetic reality television series Mob Hit. Heather follows this remark with, “Watch and learn how to sell Italian culture.” Thus, the lived experience and cultural expectations of Italianness are equated with mafia culture and a sort of “over-the-top” commodity capitalism. This reinforces what Bruce LaBruce underscores in his article “Notes on Camp—and Anti-Camp” when he remarks: “Camp is now for the masses. It’s a sensibility that has been appropriated by the mainstream, commodified, turned into a fetish, and exploited by a hyper-capitalist system.”31 30  Chuck Kleinhans, “Taking Out the Trash: Camp and the Politics of Parody,” in The Politics and Poetics of Camp, ed. Moe Meyer (NY and London: Routledge, 1994), 157. 31  Bruce LaBruce, “Notes on Camp—and Anti-Camp,” in The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide Vol 21, 2 (2014): 11.

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Camp—and all the excess implicit within it—which has now expanded to include subcategories such as “Bad Straight Camp” of which many Italian American and mafia films and shows (such as Mob Wives and The Jersey Shore, to name two that he cites) are a part, is now being reunited with its queer origins. The link between Italian Americanness and mafia life is not only presented through exaggerated cultural markers, but also through more subtle narrative events. Frankie, for example, acknowledges to Nicolette (her love interest) that her desire to preserve her Italian heritage came after her (mafioso-but-she-doesn’t-know-it) dad left. It is no coincidence that her now-single mother rejects many of those stereotypical traits that an Italian mother would demonstrate, such as refusing to insist that Frankie eat when she says she isn’t hungry, remarking “I know you’re trying to find your roots and all that, but this Italian mother is tired.” She is as tired of cooking as she was of being involved with her mafioso ex-husband, and in leaving him she sheds the cultural markers of her Italianness. In fact, not only does she no longer cook the lasagna that Frankie waxes nostalgic about, she even sleeps with her Japanese food instructor. All this excess, this campiness, and the Italian-mafia connection it creates are considered positive traits and behaviors throughout the film. Italian American gender stereotypes, and the Italianness of the mafioso lifestyle are used as points of attraction for lesbian couple Frankie and Nicolette. It is through the performance of these Italian/Italian American traditions and expectations that the couple manage to express their love for one another to each other and their respective families. Frankie, in searching for her roots and in finding her sexuality (although it is never made clear how she identifies), finds in Nicolette the very same traits that her mom now rejects; viewers begin to make this connection when, shortly after Frankie’s mother refuses to cook for her, she and Nicolette are hanging out. When Frankie says that she isn’t hungry, Nicolette replies, “whatever I fixed a meal you could choke Caesar on,” and feeds her anyway (Fig. 10.2). Furthermore, Frankie explains her fascination with Nicolette by remarking that she is everything that she herself is not, namely, “fun, fiery, free, speaks Italian, cooks Italian, and she might even be in the mafia.” The ambiguity of this desire continues unresolved throughout the film, and thus we will never know if she is attracted to Nicolette because she wants her, wants to be her, or because she is missing the Italian mother figure she lost when her parents split up. The nurturing and satisfaction that Frankie

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Fig. 10.2  Two white women with long dark hair and similar floral print tops sit at a table; one is about to take a bite of a pastry while the other looks on smiling. (© Alto the Movie, LLC photo credit: Valentina Caniglia, AIC IMAGO, director: Mitch del Monico, producer: Toni D’Antonio)

finds through food reveal what she has lost in her parents’ divorce, reaffirm her affections for Nicolette, and confirm (for us and for herself) that she and her current fiancé Tony should not be together. Frankie, indeed, seeks an authenticity she isn’t getting from Tony, whose frozen lasagnas— which he plans on turning into a frozen food empire—not only pale in comparison to Nicolette’s Caesar-killing capacities, but even make her physically ill. From the beginning of the film Frankie shows an interest in the Italian language and considers it indicative of her cultural (and personal) failings. This is played out, for example, in a series of linguistic miscommunications between Frankie and her sister Heather, like when Heather says “in culo alla balena” to her sister wishing her luck and Frankie responds, “and I’m supposed to know what that means?” or when Heather needs her sister to explain that Italian confetti are essentially what Americans call Jordan Almonds, and she responds, “we are so not Italian.” Nicolette, on the other hand, not only cooks but speaks Italian as well, which for Frankie proves an element of both cultural and sexual seduction. Indeed, her desire for Nicolette and her rejection of her fiancé are solidified when,

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after spending time with Nicolette, she asks her boyfriend to speak to her in Italian and he replies: “you’re not serious, are you?.” Nicolette’s language, food, and culture motivate Frankie to distance herself from Tony and his frozen lasagnas which, she argues, “taste like feet” and should “be fresh, hot, steamy,” in essence more like Nicolette and her delicious stuffed shells. While all these examples seem to confirm the desirability of Italian traits and culture, and the proximity between mafia affiliation and Italianness, it is made clear repeatedly that Italian ethnicity and homosexuality do not mix. We see the beginnings of Frankie’s sexual struggles as things start getting more serious between Nicolette and Frankie and they get physically intimate. Frankie, who has still not come clean to her fiancé who calls in the middle of their make out session, begins to question everything: “What are we doing? We can’t do this? My god I had cake with the priest and the Jesus statue. I’m not gay, this isn’t how my life is supposed to be. This is not me, I can’t be who everyone, who you, and my dad, and your dad, oh my god, and Tony, I can’t be who you all want me to be, I’m sorry.” It is precisely here that the intersectionality of her identity comes to the fore: She does not know how to deal with her newfound mafia involvement and thus can’t be who her father and Nicolette’s father want; she can’t be the girlfriend and future Italian wife that Tony expects; and she has doubts about her sexual orientation when she is with Nicolette. All these identities relate in some way to her Italianness, but they don’t seem to be able to comfortably fit together precisely because of implied heteronormative expectations. This Italian cultural normativity is explicitly expressed by Tony’s parents Guglielmo and Lina, who talk to the engaged couple about how they will take over the family business: Guglielmo Cappelletti: Mannaggia this business. You’ll see when you and Tony run it. Lina Cappelletti: Hey, let them get married first. This is the most beautiful time for you. This, and when you get pregnant. Frankie: I think we’re going to wait. Lina and Guglielmo: Nah no no no. Lina: That’s what they all say. No. When you are a good Catholic, these things, they just come. Guglielmo: You push. Lina: Alright, alright alright. We’re just so happy.

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Lina: When we do have kids, I want them to know their culture. Guglielmo: This girl’s gonna make such a good Italian wife. Viva l’Italia. Tony: Hey Pop the whole world isn’t Italia Italia Italia. Frankie: Leave him alone. Tony: Hey you won’t make a good Italian wife if you disagree with me. Frankie: Please if that’s the case I won’t make a good Italian wife period. This brief dialogue maps out the family trajectory awaiting Tony and Frankie: they will get married, run the family business together, and Frankie will get pregnant shortly thereafter because Catholics do not believe in birth control. She is to learn to be a good Italian wife, which includes not only being a good partner, having children, and working to support them, but also listening to her husband, and teaching their children the foundations of Italianness. The Italian cultural expectations reinforce normativity; thus it should be no surprise that when Frankie and Nicolette’s relationship is made public it is problematic, and ultimately the audience experiences the difficulty of their lesbian relationship from the perspective of all the other characters (Fig. 10.3). Tony, for example, remarks: “A girl just told you she loved you. What’s wrong with her?” Whereas Frankie’s mother Sofia comments: “This is what I get for getting pregnant before I was married. […] What did I do to deserve this?” She then turns to Frankie’s father and adds: “This is your fault.” Her sister Heather puts an optimistic spin on this difficult situation: “I mean, are you really gay? I mean it’s cool ‘cuz now I can screw up as much as I want.” While Nicolette’s father takes a similar stance: “You wanna go to Italy, do it, but do you think she’s [Nicolette’s mother] going to want a finook32 for a daughter?” Each reaction is, in its own way, wrapped in displeasure, blame, and rejection, and their overall disapproval is compounded by passing micro-aggressive comments like those of Frankie’s mom when she walks into Nicolette’s kitchen and remarks: “Don’t you lesbians ever wear bras?” 32  Finook is an Italian-Americanization of the Italian word finocchio which is a derogatory term primarily used against gay men.

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Fig. 10.3  Three white people with dark hair stand side by side, unsmiling, facing us; on the left is a young woman in a red leather jacket, center is a middle-aged woman in dark brown leather, and to the right is a young man in tan leather. (© Alto the Movie, LLC photo credit: Valentina Caniglia, AIC IMAGO, director: Mitch del Monico, producer: Toni D’Antonio)

It is the mafiosi, however, whose response proves surprising. More open to and seemingly already aware of Nicolette’s sexual orientation, the mafiosi end up ushering the couple back into acceptance, possibly because of their similarly marginalized cultural position. The commonalities between the life of a mobster and the life of a lesbian are then reinforced by Caesar who, upon finding out about Nicolette remarks: “my daughter she’s got a problem with my lifestyle, MY LIFESTYLE, now I find out she’s got a lifestyle too.” Later Frankie’s mobster father Mike creates a true pathway of acceptance by once again verbalizing the similarities between them: Mike: It’s hard not to feel what you’re feeling. Frankie: What do you know about it? Mike: Not much. Enough to know the more you try and hide something the worse it is when it comes out. Frankie: I’m never going to forgive you. Mike: I’m never going to stop loving you no matter what.

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Just as with Friends & Family, the film plays with the notions of the two “coming outs,” but more than a humorous swapping of one coming out for another, as is the case in Coury’s film, here we have a relational understanding of the two lifestyles based on their positionality within Italian American culture. Through a comparison with the mafiosi, Frankie and Nicolette’s sexuality is put into perspective and ultimately deemed palatable: Sofia: You’re sleeping with my daughter?! It’s against the church. Caesar: That’s right. Frankie: Last time I checked the commandments this wasn’t even in the top ten so if we wanna talk about sinning, fine, let’s all confess… you first… Caesar: She’s got a point. Mike: Hey, at least they’re both Italian right?! Tony: I’m Italian. Sofia: And she’s a good cook. In terms of sinning, it would seem, they all have baggage they’ve been storing in their respective closets, and at the end of the day, for Frankie’s family, Nicolette satisfies the two main requirements of a woman: that she be Italian, and that she be a good cook. Thus, Italianness increases as proximity to mafia culture increases, and while the filmic portrayal of Italian culture is anti-gay, its acceptance is achieved through a relational similarity to mob experience. The similarity between the mafiosi and the gay characters—as we saw in Friends & Family through a camping of the mafiosi—is presented by their proximity to secrecy, while the campiness is presented as an outward demonstration of Italian culture. Ultimately, the Italian-LGBTQ connection exists as aesthetic subtext throughout the film, but it takes the relational third element of the mafia to bring the two identities together.

Flamboyant Finooks and Excessive Italians When Frankie finally tells Tony she doesn’t want to marry him she says: “you’re my family Tony, but part of family is knowing what to keep and what to leave behind.” Each piece, the mafiosi, the Italian Americans, and the lesbians, end up fitting together in love and discomfort as they all negotiate what can happen when none of it gets left out, when all the

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closets get emptied. This discomfort not only creates the foundations of the incongruence driving the movie, but it also mirrors another discomfort, namely the legacies of historical discomfort with Italians in American media. While these parodic mafia portrayals do not depict Italian Americans as particularly dangerous or threatening, we must acknowledge that the historic positionality of Italians as threats to normative Protestant white ethics paved the way for the tropes and stereotypes at the base of the Hollywood mafia genre. Mafia archetypes derived from Italian stereotypes, stereotypes often used to highlight and perpetuate notions of Protestant superiority.33 The fesso, both in his brutish and effeminate iteration, fulfilled the same purpose for American audiences; inserting the fesso in comedies worked as a comedic device rooted in feelings of superiority. Leon Rappoport explains that laughter rooted in superiority is evoked “as an expression of pleasure at feeling superior to those who appear uglier, stupider, or more unfortunate than ourselves” he then goes on to specify that “people who are uncertain about their superior position or feel a bit guilty about it are the ones most likely to enjoy witnessing the embarrassment or humiliation of others who are supposed to be inferior to them” as is the case between the dominant Protestant majority and the Italian immigrant minority.34 The fesso’s proximity to the gangster and the sissy’s proximity to the fesso create a direct connection between the gangster and the sissy, a connection reinforced by their joint overlaps with representations of Italianness in American media, representations that have historically been shaped by notions of queerness. John Champagne has discussed the queerness of Italian (and we would argue Italian American) men specifically with regard to their relationship to melodrama, he says: Perhaps the most unique characteristic of Italian masculinity is its polymorphous linking of sex and gender, the excesses ascribed to Italian men crisscrossing masculine and feminine, homosexual and heterosexual […] Throughout much of his history, the Italian man has appeared downright ‘queer’—at least when compared to his Northern European/US counterpart.35 33  For more on demeaning depictions of Italians in the service of maintaining Protestant superiority see Jonathan Cavallero, “Gangsters, Fessos, Tricksters, and Sopranos.” 34  Rappoport, Punchlines, 15–16. 35  John Champagne, Italian Masculinity as Queer Melodrama, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 4–5.

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These connections reveal that, as contradictory as it may seem given that contemporary notions of mafiosi are deeply rooted in excessive displays of heteromachismo, media depictions of mafiosi and other Italian American characters have never actually strayed too far from representations of feared and marginalized LGBTQIA+ communities. The interplay between the intersectional identities portrayed, reveals the fragility of ethnic expectation and the legacies of genderqueer subtext often at the heart of exaggerated gender performance and Italian American whiteness.36 In both the films analyzed in this chapter, there seems to be comedic reliance on the secrecy and nefariousness of the activities of gangster life and gayness, but what truly manages to bring them together is a similar propensity for aesthetics and attitudes of excess. Camp is the driving connector between these two cultures, and thus a comedy of incongruity exposes deep rooted similarities between seemingly divergent lifestyles. You need people like me so you can point your fuckin fingers and say ‘that’s the bad guy.’ —Tony Montana, Scarface

Works Cited Alto. Directed by Mitch del Monico. USA: Shake the Tree, 2015. Babuscio, Jack. “The Cinema of Camp (AKA Camp and the Gay Sensibility)” In Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: A Reader, edited by Fabio Cleto, 117–136. Edinburg: Edinburg University Press, 1994. Bayman, Louis. “Family Therapy: Harold Ramis’s Analyze This and the Evolution of the Gangster Genre,” In Mafia Movies: A Reader, edited by Dana Renga, 132–137. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge, 1990. Cavallero, Jonathan and George Plasketes. “Gangsters, Fessos, Tricksters, and Sopranos: The Historical Roots of Italian American Stereotype Anxiety.” Journal of Popular Film and Television 32 (2004): 50–63. Champagne, John. Italian Masculinity as Queer Melodrama. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 36  In Camp TV: Trans Gender Queer Sitcom History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), Quinlan Miller, taking the expression “nonethnic-ethnic” from Phil Rosenthal’s You’re Lucky You’re Funny, elaborates on the ways that Italians and Jews embodied a safe white nonethnic ethnicity upon which transgressive campy gender play could provide sitcom humor as positioned against WASP notions of sex and gender propriety and expectation.

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De Stefano, George. “A ‘Finook’ in the crew: Vito Spatafore, The Sopranos, and the queering of the Mafia genre” In The Essential Sopranos Reader, edited by David Laverly, Douglas L. Howard and Paul Levinson, 114–126. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2011. Family & Friends. Directed by Kristen Coury. USA: Regent Releasing, 2001. Gambino, Richard. Blood of My Blood: The Dilemma of the Italian Americans. Toronto: Guernica, 2000. Gardaphé, Fred. From Wiseguys to Wise Men. New York: Routledge, 2006. Kleinhans, Chuck. “Taking Out the Trash: Camp and the Politics of Parody” In The Politics and Poetics of Camp, edited by Moe Meyer, 182–201. New York: Routledge, 1994. LaBruce, Bruce. “Notes on Camp—and Anti-Camp.” In The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide Vol 21, Issue 2 (2014): 10–13. Meyer, Moe. The Politics and Poetics of Camp. New York: Routledge, 1994. Prezzolini, Giuseppe. Il codice della vita italiana. La voce: Firenze, 1921. Accessed at: https://alpinigenovaquarto.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/giuseppe-­ prezzolini-­codice-­della-­vita-­italiana-­1921.pdf Rappoport, Leon. Punchlines. Connecticut: Praeger Publishers, 2005. Reich, Jacqueline and Fatima Karim. “Mob Wives: Exploitation or Empowerment?” Mafia Movies: A Reader, edited by Dana Renga, 163–167. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019. Russo, Vito. The Celluloid Closet. New York: HarperCollins, 1995. Sontag, Susan. Notes on Camp. London: Penguin Modern, 2018.

CHAPTER 11

Spotlight: Mitch Del Monico Mitch del Monico

I came out to my Italian American family as transgender while making a movie with the tagline: “Two girls. One gun. The Mob. Because coming out to family is hard, but coming out to FAMILY is funny.” I’ve had several conversations and even presented at an Italian American Studies Association Conference about the whys and the ways I chose to include the Mafia, with its outsized ability to shape mainstream views of Italian Americans, but truthfully, I had enough on my cultural radar just making a film that featured two Italian American women who fell in love, a film that was “too ethnic” for some and “not gay enough” for others. For all the concern I had about the film finding an audience, I smiled every time an older Italian American man looked at me with glistening eyes and expressed just how much I’d “nailed it.” Perhaps their genuine surprise meant they hadn’t expected to see themselves represented in a movie, but for me, that was inevitable: these were the men who—without their even knowing it—served as role models throughout my youth. Not, however, always in the ways you’d expect.

M. del Monico (*) Venice, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Heim, S. Anatrone (eds.), Spaghetti Sissies Queering Italian American Media, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10197-7_11

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My grandfather, who left home in eighth grade after his mother died in childbirth, taught me how to iron, thread a needle, mix paint, grind a key, plant a garden, fix screens, lay window glass, and use a hammer and nail, among other things. He and the other men in my youth taught me how to throw, field, and hit a baseball as well as how to stand, how to walk, how to laugh, and even how to cry. They taught me about anger and honor, and sometimes, they taught me about the person I did not want to be. I also learned that women do more than most of the men give them credit for. I helped with the cooking and cleaning enough to know that it felt like an unfair division of labor. I had mixed feelings about cooking with the women in my family. On the one hand, I wanted to know how to make what I liked to eat, but I also wanted to be out in the small patch of yard or on the steps with the men. I wished I could learn my grandmother’s eggplant parmesan, meatballs, fried chicken, and pizzelles without spending all day in the kitchen doing it. Unfortunately, that was how such delicious food got made, especially when you had a lot of mouths to feed. She used recipes from her mother, who likely learned from her mother, and back it goes. They put their hands on mine and helped me form what they thought would be the next generation’s meals, but inside, I wanted to wrap my fingers around rawhide more than raw meat. I also resented that no one seemed to see me for the boy I knew I was inside. I tried out for Little League, and though I was just as good if not better than my brother, the powers that be of Northside Little League told me I couldn’t play, so instead, I had to make pizze fritte with my grandmother in the concession stand all season while my brother got to wear the purple and yellow team colors of the Sons of Italy. I can still see his freshly pressed #4 uniform laid out on his bed before the game. So I learned that being male came with all sorts of privileges I could only watch from the outside. I had never heard the word transgender, and even if I had, I’m not sure I’d have thought twice. I just wanted people to treat me like the boy I was inside. In grade school, when a lunch aide called my mother to ask why I didn’t play with the girls, I simply responded, “Because they’re boring,” instead of what I was actually thinking. At that age, boys didn’t really play with girls, so I didn’t understand why I was being singled out. This sort of being recognized as different didn’t end with the way I presented my gender identity. In fact, when I had a college interview, the alumna at whose

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home I found myself, ended the conversation with, “It’s good we’re letting more of your kind in these days.” After an uncomfortable chuckle, I realized she meant Italian Americans; that comment could have gone a lot of ways. For me, being Italian American meant that decades later, when I came out to my father and his wife, it was over coffee and cannoli in the middle of editing my first feature film; my sister and my producer were also in the room. They both looked at me like, You’re f*cking doing this now? Yeah, because everything sounds better over Italian pastries. My dad walked around the table and gave me a hug. He was relieved the voice changes he’d noticed didn’t amount to throat cancer. In other words, I’m his kid, end of story. I went back to editing the movie, in fact, it was the scene he and my producer’s father starred in. We’d brought them on set for a day. They didn’t know each other, but they talked like old friends for hours while they waited for their turn in front of the camera. We never told them what to wear. They just knew. A lot of the cast and crew on the set of my film, Alto, were Italian or Italian American. For me, this meant that people took random coffee breaks (sometimes off set), yelled at high decibels (sometimes in Italian), but by the end of the day, all was forgotten. I remember one of the non-­ Italian crew asking me one night, “Weren’t those two just yelling at each other?” I looked over at them, heads rolled back in laughter. “Sure,” I said, “but that was at least twenty minutes ago.” Being Italian American isn’t all about yelling, but it means I collect stories that sometimes involve it. Like one of the many times I stayed at my producer’s apartment, I walked right through the middle of her and her husband arguing. I got a cup of coffee, made myself some toast, and then walked right back through to go eat it without interrupting their flow. Being Italian American also means that without my Italian American producer and her husband handling all kinds of potential show-stoppers using the creative problem-solving crafted from generations of getting by and making do and finding a way, this movie never would’ve gotten made and our families might not have had the chance to see the love letter we crafted for them. I feel story in my bones, in the same way I feel family. I’m always working something out when I write, and often it has to do with identity and the bonds that link me from the past to the person I face in the mirror each day. At the heart of it all, of course, beats an Italian American pride, one that is not ignorant of the ways in which Italians and Italian Americans

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have stepped on the rights of others but also remembering the ones who have changed not only music and art and literature, but their own neighborhoods, houses, and backyards forever. I don’t make excuses; I make distinctions. My pride in any part of myself includes a belief that no culture, class, race, or identity can claim high moral ground without at least acknowledging their own murderers, marauders, and thieves. This is part of what I was working out in Alto. I’d say that being Italian American has influenced my work in that themes of family and heart are inescapable. I also can’t escape the fact that I’m transgender and move through the world with a vantage point that likely no one else in my family can fully understand. The fact that I’m a trans man, in and of itself, doesn’t separate me from them, but the way I see the world as a result of it might. Not only being transgender, but being out as such means that I put myself in danger every day in ways that my family worries about. It means I’ve had insults hurled at me that I hope they never have to imagine. Yet it is my sense of being part of families— both blood and chosen—that helps me get through all this with my sense of self intact. I realize that not every Italian American queer person has a family who can show up with love for them. I hoped that by making my movie, people could at least begin having those conversations. In order to feel whole, I can’t lop off the part of me that feels ethnic to others. I can’t pretend that growing up Italian American, for me, didn’t mean that I have a whole shorthand I use when I talk to other Italian Americans. Story helps me hang on to that sense of identity, especially after leaving my native New York for a city where people pay all sorts of crazy for items I could find dusty on a deli shelf back home. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, I hadn’t seen my family in person in 18 months. When we finally met up, which involved a red eye from Los Angeles, I remember thinking not only about how good it would feel to hug them but also, of course, about food. I looked forward to errands that involved multiple stores that still hung meats from the ceiling: picking up parmesan cheese from Cappiello’s, bread from Perecca’s. My father showed me a photo of a friend eating his final link of Garofalo’s sausage, before they shuttered this hundred-plus year old local institution. For Father’s Day, we ate dinner at John Riccitello’s, a restaurant built into a house and owned by a guy my dad has known from his school years six decades ago. In fact, my father had once briefly lived in a house next door. We told stories. What struck me is that other than sports, we didn’t watch TV.  We’d sit around talking. My mother and niece played cards. My

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nephew would stop a video game to come talk to me or wrestle or shoot Nerf hoops. We told our stories to the next generation as well, so they’d remember the good ones, the ones that took years to perfect. At one point, my brother handed me a short, fat notebook containing recipes in my grandmother’s hand. The first was scardellini, otherwise known as bones of the dead. I write this on what would have been her 101st birthday. Also, fig cookies, biscotti, anise seed cookies, and taralli. A lot of the recipes seem unfinished, as though she only included the parts she couldn’t otherwise recall. It was too late to ask but not too late to drive by the two-­ family house where she’d lived nearly all of the days of my father’s life and almost to the day she died. We’re still talking about her eggplant parmesan. I understand that I’m several generations removed from being Italian in the purest sense of the word, but the one time I went to Italy, I thought, Here are old people who look like I’ll look someday. Here are old people who look like the photos of my ancestors. It made me realize that the old people I see in American media don’t really look like the people I knew. The entirety of this contains huge generalizations that I can only warrant by saying I understand them for what they are: ways of bringing a complex identity together inside my own head. We don’t get off this ride alive, but while we’re here, we can let our stories emerge from the deepest and most integrated parts of ourselves. We can give them the dead bones and still-beating hearts of the generations who came before. A recipe. Something carved from wood. A book. Whatever we leave behind. Eight of my great-grandparents left their home countries in search of better lives, six of them from Italy. I wouldn’t be here without their journeys, so instead of trying to separate parts of my identity, I honor them by pursuing my own path with as much heart as nature and nurture have provided me.

CHAPTER 12

Queering the Guido or Guidoing the Queer? Performing Gender and Identity on Comedy Television Carmelo A. Galati

The study of LGBTQIA+ Italian American representation on television is challenging due to the minimal portrayals of gay characters of Italian descent. It is with the onset of the new millennium and premium channels like HBO and Showtime that a shift in the representation of queer1 Italian Americans begins to emerge. Although subscription channels pioneer more inclusive programming (they are not constricted by standards of network television content and reliance on advertisement fees), queer Italian American visibility continued to exploit antiquated ethnic stereotypes of the mafioso or the cook/caterer. The characters, in addition to conforming to traditional tropes, are often on the margins; minor 1  While the Italian American characters in my analysis identify as gay and cisgender, I use the term gay and queer interchangeably to indicate sexual non-normativity.

C. A. Galati (*) Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Heim, S. Anatrone (eds.), Spaghetti Sissies Queering Italian American Media, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10197-7_12

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sidekicks, or as is the case in The Sopranos, murdered for being gay.2 By contrast, when they are central characters,3 their Italian American ethnicity is all but erased apart from a few pasta dinners.4 While these shows aired on subscription cable channels, it will be the situational comedy genre of network television to usher in a more evolved and multi-­dimensional queer Italian American character.5 In March of 2004, NBC’s Will & Grace (1998–2006; 2017–2019) introduced audiences to Vince D’Angelo, a New York City police officer who would become the love interest and eventual life-long partner of the sitcom’s main protagonist, Will Truman.6 In 2005, actor Bobby Cannavale received a Prime-Time Emmy Award for his portrayal of the neurotic persona. When Will & Grace premiered its one-hour Thanksgiving episode, “Queens for a Day” (7:10) that same year, audiences became acquainted with the D’Angelo family; in an episode ladened with Italian American stereotypes concerning family, religion, and food. Most recently, Hulu’s Difficult People (2015–2017), and Netflix’s The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (2015–2019), also propose gay Italian American characters as love interests for their main characters. Despite the progress of queer representation, the programs exploit primitive conventions of Italian American ethnicity validating Jonathan J. Cavallero and George Plasketes’ fears that “stereotypes have gone unchecked.”7 Rather than superfluously examine the dichotomy of whether stereotypes employed are positive or negative, my analysis considers how these three case studies are a means to ­formulate 2  HBO’s Sex and the City (1998–2004) and The Sopranos (1999–2007) introduce audiences to Anthony Marantino, (an event planner and close friend of Charlotte York) and Vito Spatafore (a capo of the Dimeo crime family). Vic Grassi (a chef and caterer) appears as a minor character in Showtime’s Queer as Folk (2000–2005). 3  Michael Novotney in Queer as Folk. 4  In the episode “It’s because I’m Gay, Right?” (2:13), the audience, along with Michael, learns that his mother, Debbie, changed her name and fabricated the story about Michael’s father, a soldier who died in combat during the Vietnam war, when, his biological father (Danny Devore) is a drag queen performer known as Divina Devore. 5  Beginning in the early 1970s, the sitcom becomes the first genre to feature openly gay and recurring characters. For a more comprehensive history of LGBTQIA+ representation in the sitcom refer to Jeremy G.  Butler, “Comedy, Sex, and Gender Identity,” The Sitcom. (Routledge, 2020), 127–161. 6  When Will & Grace returned to NBC in 2017 the show was revised and altered the original “finale” so that the main characters, Will and Grace, would be single. 7  Jonathan J. Cavallero and George Plasketes, “Gangsters, Fessos, Tricksters, and Sopranos: The Historical Roots of Italian American Stereotype Anxiety,” Journal of Popular Film and Television, 32:2 (2004): 51.

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an understanding of LGBTQIA+ characters of Italian descent on television. Why is it that queer Italian American characters exist only as stereotypes regarding either ethnicity or sexuality? Can an Italian American queer identity exist only if it inhabits a fantasy world sustained by television, where stereotypes are but a means to make palatable that which for the Italian American community was taboo? While it appears that television perpetuates the idea that the characters are not allowed to be both gay and Italian American, I maintain that humor, as a lens to observe and understand LGBTQIA+ Italian American identity, facilitates discussions about social injustices and changes affecting the queer community.

Performing Masculinity Will & Grace, The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and Difficult People introduce Italian American men as same-sex love interests of their show’s leads. Each is portrayed by a heterosexual actor who, in contrast to his romantic counterpart, performs masculinity by culturally coding the character in mannerisms, style, and actions reminiscent of the Guido;8 perpetuating heteronormative ideals regarding Italian American gender presentations. The characters of Vince, Mikey, and Joey adhere to expressions of Italian American masculinity via the assumptions of toughness and socio-­ economic class that go with their blue-collar professions (See DeStefano). In Will & Grace, Vince is a police officer, while Mikey in The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, is a construction worker. Except for Joey in Difficult People, which opts to focus more on the “visual vernacular of Guido”9 (the character’s well-chiseled body), the occupations are traditionally male and 8  Although today, the term Guido is defined as “consumption culture or style,” the designation still bears the marker of difference, “exposing ideological divisions” (Tricarico 179). As Donald Tricarico explains, the expression entered the lexicon of American culture in the middle of the 1980s, but the “particular style” developed in the disco movement of the 1970s, when young Italian Americans from New York City neighborhoods, gravitated to dance clubs, consuming leisure culture as a form of rebellion against the restrictive opportunities of their parents’ generation in the 1960s. As such, the term is marked by class, and race, and is heavily associated with “toughness and delinquency” (180). 9  Donald Tricarico, “Consuming Italian Americans: Invoking Ethnicity in the Buying and Selling of Guido,” in Making Italian America: Consumer Culture and the Production of Ethnic Identities, ed. Simone Cinotto (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 184.

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esteemed in working-class Italian America.10 Moreover, the professions evoke iconography of gay eroticism and pornography.11 On Will and Vince’s first date (6:19), the officer shares how he is living out his fantasy through his profession: “You know, I never really had my heart set on being a cop. I just knew I wanted to wear blue and ride around in a car with another guy all day. Besides, with all four of my brothers being cops—.” Will interrupts and transforms Vince’s fantasy into his erotic one, alluding to an adult film he may own: “Wow, five brothers, all cops? I think I have that video.” In Will & Grace, Vince’s profession codes him as hyper-masculine. In The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Mikey’s construction worker caricature is utilized to perform gender and hide his sexuality. Neither character is the first to (re)present queer and Italian masculinity on screen. Scholars Aaron Baker and Juliann Vitullo discuss how portrayals of Italian American urban and working-class men, “trying to survive on the streets of their neighborhood,” began to transform at the close of the twentieth century.12 Contrary to earlier decades, narratives in the 1990s tended to concentrate on aspects of identity; specifically race, gender, and sexuality.13 As cultural biproducts of 1990s film, Vince and Mikey share performative similarities which echo those of officer Anthony Randazzo (Vincent D’Onofrio) in Thomas DeCerchio’s Nunzio’s Second Cousin (1994) which reinvents the “erotic icon and its real-life referent.”14 DeCerchio’s film is an 18-minute short that “upsets the semiotic apple cart of traditional signification.”15 Far from the “effeminate, seemingly shy and weak male, Anthony proves to be a type of ‘macho gay,’” an off-duty police officer who carries his pistol.16 Similar to the subsequent portrayals of Vince and

10  George De Stefano, “Identity Crises: Race, Sex and Ethnicity in Italian American Cinema,” in Mediated Ethnicity: New Italian-American Cinema, ed. Giuliana Muscio, (New York: City University of New York, 2010), 168. 11  As De Stefano explains, the image of the “hot Italian cop” is “usually mustached, muscular, and hairy of the chest, presumably heterosexual, but sexually attainable under the right circumstances” (“Identity Crises,” 168). 12  Aaron Baker and Juliann Vitullo, “Screening the Italian-American Male,” in Masculinity: Bodies, Movies, Culture, ed. Peter Lehman, (New York: Routledge, 2001), 213. 13  Baker and Vitullo, “Screening,” 219. 14  De Stefano, “Identity Crises,” 168. 15  Anthony Tamburri, Italian/American Short Films and Music Videos: A Semiotic Reading, (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2002), 30. 16  Tamburri, Italian/American, 30.

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Mikey, Anthony does not conform to the shared stereotype of gay men. His language and obscenities convey masculine dominance.17 The addition of Mikey Politano (Mike Carlsen) in the second season of Netflix’s comedy series allows the audience to partake in the challenges the character encounters in defining his queer identity. The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt premiered in the spring of 2015 and chronicles the 29-year-old Kimmy’s adjustments to life in New York City after having been rescued from a doomsday cult in Indiana. In “Kimmy Walks into a Bar” (S2:7) Titus (Tituss Burgess) is perplexed as he is subjected to Mikey’s incessant trivial chatter whose focal points are work miscommunications about a ten-foot rebarb, his nonno’s garden, and the newly installed drywall in his sister’s house. Later, upon visiting Mikey’s worksite, Titus uncovers how: “around other people, Mikey doesn’t talk at all” and presumes: “He’s not just babbling; he’s trying to open up to me.” Titus’ assumption about Mikey is reminiscent of the liberating qualities Professor Mary Jo Bona chronicles in “Claiming a Tradition: Italian American Women Writers.” In the essay, Bona explains how authors break their code of silence to overcome the “inhibitions placed on them implicitly or explicitly by the family.”18 In the old-world Italian tradition, to speak of family secrets resonates with danger and weakness. Consider the following Italian proverbs: “The best word is the unspoken one”19 and “You give away your freedom to the one to whom you tell your secret.”20 For Bona, breaking the code of omertà is a courageous act of freedom. In sharing their secrets, writers distance themselves from their italianità; challenging a culture often plagued by old-world values. The Sicilian noun omertà, to keep silent, to turn a blind eye, is often associated with deviance (mafia, criminality, and violence). However, etymologically it derives from the dialectal form of Italian umiltà (humility), in reference to the code of submission of individuals to the group interest, from the Latin, humilitas.21 Fred Gardaphé, a leading expert in Italian American Studies, interprets the word as a performance of manhood, where Italian masculinity is expressed through a display of actions.  De Stefano, “Identity Crises,” 168.  Mary Jo Bona, in Don’t Tell Mama!: The Penguin Book of Italian American Writing, ed. Regina Barreca (New York: Penguin Books, 2002), 61. 19  “La miglior parola e quella che non si dice.” 20  “A chi dici il tuo segreto, doni la tua libertà.” 21  Online Etymology Dictionary | Origin, history, and meaning of English words, https:// www.etymonline.com/, accessed 23 April 2021. 17 18

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Gardaphé identifies the term as a derivative of the Spanish omredad (manhood), which “refers to proper male behavior,” and concludes that, “Italian masculinity is typically expected to be displayed through actions rather than words: ‘Le parole sono femmine,’ goes an Italian saying, ‘Words are feminine;’ but ‘i fatti sono maschi,’ ‘actions are masculine.’”22 Mikey’s words are hybrids of his manliness; his ramblings function as markers of his non-binary gender identity; working with one’s hands, managing heavy tools, and digging dirt in a vegetable garden, play into his hyper-­ masculinity. Befitting historian Michael Kimmel’s assertion that masculinity needs to be constantly demonstrated, “lest the man be undone by a perception of being too feminine,” Mikey asserts his machismo through performance.23 When he and Titus are on a leisurely walk and encounter a few men from the work site, Mikey differentiates himself from his partner, asking that he not act himself: MIKEY:

Shoot. Those guys are from the site. Don’t do anything gay. I said don’t do anything gay! And don’t say stuff like “theater,” or “salad,” or “Hey, let’s all take a bath.” You know what? Just let me do the talking. TITUS: I’m used to that, #WentThere. MIKEY: You know I love your bitchy muttering, but not now. CONSTRUCTION WORKER 1: ’Sup? MIKEY: ’Sup? CONSTRUCTION WORKER 2: ’Sup? TITUS: Soup. The verbal exchanges and the unfolding action of the scene rely heavily on performance. The triple use of the negative contraction “don’t” underlines the character’s perception of gender constructs. Mikey’s insistence that Titus refrain from using words like “theater,” “salad,” and “bath,” 22  Fred Gardaphé, From Wiseguys to Wise Men: The Gangster and Italian American Masculinities, (New York: Routledge, 2006), 16. 23  Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 89.

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Fig. 12.1  Titus, a larger black man, and Mikey, a larger white man, sit sipping coffee next to some trash cans in front of a brick exterior; two of Mikey’s coworkers stand looking on, also sipping coffee

contrast with his earlier use of more masculine terms (“a ten-foot rebarb” and “drywall”) (Fig. 12.1). Mikey insists that he allow him to do all the communication to prevent Titus from doing “anything gay.” As the scene unfolds, the exchange between the men is purely physical. They nod their heads in acknowledgment, and only inquire about how they are utilizing the contraction ‘sup.’ Titus’ response, “soup,” is used to break the tension with laughter while simultaneously becoming a marker of difference as a “gay word.” Mikey equates Titus’ speech with effeminacy and views the interaction as possibly threatening to the masculine dynamics within his workspace. Mikey’s projections of his insecurities onto Titus are met with the spiteful response, “I’m used to that, #WentThere,” further differentiating Mikey’s more masculine demeanor from Titus’ “bitchy muttering.” Mikey’s characterization of Titus’ behavior further differentiates the two men. Consequently, Titus is emasculated and labeled a bitch, a term which the authors of “Reclaiming Critical Analysis: The Social Harms of “Bitch,’” say reinforces sexism. Both noun and verb are attributed to women more than men. Similar to the Italian proverb which equates words as feminine, “bitching is the kind of complaining that is not followed by action.”24 The  Sherryl Kleinman, Matthew B. Ezzel, and A. Corey Frost, “Reclaiming Critical Analysis: The Social Harms of ‘Bitch,’” Sociological Analysis, Vol. 3, No. 1, (Spring 2009): 54. 24

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authors of the “RCA” study explain that bitching is “the negative reaction of the audience (irritated, annoyed)” to the speaker and address how its correlation to whining, perceived as lacking a good argument, is also attributed to children.25 “The negative connotation of ‘bitching’ is clearest when applied to a man: his speech is demoted in part because he is doing what women (subordinates) presumably do—bitch.”26 The character Mikey conforms to the traditional idea of Italian American masculinity, where one’s gender is expressed through words and actions. In wanting to instill onto Titus the idea that gayness corresponds to femininity, Mikey’s demand, “don’t do anything gay,” implies “act like a man,” where manhood is defined by omertà (silence). In the episode “Italian Piñata” from Difficult People (2:03), gender is performed as a construct related to one’s ethnicity. For example, Billy, who pretends to have just come out of the closet to attract the attention of a possible love interest, performs masculinity as a Bro, a youth subculture of predominantly white, young adult men. In contrast to Joey’s Guido, Billy’s performance relies heavily on speech and clothing style to express his hypersexual vitality. Joey shares how he is aroused by Billy’s “quoting The Big Lebowski” and “wearing cargo shorts.” The humor in the character’s performance is found in his merging of sexual desires for gay icons: Judy Garland and Liza Minelli. Billy’s sexual inexperience effeminizes his character, leading Joey to not rush things since it will be Billy’s “first time with a man.” Joey’s remark is reminiscent of the old-­ fashioned romantic ideals Vince expresses to Will in Will & Grace, in wanting to treat him as a respectable woman. By the same token, Vince’s masculinity in Will & Grace is made to stand in stark contrast to that of his partner. Of the principal gay characters in the NBC sitcom, Jack McFarland (Sean Hayes) conforms to television’s tradition of portraying gays as effeminate and flamboyant. While he deviates from the heteronormative male, and as consequence often becomes the butt of jokes, Will’s character, “fits well into a mainstream model of

 Kleinman, Ezzel, and Corey, “Reclaiming,” 54.  Ibid., 54.

25 26

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Fig. 12.2  Living room interior: Jack, a thin white man, sits with his legs crossed and his hand cupped under his chin, eyebrows raised as he listens to her story

masculinity.”27 His homosexuality is not a danger to heteronormative ideals because he rarely challenges heterosexual mores (Fig. 12.2).28 As Battles and Hilton-Morrow indicate, Will is handsome, has an ivy-­ league education, and has a professional job with a high income. He “provides a mainstream audience with a likable, well-assimilated gay character that is very different from the negative stereotype of gay characters in early television.”29 According to a critique in TV Guide, “Will is gay, although he is so low-key about it you might not notice.”30 However, as specified by Battles and Hilton-Marrow, Will’s “‘gayness’ is defined at specific moments in the text” in which the character is romantically involved with a potential partner.31 For example, Vince rides motorcycles while Will is famous for his olive tapenade “that would make you faint.”32 The

27  Kathleen Battles and Wendy Hilton-Morrow, “Gay Characters in Conventional Spaces: Will and Grace and the Situation Comedy Genre,” Critical Studies in Media Communications, Vol. 19, No. 1 (March 2002): 90. 28  Sheri L. Manuel. “Becoming the Homovoyer: Consuming Homosexual Representation in Queer as Folk,” Social Semiotics, Vol. 19, No.3 (September 2009): 275. 29  Battles and Hilton-Morrow, “Gay Characters,” 90. 30  Rodger, Streitmatter. From “Perverts” to “Fab Five”: The Media’s Changing Depiction of Gay Men and Lesbians, (New York: Routledge, 2008), 118. 31  Battles and Hilton-Morrow, “Gay Characters,” 90. 32  Will & Grace, season 6, episode 18, “Courting Disaster,” directed by James Burrows, aired March 18, 2004, in broadcast syndication, NBC.

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beginning and end of episode 6:19 serve to solidify heteronormative ideals of binary gender roles between the romantic couple. The beginning of episode 6:19 foreshadows Will’s feminine role in the relationship as evidenced by Grace’s advice: “Let someone chase you. Let someone call you. Let someone do for you.” Jack agrees and reminds Will that “Men don’t like to be chased. They like to do the chasing.” Will rebukes Jack’s statement reminding both he and Grace that they are both men, to which Jack responds by mocking Will’s manhood as questionable: “We’re in an ugly area. Let’s move on.” At the conclusion of the episode, Vince declares himself “old-fashioned,” and believes that when he takes another man out, “he should treat him like a lady.” In episode 7:10, when Vince’s sister, Ro, first meets Will, she declares: “he’s pretty.” The adjective commonly used as a descriptor for feminine beauty, stresses the character’s effeminacy as he is compared to Vince and Ro’s female cousin: “put a mustache on him, he’s Cousin Gina.” The comparison of Gina’s higher levels of testosterone to Will’s exploits a subtext of gender conformism to elicit laughter from the audience who imagines Eric McCormack’s character in drag. Ro’s connotation of her cousin’s hyper-masculinity is also one of social conformity. As we shall soon see, the “gender invert” trope used to define Gina’s “butch” representation of femininity is unpresentable on network television and consequently omitted from the screen.33

Creating Queer Space Through Comedy The three case studies in our analysis use comedy to ease the audience into a discussion about social injustices and changes affecting the LGBTQIA+ community. Reminiscent of Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of carnival, the series marks the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions.34 As a by-product of carnival’s change and renewal, the representation of queer Italian Americans on television has made the co-existence of queerethnic identities more palatable to an Anglo-American community in which both Italians and queers were prohibited from existing. Comedy is the driving force behind Will & Grace’s success on primetime television. Hailed as the “biggest gay hit in tv history,” it managed to avoid 33  Vicki L.  Eaklor. “The Kids Are All Right but the Lesbians Aren’t: The Illusion of Progress in Popular Film,” Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques, Vol. 38, No. 3 (Winter 2012): 158. 34  Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009).

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the fate of its predecessor, Ellen (1994–1998), by providing viewers with its successful formula of keeping “things silly” with crude jokes and slap-stick comedy instead of addressing social issues which may have been problematic or taboo for a more conservative audience.35 According to its creators, Max Mutchnick and David Kohan, Will & Grace was more concerned with comedy than social issues: “The only thing we’re trying to force down people’s throats is comedy.”36 Be that as it may, NBC was very pragmatic and slowly introduced potentially controversial subjects to its audience. Similarly, Hulu’s Difficult People propels the audience’s comfort level further with its use of humor to address topics of taboo. The dark sitcom, which follows the lives of two aspiring comedians, Julie (Julie Klausner) and Billy (Billy Eichner) is comparable to the Will & Grace formula in its use of the gay-straight best-friend dynamic. The show’s novelty is found in its avoidance of Will & Grace’s ultimate twist to the sitcom genre, the “will they, won’t they” trope which uses sexual orientation to separate the two potential lovers. Difficult People is suggestive of the limits of network television regarding queer representation in media. Unlike Will & Grace, the dark comedy was able to push boundaries because it was not inhibited by network standards and protocols. Television “serves as a powerful instrument for disseminating and legitimating culture and for regulating how persons and things are represented and valued.”37 As scholar Kristen Murray contends in her analysis of comedy on US television, dark humor emerges “from significant shifts in people’s relationship” with taboo subjects, in our case, gender, sexuality, and identity.38 The premise of the episode, “Italian Piñata,” takes place during National Coming Out Day, (October 11), which celebrates and supports members of the community who decide to live their truths and be open about their sexuality.39 As the title of the series implies, Julie and Billy are “difficult” and share sarcastic views on the commemorative day. Julie asks Billy: “Could you imagine waiting till Coming Out Day to come out, even if you’ve known all year? I should really be true to myself, but I’ll wait till October.” Billy responds by sharing his dislike for the day because it only  Rodger, From Perverts to Fab Five, 115.  qtd. in Rodger, From Perverts to Fab Five, 115. 37  Avi Shoshana and Elly Teman, “Coming Out of the Coffin: Life-Self and Death-Self in Six Feet Under,” Symbolic Interactions, Vol.29, No. 4 (Fall 2006): 560. 38  Kristen A. Murray, “The Last Laugh: Dark Comedy on US Television,” Taboo Comedy: Television and Controversial Humour, eds. Chiara Buccaria and Luca Barra (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 41. 39  The month of October is also devoted to commemorating Italian American Culture and History. The episode, therefore, blends the two in creating its comedy of mistaken gender and cultural identities. 35 36

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makes life more difficult for him: “It’s hard enough for me to get gay guys to notice me. Now I have to deal with a whole new graduating class.” In the episode, Billy and Julie venture out of New York City to attend a party in Hoboken, New Jersey. Due to their miscalculations, having arrived three hours in advance, the two comedians, in between chuckles of, “Hey, fuhgettabout it!” and “Whatsmatta you!” follow the scent of marinara into an Italian delicatessen. Once inside, the New  Yorkers encounter a group of Italian American women who mistake Julie for Italian. The episode premiered in July 2016 and satirizes the Rachel Dolezal controversy (2015) in which Dolezal identified as multiracial even though both biological parents were Caucasian, and the two comedians engross themselves in a play of mistaken identities about ethnicity and sexual orientation, leading Julie to embrace her inner Guidette: “To paraphrase activist hairdresser Rachel Dolezal, ‘Challenging the construct of ethnicity is at the core of human consciousness.’ In other words, I identify as Italian.” Consequently, Julie, who is Jewish, is deemed more feminine by her new friends as she embraces her new identity: “Oh, Giuliana, look at you. You fluffed your hair. You borrowed my blouse. You don’t look like a boy anymore.” (Fig. 12.3) The “Italian piñata” episode of Difficult People uses stereotypical imagery and alludes to Italian Americans as ignorant, violent, and connected to organized crime. The character Joey, for example, evokes characteristics of

Fig. 12.3  Two people sit with their backs to us. Facing us is a white woman with big curly red hair, a low-cut black shirt, and a cross hanging on a necklace that drops into her cleavage

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the fesso (the fool) in earlier depictions of Italian Americans in film and television. In their analysis of the historical roots of Italian American stereotypes in media, Jonathan J. Cavallero and George Plasketes trace the fesso’s genealogy to 1930s Hollywood ethnic representations of the gangster’s brutish and dim-witted sidekick.40 Often depicted as poorly spoken, the fesso becomes a comic character oblivious to his surrounding reality and consequently “the ridicule of film and audience alike.”41 In episode 2:03 of Difficult People, Joey not only becomes Billy’s potential lover but also decides to become his mentor and guide him through “Gay 101.” He educates Billy about gay culture and demonstrates that contrary to the dominant ideology, “gay men have way more in common than just wanting to have sex with each other.” Joey promises Billy a “detailed tour” surveying LGBTQIA+ history from the ancient Greeks to a contemporary popular culture where Demi Lovato is more popular than Madonna, and Ryan Murphy’s Scream Queens (2015–2016) is the quintessential series to watch on television. Joey becomes the butt of the joke as he is oblivious to LGBTQIA+ history, conflating the Stonewall Riots of 1969 with the death of Diana Spencer in 1997. “The riots happened right after Princess Diana died” he explains to Billy, “so the gays were in no mood.” The representation of Difficult People’s Joey as fesso is further cemented in his mispronunciation of the LGBTQIA+ acronym, which in his inclusion of extra letters (LGBLT), recalls the bacon, lettuce, and tomato signifier. The joke, in its intent to elicit laughter from the audience, serves to embellish Joey as a poorly spoken imbecile.42 As Cavallero and Plasketes suggest, the fesso tradition was carried on, on network television by Joey Tribbiani (Matt Le Blanc) of NBC’s Friends (1994–2004) who, “occasionally surprising his friends with an astute comment,” remained clueless throughout each episode.43 Unsurprisingly, Difficult People’s Joey recalls LeBlanc’s character as the namesake and descendant of the fesso tradition. “Italian Piñata” exaggerates stereotypical tropes of Italian Americans in the media thus creating a grotesque rendition of the group. Joanie, Therese, and Rizzo, the three women whom Julie befriends at the delicatessen, are dressed in a gaudy and showy manner. Their hair and style are reflective of the type of Italian American they represent: the Guidette. In  Cavallero and Plasketes, “Gangsters,” 56.  Cavallero and Plasketes, “Gangsters,” 56. 42  Cavallero and Plasketes, “Gangsters,” 56. 43  Cavallero and Plasketes, “Gangsters,” 59. 40 41

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the purse party scene, Julie recalls “the first time I realized how different I felt,” and describes her new friends as having bad skin, wearing too much makeup, and the designer purses stolen merchandise that “fell off a truck.” Julie also expresses how they threaten and “kill anyone who ever crossed them.” The purse party scene is the first time that the expression, “Italian piñata,” is uttered. 44 In it, Rizzo relates to her girlfriends the encounter she had with Paul, a local guy from the neighborhood, who claimed that sex with him would have her, “forget the recipe to my grandmother’s gravy.” The women gasp with disgust at Paul’s statement, but welcome Rizzo’s reply with solidarity and laughter as it threatens his manhood: “I said, ‘Paul, shut your fucking mouth or I’ll kick you in the balls until you forget your confirmation name.’” Therese, however, would have “given him the Italian piñata” instead. The women gasp and cross themselves in envisioning the violent act in which Paul’s head would be covered and bashed. Paul’s, Rizzo’s and Therese’s remarks rely on food, religion, and organized crime to further cement their ethnicities. The laughter from the women allows the audience viewing at home permission to laugh with as opposed to at them. The women speak in a coarse language no different than Julie’s yet are distinguishable from her in their ignorance and representation as fesse (fools). For example, when they overhear Julie telling a joke, Therese responds with, “you say what we want to think” (italics, mine). When Jonie invites Julie and Billy to the local gay bar where they are to meet Joey, she addresses him as her “fag brother.” To disrupt the awkwardness of the statement, Therese excuses it, “She can say it because he is.” Jonie and Therese’s remarks mirror those made earlier in the episode by Lola, a transwoman who works with Billy. After initiating an argument about the use of the word “guys,” Lola reminds Billy to check his white cisgender male privilege. She assaults him with the word “faggot,” defending her use: “I can say that because I was one.” In their investigation on representations of identity in comedy, Helen Davies and Sarah Ilott contend that “laughter is constructed as resting on a perceived hierarchy between 44  Although today the piñata is associated with Latin American culture, its historical tradition dates to the Italian medieval “pignatta” used in the celebration of liturgical and popular feasts. When used in contemporary American slang the term has sexual implications. Similarly, in Italian, pignatta is used in reference to a gay man in the passive role. Difficult People’s use, however, suggests more of a means to highlight the episode’s narrative of mistaken perceptions as well as merging the episode’s subplot, in which Arthur (James Unbaniak), Julie’s boyfriend, organizes “a puppy party but with kids” for his boss, Gabbie.

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‘others’ and ‘ourselves’ in which those marked by difference are deemed inferior. The power dynamic at play here is evident in sexist, racist, or homophobic jokes (for example), but can also be used more subversively to denote moral superiority by laughing at sexists, racists, or homophobes.”45 In the instances above, the initial destructive force of the terms “fag” and “faggot” become corrective, and consequently, the viewer laughs at them instead of with the women who utter them. Comedy does not construct social and cultural identities; it also challenges them.46 Difficult People parodies stereotypes in its re-invocation of them. As Davies and Ilott observe, comedy is “an amorphous beast” that can be used to mock the minority or “provide a space in which to challenge and upturn social conventions that serve to stigmatize and alienate those marginalized by mainstream society.”47 Through its grotesque representation of Italian Americans, “Italian Piñata” can (re)construct how Italian Americans are perceived. Similar to Karen’s use of the word “homo” and “fagATZ” in “Queens for a Day,” the language used in “Italian Piñata” is intentionally jarring and the grotesque characterization of Italian Americans is purposely uncomfortable for the humor to “function as social critique.”48 At the end of the episode, for example, once Julie and Billy are discovered for having lied to their new friends, the characters are shown to have feelings for and love one another despite their differences. They are represented as a tight-knit community that takes care of their own, the opposite of what we were first introduced to at the delicatessen.

The Family as Means to Laughter In Difficult People’s “Italian Piñata,” Julie and Billy’s true identities are finally revealed when Frank Sinatra’s cover of “New York, New  York” begins to play at the delicatessen. While Therese begins to explain how the song is her “favorite Sinatra song of all time,” Julie and Billy let their guards down, declaring how the song is better associated with its original singer, Liza Minelli. In this unmasking, although Joey and Therese are disappointed that Billy and Julie pretended to be something other than 45  Helen Davies and Sarah Ilott, “Mocking the Weak? Contexts, Theories, Politics,” Comedy and the Politics of Representation: Mocking the Weak, (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 7. 46  Davies and Ilott, “Mocking the Weak,” 1. 47  Ibid., 6. 48  Ibid., 10.

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their true selves, the siblings are angrier at the fact that the New Yorkers lied and took advantage of their sibling. The sympathy that Joey and Therese express for one another is an example of the strong family bond shared between the two. Family is a pervasive and culturally unique theme in Italian American Studies. The three sitcoms under investigation capitalize on Italian American familial clichés to garner laughter and alleviate the audience’s uneasiness.49 The episode, “Kimmy Goes to Her Happy Place” (2:10), begins with Titus excited to be a part of his boyfriend’s coming out. Kimmy (Ellie Kemper), fearful that the Politano family may not take the announcement well, expresses her concern by referencing the old-world values of an Italian family she knew in Durnsville, Indiana. As she warns Titus that they were “old fashioned” and resorted to extremes, her eager, wide-eyed roommate replies: “I know, can you imagine the drama?” Mikey’s coming out unfolds at the family table (Fig. 12.4). In the background, the soundtrack plays Giuseppe Verdi’s aria, “La donna è mobile,” from the tragic opera, Rigoletto (1850) and concludes with the Neapolitan song, “Funiculì, Funiculà” (1880). The musical references, as markers of the Politano’s ethnic identity, also serve to underscore the scene’s progression from the tragic (Titus’ anticipation of drama) to the happy ending (the family’s acceptance). Similarly, in Will & Grace, comedic jokes allude to the D’Angelo family’s Roman Catholicism and home décor, complete with pictures and statues of popes and saints. Although comical, the referents mark the representation of Italian Americans on screen as Other. Case in point, the plastic coverings on the sofas of the D’Angelo home, which as a prop for Jack’s physical comedy, provide a stark contrast to Will’s modern, interior-designed, Manhattan apartment. Episodes 7:10 of Will & Grace and 2:10 of The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt borrow from Hollywood’s rendition of an Italian American family as portrayed in John Badham’s Saturday Night Fever (1977) and anticipate the audience’s familiarity with the film to set up their jokes.50 49  Michela Baldo, “Familiarizing the Gay: Queering the Family Coming Out and Resilience in Mambo Italiano,” Journal of GLBT Family Studies, Vol. 10, No. 1–2 (January 2014): 172. 50  According to Clarissa Clò, the film with its “distinctive Italian American identity and characterization in a specific geographical location, Brooklyn’s Bay Ridge, … is in equal measure the originator of myths and misconceptions” of the Italian American identity in the late 1970s and early 1980s. (Clarissa Clò, “Disco Fever: Italian and American Diasporic Journeys,” Italian American Review Vol. 8, No. 2 (Summer 2018): 119–142.

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Fig. 12.4  A group of people sits around a table laden with plates of food and glasses of wine; at the head of the table an older white man gestures angrily at a younger white man; the rest of the people look knowingly at each other, or gaze down at their plates

Episode 2:10 of The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt appropriates the character of Flo Manero (Julie Bovasso) as a marker of Italian American motherhood in its representation of Mrs. Politano, Mikey’s mother. In Saturday Night Fever, when the audience is first introduced to Flo, she continually crosses herself every time her eldest son’s name, Frank Jr., is mentioned: “He’s a priest, aint he? Father Frank Jr., your brother.” She tells her son, Tony, how she wishes he would be more like him: “You should have been a priest like your brother, you wouldn’t worry about a job.” Similarly, Mrs. Politano crosses herself when she fears that her son is unwell due to his lack of appetite: “You don’t want to be a little fat anymore? … did you eat before you got here?” As a parody of Saturday Night Fever, Mrs. Politano, in a distressful and existential panic, exclaims “There is no God!,” invokes Satan, “O Lucifer, receive your servant!,” and sacrifices herself to bare the devil’s child: “Satan, fill me with your seed!” Saturday Night Fever’s combative father-son relationship is mimicked in episode 7:10 of Will & Grace and is reflected in the rapport between Vince and his father, Paul. In the episode, Vince’s neurotic personality leads him to believe that his father is critical of and does not love him in return. This idea, as Will, Jack, and the audience soon realize, is furthest from the truth, as Vince and Paul have a healthy relationship. Despite this, Paul remains a problematic character as evidenced by his rhetoric which

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alludes to his violent tendencies. In introducing himself to Mr. D’Angelo, Will apologizes and takes responsibility for his wife’s broken toe. The character, dismissive of the injury remarks, “Ah, it happens…once…I broke her jaw.” Paul’s declaration, in line with other conventions of violence referenced by the episode,51 contributes to the stereotypical trope of Italian American men as violent and domestically abusive; a convention long established and reinforced by Hollywood.52 In using the concept of the first meeting with a partner’s family as the central narrative of the episode, Will and the audience discover how the incident occurred accidentally as Paul went to grab the grated cheese.53 This is also suggestive of the physical violence that occurs at the Manero family table: “no hitting, no slapping at the dinner table, okay that’s the rule here.” The family continues to be “a principal theme” in the “inherited cultural traditions” of Italian American identity.54 The series under investigation combine familial stereotypes with the coming out narrative, which is viewed as limiting “the artistic possibilities” of LGBTQIA+ accounts on film and television.55 In Michael Bronski’s analysis of cinema’s appropriation of the coming out narrative, the author maintains that the metaphor “is no longer fresh, says nothing new, and is often not emotionally, physically, or artistically challenging.”56 Similarly, television—ever since ABC aired the famous 51  Upon arrival at Vince’s family home in Queens, Will’s first remark, “I always thought Queens was just a place to bury bodies,” correlates the borough to the mob. Will’s assumption about Queens serves to establish jokes which associate the D’Angelos with organized crime. As the two men enter the kitchen, Will states, “Family kitchen. I bet there’s a lot of history here,” to which Vince responds, “That’s the spot my uncle got shot.” After an awkward moment, Vince points to another area of the room and explains, “That’s where I was standing when I accidentally shot my uncle.” 52  Examples of psychological and physical violence toward women in the Italian American community include Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972), John Badham’s Saturday Night Fever (1977), Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990), and Tom Chase’s The Sopranos (1999–2007). 53  Like the earlier correlation of the family’s possible ties to the mob, the grated cheese (an emblem of Italian and Italian American cuisine) underscores their cultural identity. The cliché induces the audience’s laughter and interrupts the awkward moment. The audience is distracted from the act of abuse through food-based comedy. 54  George De Stefano, “Fuori per sempre: Gay and Lesbian Italian Americans Come Out,” The Routledge History of Italian Americans, eds. William J. Connell and Stanislao G. Pugliese (New York: Routledge, 2019), 569. 55  Michael Bronski. “Positive Images and the Coming Out Film: The Art and Politics of Gay and Lesbian Cinema,” Cinéaste, Vol. 26, No. 1 (2000): 26. 56  Michael Bronksi, “Positive Images,” 20.

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“Puppy Episode” of its sitcom Ellen (1997), in which its titular character (Ellen DeGeneres) announces that she is a lesbian on prime-­ time— reduced the metaphor to “a generic televisual convention.”57 Ironically, after Mikey’s coming out scene, Titus as an aside, utters: “I blame Ellen for this.”

Laughing Out of the Closet Scholars (Eaklor, Winning, Evan, and Herman) agree that the act of coming out has metamorphosed and bears little resemblance to its origins which can be found in the gay liberation movement of the mid-1960s: to provide visibility for the queer community and challenge stigmas imposed by dominant ideologies. Today, a half-century later, the metaphor has been diminished to “a neoliberal project of the self.”58 In “Categorizing Coming Out: The Modern Televisual Mediation of Queer Youth Identification,” Evan Brody explores how queer narratives are “contained by the ritualized event” of coming out of the closet, and that it has become a forced act: a “tendentious form of confession and sublimation.”59 Of the three programs studied in this chapter, episode 7:10 of Will & Grace differs the most as it offers its audience a female representation of the coming out narrative for comedic play. Consequently, it presents coming out as an illusion “rather than the lived experiences of lesbians and gay men.”60 “Queens for a Day” introduces the audience to Vince’s sister, Ro. The character, who makes her only appearance in this episode, is portrayed by Jamie-Lynn di Scala, best known for her portrayal as Meadow Soprano in HBO’s The Sopranos. Over the course of Will & Grace’s original NBC run (1998–2007), the 2004 Thanksgiving episode is only one of a handful that focuses on a lesbian storyline. Jack, in his attempt to mingle with Ro before dinner, asks her if she is nervous about her upcoming wedding to her fiancé, Matt (Benjamin Spunger). She responds by blurting out that 57  Brody, “Categorizing Coming Out: The Modern Televisual Mediation of Queer Youth Identification,” The University of Southern California Journal of Film and Television, Vol. 31, Issue 2 (Fall 2011): 35. 58  D. Travers Scott. “‘Coming out of the closet’—Examining a Metaphor,” Annals of the International Communication Association, Vol. 42, No. 3 (2018): 151. 59  Evan Brody, “Categorizing Coming Out,” 35. 60  Joanne Winning, “Lesbian Modernism: Writing in and Beyond the Closet,” The Cambridge Companion to Gay and Lesbian Writing, ed. Hugh Stevens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 54.

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she is apprehensive because she is a lesbian. Ro proceeds to apologize for having “dumped” the news on him but defines her declaration moment as liberating: “I’m a lesbian! I’m a lesbian! Oh, my God, it feels so good to say it aloud.” Ro’s emancipation is short-lived. The episode fails in making her experience more about everyone else voicing their opinion and less about her self-acceptance.61 Ro is no longer the subject in her coming out, but the object. Eventually, she is unable to have control over her narrative and is forced into coming out. Throughout the interactions with and about her sexual identity, jokes evoking lesbian stereotypes garner laughter from the audience: watching football on television, wearing Birkenstocks, and “making a bunch of cats a fine mother someday”; this validates professor Vicki L. Eaklor’s critique of Hollywood’s representation of lesbians on film which “[perpetuate] a narrow, simplistic, and often negative view.”62 Contrary to the jokes which generalize lesbians as being ultra-masculine, Ro’s character instead follows television’s norms of what is deemed presentable and is, therefore “defined by her femininity and conventional sexiness.”63 In other words, she is a lipstick lesbian, whose ultra-femininity, provides greater appeal to a male heterosexual audience. The character eases its audience into a discussion about sexual identity but is limited in its portrayal. It is important to recall that when Ro first appears in the episode, she is the one who compares Will to her cousin, Gina. Together with Will and Jack’s narrow generalizations of lesbians as manly, the episode marginalizes “butch” representations of femininity, allowing only the “privileged, white lesbian to be visible.”64 The choice of casting DiScala for the role also serves to attract a demographic familiar with her work on The Sopranos. When DiScala guest starred on Will & Grace, HBO had already aired its penultimate season of The Sopranos in which she portrays the character Meadow, the eldest child of mobster Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) and his wife, Carmela (Edie Falco). Consequently, with Will’s earlier assumption that “Queens was just a place to bury bodies,” the audience’s perception of Ro and her family’s ethnicity is associated with the Italian American mobster trope. 61  Larry Gross, Up from Invisibility: Lesbians, Gay Men, and the Media in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 83. 62  Vicki L. Eaklor, “The Kids are All Right,” 153. 63  Ibid., 166. 64  Ibid., 158.

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Will & Grace’s portrayal of a female coming out narrative serves as an example of its reinforcement of heterosexism65 and heteropatriarchy.66 As in other episodes that focus on Will’s romantic relationships, “Queens for a Day” also positions the character as effeminate (the script directs the actor to “scream like a girl”) and places him in a domestic role by having him spend most of the episode preparing the holiday meal. At the same time, however, the character exhibits dominant and patriarchal tendencies concerning the women he interacts with. In the episode, the female characters are the ones whom Will believes could ruin his chances with his boyfriend. Annette (Lee Garlington), Vince’s mother, is the most threatening. At the episode’s beginning, Will is already aware that she dislikes him for she has never approved of any of her son’s boyfriends in the past. In an attempt to bond with his potential mother-in-law, Will offers to take her shopping and gives her “a whole Pretty Woman, makeover.” Unfortunately, Annette, pressured by Will to try on “four-inch hooker heels and to climb up on the display case” falls and breaks her toe, confirming her initial dislike of him. To salvage any hope for a cordial relationship, Will offers to cook Thanksgiving dinner and host it at the D’Angelo home. Annette is critical of his abilities and, as a possible threat and challenge to Will’s happiness, is vilified, compared to “Mussolini in the blonde rinse” and “a witch.” For Will, Ro’s decision to cancel her wedding and come out to her family becomes another obstacle he must surpass to receive Annette’s approval. As he frantically explains to Jack: “she cannot come out tonight! Because if she does, her mother is somehow gonna blame it on me… Today is my day!” In an attempt to silence Ro until after the holiday, Will says Ro may touch either Karen or Grace’s breasts. Ro agrees without hesitation. In Eaklor’s definition of film’s rebranding of lesbians, the author asserts that in its construct for consumption, “lesbians are doubly disadvantaged as women and as queers, or as both sex and gender outlaws regardless of individual (re)presentation.”67 Will’s misogynist bartering of Grace’s body for Ro’s silence also functions to attract a male heterosexual audience 65  According to authors Kathleen Battles and Wendy Hilton, the NBC sitcom “can be read as reinforcing heterosexism and, thus, can be seen as heteronormative” due to its constant reliance on the convention of feminizing Will (87, 90). 66  Eaklor uses the term to better express “the underpinnings of male domination in gender enforcement” (15). 67  Eaklor, “The Kids Are All Right,” 166.

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offering a depiction that “typically appears in straight porn films.”68 Will’s pimping of his friend sets up Grace as the butt of the joke toward the end of the episode. The scene delivers on the promise of the male heterosexual fantasy by having Ro extend her hand up Grace’s skirt as she pretended to have dropped her napkin. As the scene at the table unfolds tensions between Will and Annette rise causing an outburst from Will: What is wrong with you, lady?! It’s like the only nice bone in your body was in your toe! And that got crushed when you forgot how to walk with shoes on! All I wanted was for you to like me. Because I love Vince and Vince loves you. Do you have any idea how much trouble I’ve gone through today to try to make it perfect for you? Your 16-year-old nephew made out with a woman twice his age. And then another woman ten times his age! Your soon-to-be married daughter is a lesbian! But did you hear about any of that? No! Not until just now, when I accidentally blurted it out!

The outburst summarizes the episode’s subplot in which Grace and Karen made out with Annette’s nephew, Sal, whom they assumed was of legal age. More importantly, it forces Ro’s coming out to her family. The outburst is reminiscent of Brody’s declaration in which the viewer is witness to a “one-sided confession” in which the queer individual’s place within the narrative is “often relegated to that of object rather than subject.”69 Just as Will demonstrated control over Grace’s body, his eruption subverts Ro’s ownership of her own experience. Ro’s secret is now Will’s weapon to use against Annette and her role as matriarch.

Queering the Guido or Guidoing the Queer? The representation of LGBTQIA+ Italian Americans on television has made significant progress since its initial marginalized portrayal of stock and minor characters on screen. The situational comedy Will & Grace and its successors, The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and Difficult People, not only introduce gay Italian American characters but include them as part of the main ensemble as love interests for their male leads. Despite this evolution, these series continue to exploit primitive conventions of Italian  Ibid., 158.  Brody, “Categorizing Coming Out,” 14.

68 69

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American ethnicity, consequently queering the Guido and perpetuating heteronormative ideals regarding gender. The “Q-uido” (on television) is new and unfamiliar, therefore the use of humor and Italian American clichés to facilitate discourse with the audience is optimized by the sitcoms, affording a comedic representation of queerness. According to Sheri L. Manuel, the mainstream media can be queered if portrayals directed to queer audiences are authentic.70 To achieve this goal, the shows forego stereotypical representations of gender and sexuality and instead turn to ethnic ones. Stereotypes, Manuel adds, “create boundaries and oppositions in the normal versus the abnormal.”71 The erroneous versions of the minorities constructed in these programs, however, are directed at a flawed system rather than the characters themselves; the audience responds to laugh with as opposed to at them.72 Comedy, as Davies and Ilott suggest, is used “both to mock the weak and to provide a space in which to challenge and upturn social conventions that serve to stigmatize and alienate those marginalized by mainstream society.”73 Humor, as Bakhtin asserts, can “build a second world and a second life outside of [heteronormative] officialdom.”74 Albeit Cavellero and Plasketes’ fears that stereotypes regarding Italian Americans in media have gone unchecked, the often-exaggerated, jarring, and uncomfortable tropes are precisely what allows humor to function as social critique free of politicization. Laughter, as the driving force of the three series, depoliticizes gender and sexuality in addition to creating more palatable queer Italian American spaces on television.

Works Cited Baker, Aaron and Juliann Vitullo. “Screening the Italian-American Male.” In Masculinity: Bodies, Movies, Culture, ed. Peter Lehman, 213–226. New York: Routledge, 2001. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. Baldo, Michela. “Familiarizing the Gay: Queering the Family Coming Out and Resilience in Mambo Italiano.” Journal of GLBT Family Studies, Vol. 10, No. 1–2 (January 2014): 168–187. 70  Sheri L. Manuel, “Becoming the Homovoyeur: Consuming Homosexual Representation in Queer as Folk,” Social Semiotics, Vol. 19, No. 3 (September 2009): 275. 71  Manuel, “Becoming the Homovoyeur,” 276–277. 72  Davies and Ilott, “Mocking the Weak,” 2. 73  Davies and Ilott, “Mocking the Weak,” 6. 74  Bakhtin, 6.

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Battles, Kathleen and Wendy Hilton-Morrow. “Gay Characters in Conventional Spaces: Will and Grace and the Situation Comedy Genre.” Critical Studies in Media Communications, Vol. 19, No. 1 (March 2002): 87–105. Brody, Evan. “Categorizing Coming Out: The Modern Televisual Mediation of Queer Youth Identification.” The University of Southern California Journal of Film and Television, Vol. 31, Issue 2 (Fall 2011): 35–44. Cavallero, Jonathan J. and George Plasketes. “Gangsters, Fessos, Tricksters, and Sopranos: The Historical Roots of Italian American Stereotype Anxiety,” Journal of Popular Film and Television, 32:2 (2004): 50–73. Davies, Helen, and Sarah Ilott. Comedy and the Politics of Representation: Mocking the Weak. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. De Stefano, George. “Identity Crises: Race, Sex and Ethnicity in Italian American Cinema,” 159–170. In Mediated Ethnicity: New Italian-American Cinema, ed. Giuliana Muscio. New York: City University of New York, 2010. ———. “Fuori per sempre: Gay and Lesbian Italian Americans Come Out,” 565–580. The Routledge History of Italian Americans. Edited by William J. Connell and Stanislao G. Pugliese. New York: Routledge, 2019. Difficult People. Created by Julie Klausner. Hulu, 2015–2017. Eaklor, Vicki L. “The Kids Are All Right but the Lesbians Aren’t: The Illusion of Progress in Popular Film.” Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques, Vol. 38, No. 3 (Winter 2012): 153–170. Kleinman, Sherryl, Matthew B. Ezzel, and A. Corey Frost. “Reclaiming Critical Analysis: The Social Harms of ‘Bitch.’” Sociological Analysis Vol. 3, No. 1, (Spring 2009): 47–68. Manuel, Sheri L. “Becoming the Homovoyer: Consuming Homosexual Representation in Queer as Folk.” Social Semiotics Vol. 19, No.3 (September 2009): 275–291. Murray, Kristen A. “The Last Laugh: Dark Comedy on US Television.” In Taboo Comedy: Television and Controversial Humour. Edited by Chiara Buccaria and Luca Barra, 41–59. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Saturday Night Fever. Directed by John Badham. Paramount Pictures, 1977. Scott, D. Travers. “Coming Out of the Closet: Examining a Metaphor.” Annals of the International Communication Association, Vol. 42, No. 3 (May 2018): 145–154. Rodger, Streitmatter. From “Perverts” to “Fab Five”: The Media’s Changing Depiction of Gay Men and Lesbians. New York: Routledge, 2008. Tamburri, Anthony. Italian/American Short Films and Music Videos: A Semiotic Reading. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2002. Tricarico, Donald. “Consuming Italian Americans: Invoking Ethnicity in the Buying and Selling of Guido.” In Making Italian America: Consumer Culture and the Production of Ethnic Identities, Edited by Simone Cinotto, 178–192. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014.

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The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. Created by Tina Fey and Robert Carlock. Netflix, 2015–2019. Will & Grace. Created by Max Mutchnick and David Kohan. NBC, 1998–2020. Winning, Joanne. “Lesbian Modernism: Writing in and Beyond the Closet.” In The Cambridge Companion to Gay and Lesbian Writing. Edited by Hugh Stevens, 50–64. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

CHAPTER 13

Spotlight: Julio “Giulio” Vincent Gambuto Julio Vincent Gambuto

For me, being Italian is a spiritual calling—not in a yoga/ohm or religious way. It gives me energy and pushes me to share that with the world in as many ways as I can. Italian, to me, is all things joy, beauty, love, color, design, motion. I consider my Italian background a legacy that has been handed down to me. It’s in my cells. It’s in my heart. And I use my work to express it. On the other hand, I consider my Italian American experience a set of traditions, foods, practices that are very much based on family and community. We all know the Italian American experience and the Italian experience can be vastly different. Being an Italian American from Staten Island means respecting my Catholic upbringing, though I no longer practice. It means honoring the traditions, cooking the recipes, and carrying down and forward our family and community rituals. I have long struggled with my Italian Americanness because of my name. I was born Giulio, named after my grandfather, who took his name from his mother, Giulia. When I was a kid, my mom changed the spelling to make it “more American.” She was fearful that I wouldn’t fit in or that I would get ridiculed in school if kids couldn’t pronounce the Italian Gi-. Instead, she made it Julio. I often joke that she made me Latino. So, my J. V. Gambuto (*) New York, NY, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Heim, S. Anatrone (eds.), Spaghetti Sissies Queering Italian American Media, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10197-7_13

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Fig. 13.1  Close-up of Julio “Giulio” Vincent Gambuto, a white man with close-­ cropped hair and a dark shirt, smiles against a red backdrop

experience—day-in-and-day-out—has been one of confusion when I meet people in social or professional settings. They are never sure how to address me, approach me, or talk to me. In some contexts, I have turned Julio into “Jules” to cut through that confusion, but I will always be Julio Vincent Gambuto. Being an out queer person is a privilege. It is a responsibility. It brings me incredible joy. I did not always see it this way. Growing up in a traditional Italian American community as a gay kid brought many challenges.

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Manhood and the projection of manhood, and all that it accompanies and implies—strength, assuredness, even stubbornness, a lack of emotion—are strong foci in Italian American families, and those can be problematic for a young kid struggling with his sexuality. I had to learn that being a man wasn’t about the outward signs we often associate with “tough” Italian Americanness. I think a lot of those signs (images, stories) were crafted in our community—and in American narrative-making and storytelling— because Italians had to be tough when they got to the United States. They had to survive. They had to work hard and rise up. And so I understand where those images and pressures come from. That said, I was a very gay kid! Imagine the braces, 80s/90s fashion, Capezio dancer shoes, and a head full of curly hair. I got a perm in the seventh grade. I was clearly struggling with self-image, confidence, identity. It all made for a lot of pain but ultimately a lot of lesson-learning. Plus, it makes for funny stories now. What I have found incredibly fulfilling is learning more and more about Italian culture and art, as an adult and as a media-maker. That journey helped me reconnect to the joy and spirit of being Italian, at its core. That has been healing and empowering. Being Italian has given me a certain body. And I am only beginning to grow into that body in my 40s. Learning to use that body to express my gender and my sexuality in meaningful, loving, and fun ways has been a journey. But we all take time to grow into our own skin. I consider myself incredibly lucky that along with that body—of that body—comes a sense of Italian joy and love. And I do my best to infuse my life with those. I hug. I kiss. I touch. (Always in appropriate ways.) The need and desire to have a tactile relationship with friends, family, lovers—all of that comes directly from being Italian. And I love it. And I lean into it. As a gay person, I have challenged myself to learn more about the history of queerness in Italy, and in Italian culture and the arts. I am in the opening chapters of that “book” and I cannot get enough of learning how, when, where, and who melds queerness and Italianness—now and throughout history. It is fascinating, and it is proving to be a deeper history than I previously imagined. I made a decision early on in my career that I would use my art to express as much of myself as possible. My work is personal. It’s intimate. It’s heartfelt. It’s funny. But where the queer and the Italian meet can be complex. For some members of the Italian American community, those

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don’t line up; and so some have not embraced my work. For others, they see the nuanced lane in which I work, and that crossover lends a new perspective, a new voice, and a fresh take. That’s really my audience. And those are the people who have elevated me, celebrated my work, and gotten on this wild ride with me.

CHAPTER 14

“Time to Come Out, Girl!”: Queering Italian American Sexuality on TV Land’s Younger Aria Zan Cabot

TV Land’s longest-running comedy-drama television series, Younger (2015–present), produced by Darren Star and based on Pamela Redmond’s 2005 eponymous novel, is centered on the character of Liza Miller (Sutton Foster), a recently divorced 40-something mother who pretends to be 26 in order to find her way back to the publishing career she had abandoned in her twenties. The principal storyline follows Liza as she embarks on her new career in New York, makes new friends, and finds herself torn between competing love interests, the 20-something tattoo artist, Josh (Nico Tortorella), and her employer and successful publisher, Charles (Peter Hermann). However, the series also offers a rare and radical representation of Italian-American and queer identities. In particular, the character of Maggie Amato (Debi Mazar), Liza’s best friend, becomes the driving force behind the plot of the entire show when, in the pilot episode, she convinces Liza to lie about her age and masquerade as a millennial:

A. Z. Cabot (*) Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Heim, S. Anatrone (eds.), Spaghetti Sissies Queering Italian American Media, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10197-7_14

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Maggie: Would you stop feeling sorry for yourself and listen to me? What, no one wants to hire a forty-year-old has-been? Tell ’em you’re twenty-six. Liza: Are you insane? Nobody’s going to believe that. Maggie: People believe what you tell them. They believe the Real Housewives are real. They think that coconut water is gonna shrink their ass. They’ll believe you’re twenty-six. Liza: I’m going to need some highlights. Maggie: Oh, girl, we’re going way bigger than that.1 Maggie, an Italian American artist who lives alone until she invites Liza to become her roommate, establishes the premise for the series by creating the “younger” version of Liza. Maggie’s Williamsburg loft provides an intermediary space between Liza’s two identities as middle-aged mother/ young single professional, and for much of the first season, Maggie is the only character who is permitted to oscillate between these two realities. Maggie’s professional, racial, and sexual identities are similarly fluid: As an artist, she shows her work in warehouses and dive bars, but is also eventually hired as a visiting professor; as an Italian American, she plays with stereotypes of the Italian diaspora while also satirizing such representations and invoking elements of high Italian culture (by speaking Italian fluently, preparing authentic Italian dishes, and aligning herself with a cultured rather than stereotyped view of Italian homosexuality through comparisons of herself to Michelangelo). Maggie’s ability to move freely between and across spaces and to conflate high and low culture can be considered within the framework of twentieth-century literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of Carnival and the carnivalesque. In Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin applied tenets of medieval Carnival to works of western literature—specifically to Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, but also to Boccaccio, Cervantes, and Shakespeare, and focused on the suspended and upended nature of social behaviors and relationships permitted during Carnival: Role reversals, perversions, and an elevation of base materiality, sexuality, mockery, and play over the lofty, intellectual, and authoritative aspects of high literature and culture. For Bakhtin, the celebration of Carnival offered a “temporary 1  Younger, Pilot, written and directed by Darren Star, aired February 24, 2015, on TV Land, https://www.hulu.com/watch/d4bb84e6-dc69-4a7f-bfb0-308ea01ea47c.

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liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions.”2 A critical lens based on the four specific categories of the carnivalesque proposed by Bakhtin (familiar and free interaction, eccentricity, carnivalistic mésalliances, and profanation) offers a useful expedient for examining the specific intersection and function of Maggie’s identities as Italian American/artist/lesbian. Specifically: (1) She plays an instrumental role in Liza’s initial transformation into a millennial, which allows Liza to enter the publishing world (free and familiar contact); (2) She models and enables behaviors that would traditionally be repressed (eccentricity); (3) She facilitates unlikely marriages, both literally and figuratively (mésalliances); (4) She engages in an irreverent debasing of sacred spaces in both Catholic and Jewish contexts (profanation). Within the critical framework of the carnivalesque, it is evident that Maggie’s character consistently creates and occupies spaces “for working out, in a concretely sensuous, half-real and half-play-acted form, a new mode of interrelationship between individuals, counterpoised to the all-­ powerful socio-hierarchical relationships of noncarnival life.”3 By investigating Maggie’s character within the framework of the carnivalesque, this chapter will provide an intersectional analysis of the narrative function of her dual identities as queer and Italian American and show how Younger offers a more inclusive representation of Italian American identities and a fresh perspective for queer, media, and Italian  American studies. First, however, in order to properly frame a discourse around Maggie’s intersectional identities, it will be helpful to establish the queer and Italian American paratexts surrounding the series and to briefly address how Maggie’s characterization differs from earlier representations of queer Italian Americans on mainstream television.

2  Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1984), 10. 3  Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 123.

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Younger’s Queer and Italian-American Paratexts Younger has garnered praise from Queer Review and the Advocate for the quality and quantity of its representation of queer characters and its employment of LGBTQ+ actors, such as Molly Bernard, Nico Tortorella, and Michael Urie.4 Tortorella and Bernard (who plays pansexual publicist, Lauren Heller, on the show) both came out publicly during the show’s run and have expressed gratitude for how the series opened the way for their “public journey through queerness” and larger conversations about sexuality and gender in the media.5 While Younger’s queer paratext has received significant media attention, its Italian American paratext remains largely ignored, but is equally salient: There are several prominent actors of Italian descent on the show, including Urie, Tortorella, and Janeane Garofalo; Miriam Shor (who plays Diana Trout) spent many of her formative years in Italy and her knowledge of Italian is often weaved into the script; and, perhaps most importantly, the show features two Italian American characters, the plumber Enzo (Chris Tardio) and the artist Maggie Amato (Debi Mazar). Offscreen, Younger’s intersection of queer and Italian-American identities is most visible through Nico Tortorella’s public persona as non-binary, pansexual actor, writer, and podcast host. Tortorella has been forthcoming about how the international popularity of their “super straight” character ironically paved the way for queer activism: My favorite thing about playing Josh has been the privilege that comes with it. Younger is on in 170+ different countries and I am known around the 4  See James Kleinmann, “TV Review: Younger Season 7,” The Queer Review, April 13, 2021, https://thequeerreview.com/2021/04/13/tv-review-younger-season-7/, and Tracy E.  Gilchrist, “Sutton Foster, Younger Stars on Queer Rep and Its One True Love Story,” Advocate, May 3, 2021, https://www.advocate.com/television/2021/5/01/sutton-­ foster-younger-stars-queer-rep-its-one-true-love-story. For both Kleinmann, who applauds the show for delivering “some of TV’s best LGBTQ+ characters in recent years,” and Gilchrist, who credits Younger with breaking “new ground for a mainstream show,” the show is unique not only in its representation of characters (Maggie, Lauren, Redmond) whose queerness is highlighted without becoming superficial or essential to every aspect of their characterization, but also in its employment of queer actors like Molly Bernard and Nico Tortorella, who Kleinmann notes “opened up meaningful conversations in the media around queerness, gender identity, and polyamory, often expanding people’s understanding of those labels.” 5  Gilchrist, “Younger Stars on Queer Rep.”

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world as a super straight, super cis, super white bro. Which is so funny to me because that’s sort of just my “male drag.” Nonetheless I know that in our world that is a privilege. It makes my activism, advocacy, and messaging on the LGBTQIAPK+ community that much more easily digestible. Whether we like it or not that is a privilege the system has allotted me. So thanks Josh, love you girl.6

In their 2019 memoir, Space Between: Explorations of Love, Sex, and Fluidity, Tortorella addresses the difficulty of navigating a fluid gender identity within the context of a conservative, midwestern Italian American family. In various episodes recounted in the memoir, it is evident that the “space between” occupied (and eventually embraced) by Tortorella refers not only to non-binary sexual and gender identities, but also the difficulty of coming out to an Italian American family. Tortorella recalls, for example, the painful experience of being outed to their 95-year-old Italian grandmother by a stranger.7 A 2017 episode of Tortorella’s podcast, “The Love Bomb,” which was focused on gender and sexuality, featured future Younger co-star, Janeane Garofalo, who similarly discussed the challenges of coming into her own as an asexual atheist in an Irish-Italian-Catholic family from New Jersey.8 For both Tortorella and Garofalo, the rift between their “Italian” and “American” identities is more than a cultural, linguistic, geographical, or generational gap, and hinges on the intersection of incompatible markers of racial, spiritual, and sexual belonging. Thus, while there have been attempts by cultural studies scholars, such as Anthony Tamburri and Ben Lawton, to close the “ideological gap” between the two terms through orthographic variations such as Italian/ American or ItalianAmerican, for Tortorella, the “space between” is

6  Nico Tortorella, “An It Gets Betters Message,” It Gets Better Project, December 2018, https://itgetsbetter.org/blog/initiatives/an-it-gets-better-message-from-nico-tortorella/ 7  Nico Tortorella, Space Between: Explorations of Love, Sex, and Fluidity (New York: Crown, 2019), 221. 8  Nico Tortorella, host, “E32: A Human I Love Named Janeane,” The Love Bomb (podcast), August 1, 2017, accessed May 1, 2021, https://the-love-bomb-with-nico-tortorella. simplecast.com/episodes/e32-a-human-i-love-named-janeane-jVoDcW1n. Although Garofalo’s character on Younger is a lesbian, neither actor plays an Italian American character on the show and viewers see nothing of Tortorella’s Italian American identity if not for the prominent tattoo of their brother’s name, Rocco, on their left shoulder amid the various makeup tattoos that belong to the Tortorella’s character on the show, who owns a Williamsburg tattoo studio, Inkburg.

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intentionally inhabited with an intent to expand rather than collapse the distance between queerness and Italianness.9 While Tortorella’s starring role on Younger provided the actor with an important platform for challenging representations of Italian  American sexuality in the media, in terms of the series’ storyline and characterization of Italian Americans, it is through the character of Maggie Amato that the audience is clearly and consistently confronted with the intersection of queer and Italian American identities. Taken on its own, Maggie’s character presents a glass ceiling-breaking representation of Italian  American female sexuality, but it is certainly bolstered by the cultural paratext of the actress who plays her, Debi Mazar. A self-proclaimed “it girl”10 in the Italian American popular imaginary, Mazar is a longtime friend of Madonna who appeared in several of Madonna’s music videos, including “Papa Don’t Preach” (1986), “True Blue” (1986), and “Justify My Love” (1990). She then made her filmic debut as Sandy in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990), going on to play Denise in Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever (1991), which tells the story of the interracial affair between a black man, Flipper (Wesley Snipes), and an Italian American woman, Angie (Annabella Sciorra). Offscreen, Mazar, who splits her time between New York and Italy, created and co-hosted the Cooking Channel’s Extra Virgin (2011–2015) with her husband, Italian celebrity chef Gabriele Corcos.11 Starting with her appearance in the music video for “Justify My Love,” which centers, as Tamburri has noted, on the “transgression of boundaries and behavioral code switching,”12 as women move from the “bottom” to the “top” and replace the male lover role by assuming his position and his attire, Mazar has occupied a place in Madonna’s transgressive oeuvre, in which the theme of female sexuality is not “all-encompassing” insofar as 9  See Anthony Julian Tamburri, To Hyphenate or Not to Hyphenate: The Italian/American Writer: An Other American (Montreal: Guernica Editions, 1991), 47, and Ben Lawton, “What is ItalianAmerican Cinema?” Voices in Italian Americana 6, no. 1 (1995): 27. Italianamerican is also the title of Martin Scorsese’s 1974 documentary about his Italian roots. 10  “Couch Surfing: Debi Mazar,” PeopleTv, May 22, 2020, accessed August 30, 2021. https://peopletv.com/video/couch-surfing-debi-mazar/. 11  As noted on her TV Land profile, Mazar and her husband received a James Beard Foundation Award for their show, which relaunched as “Extra Virgin Americana” in 2016, while their Extra Virgin cookbook became a New York Times best seller. https://www. tvland.com/shows/younger. Accessed May 6, 2021. 12  Anthony Julian Tamburri, Italian/American Short Films and Music Videos: A Semiotic Reading (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2002), 69.

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“religion and race play equally important and integral parts […] together these three themes—sexuality, religion, and race—serve as integral components of Madonna’s visione del mondo.”13 These themes are similarly intertwined in Maggie’s visione del mondo on Younger, and Mazar’s association with Madonna and Scorsese, two of the most formidable Italian Americans in the twenty-first-century film and music industry, and her history of playing Italian American characters onscreen inevitably have a palimpsestic effect on how viewers familiar with the actress experience the interplay between cultural and sexual identity on the show.

From Anthony Marantino to Maggie Amato: Queer Italian American Friends on Mainstream Television At first glance, there is nothing particularly groundbreaking about Maggie’s character. As a single, white, wealthy, and fashionable lesbian, she is in many ways emblematic of the chic lesbian that, according to cultural studies scholar Ava Parsemain, sanitized and depoliticized dominant LGBTQ+ representation on mainstream television in the nineties and early 2000s.14 While eschewing married, suburban life, Maggie exhibits a stereotypically Gen-X, binary perception of gender and sexuality. For example, in the season 5 episode entitled “Big Little Liza,” she and Liza meet Lauren’s new “pansexual, homoromantic” intern and are confused by the use of they/them pronouns: Lauren: Aren’t they great? Liza: Who? Lauren: Tam, my assistant. You just met them. Maggie: I only saw one person. Lauren: Tam is gender-queer. Liza: Gender-queer? Oh. Oh, so he’s bi? Lauren: Oh, my God. Liza, no. Please, do not—no, do not use that word here. Tam’s pan-sexual, homo-romantic, and their  Tamburri, Italian/American Short Films, 56.  Ava Parsemain has criticized queer representation in television shows of the late 1990s, such as Ellen and Will & Grace, noting that “chic lesbians and normal gays were an improvement over earlier stereotypes such as dykes and sissies, but they perpetuated a new stereotype: the rich, educated, white homosexual.” Ava Parsemain, The Pedagogy of Queer TV (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 26. 13 14

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­pronouns are they, them, and their. All right, no more questions. It’s offensive. The LGBTQIAPK community has been through enough. Maggie: You lost me after T. Lauren: Lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer/questioning, intersex, asexual, pan-/poly-, kink. Liza: Thank you. Lauren: You’re welcome. Please keep your mingling to a minimum. Maggie: Ooh, I was less confused in the closet.15 The encounter inspires Liza to challenge workplace discrimination by refusing, later in the same episode, to “identify as any age.” Claiming to be “post-age,” she refers to herself as “age queer” to evade rumors about her age, a line that sparked media backlash and accusations that Younger writers had turned “the LGBTQ community into a punchline” through a poor analogy.16 In moments such as this, Maggie’s portrayal appears to stay true to the stock character of the gay best friend and could almost be construed as a reboot of Sex and the City’s only gay Italian American character, Anthony Marantino (Mario Cantone), an essentially flat character whose narrative is limited to providing comic levity and support to his straight female friend (both shows, though separated by nearly two decades, were created by Darren Star and focus on the love lives and friendships of professional women in New York City, with a particular 15  Younger, “Big Little Liza,” season 5, episode 5, directed by Miriam Shor, written by Ashley Skidmore, aired July 10, 2018, on TV Land, https://www.tvland.com/episodes/ cgejyi/younger-big-little-liza-season-5-ep-5. 16  Lindsay Denninger, “‘Age Queer’ Is Not A Thing and ‘Younger’ Should Have Known Better,” Bustle.com, July 10, 2018, https://www.bustle.com/p/youngers-use-of-queerlanguage-­really-missed-the-mark-fans-deserve-better-9693934. While recognizing the reality of ageism, Denniger bristles at the comparison of “the struggles of a middle aged white woman trying to find a job in the New York City publishing world […] to the discrimination that the LGBTQ community faces.” Younger creator, Darren Star, despite enjoying a prominent role in the Hollywood queer community and being known for his inclusion of gay characters in hit shows of the 1990s, such as Melrose Place and Sex and the City, has received flak for insensitive or inaccurate representations of LGBTQ+ characters in the past. A recent Vanity Fair article about the upcoming Sex and the City reboot poses the question of how the show could “get gay people so wrong” and how could “openly gay writers—primarily creator Darren Star and executive producer Michael Patrick King—sorely misrepresent a group they’re a part of?” Cassie Da Costa, “When Sex and the City Returns, Will It Finally Get Queer People Right?” Vanity Fair, January 13, 2021, https://www.vanityfair.com/ hollywood/2021/01/when-sex-and-the-city-returns-will-it-finally-get-queer-people-right.

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focus on a literary protagonist in a love triangle).17 The pilot episode of Younger intimates a similar dynamic: Maggie, part of a mass-media milieu in which “queer” is “synonymous for ‘hip’ or ‘fashionable,’”18 gives Liza a kind of Queer-Eye-for-the-middle-aged-Jersey-mom makeover and offers her a spare room in her loft while grooming her to pass for a 20-something millennial. However, unlike the stock character of the supportive gay friend embodied by Anthony Marantino, Maggie’s sexual identity plays a key but only partial role in the storyline and she is not at all a minor character. Moreover, her status as an Italian American is deeply intertwined with the discourse of her sexual identity in a way that is entirely absent in Sex and the City.

“I’m the Garlic Knot”: Maggie’s Eccentricity From Bottom to Top, Inside and Out I will now turn to some specific examples of how Maggie’s actions and behaviors on the show exemplify the first two categories of carnival identified by Bakhtin—free and familiar contact and eccentricity—alongside “the peculiar logic of the ‘inside out’ (à l’envers), of the ‘turnabout,’ of a continual shifting from top to bottom, from front to rear, of numerous parodies and travesties.”19 Free and familiar contact is defined as the suspension of “hierarchical structure and all the forms of terror, reverence, piety, and etiquette connected with it—that is, everything resulting from socio-hierarchical inequality or any other form of inequality among people (including age).”20 Bakhtin’s second category, eccentricity, is a natural consequence of the freedom of interaction that arises from the opportunity to act outside of the boundaries of “the all-powerful socio-hierarchical relationships of noncarnival life.”21 In a general sense, the entire 17  More than a decade ago, a Salon.com article had earmarked Stanford and Anthony as “tragically asexual helpmates whose main role has always been to provide relationship advice to the show’s straight female characters.” Thomas Rogers, “Why Sex and the City is bad for the gays,” Salon.com, May 28, 2010. https://www.salon.com/2010/05/28/ sex_and_the_city_bad_for_gays/. 18  Parsemain cites the example of the original Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, in which “the Fab Five were experts in shopping, fashion, gastronomy, beauty and interior design who trained heterosexual men in proper consumption” (27). 19  Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, 11. 20  Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 123. 21  Bakhtin, 123.

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premise of the series, which carries it through all seven seasons, is based on the “free and familiar contact” that Liza is able to establish with her new friends, lovers, and colleagues by freeing herself of the unequal landscape created by workplace ageism. By encouraging Liza to lie about her age and giving her a makeover and a place to live, Maggie creates the conditions for Liza’s free and familiar contact. In the third episode of the series, she helps Liza to move out of her house in New Jersey and urges her to let go of her insecurities about dating her new (and much younger) love interest, Josh, by circumventing Liza (“I’m not talking to you”) and crouching to address her vagina directly: “There is this unbelievably exciting sexual world out there that you’ve been missing out on. It’s time to come out, girl!”22 This apostrophe to Liza’s vagina is only one of many examples of how Maggie embodies Bakhtinian ‘turnabouts.’ Maggie’s narrative function throughout the series is characterized by shifts and reversals that are directly connected to her Italian heritage and to associations between Italy and “high culture” on the one hand, and between “Little” Italy (Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island) and “low culture” on the other. For example, in season 4, she compares Liza’s opportunity to work with a promising author who also happens to be the wife of Liza’s boss and current love interest, publisher Charles (Hermann), to getting a scoop of gelato topped with a pubic hair: My Uncle Frank used to go to this restaurant in Bayside. It’s a family business, if you know what I mean. So, for dessert, the owner serves him this big cup of gelato. It’s beautiful, it’s gorgeous. But on top is this crazy black pube just right there. So, what does he do? He eats it, ’cause he has to, otherwise, he’d have a bottle broken over his head […] You’ve got a nice thing with a pube on top, that’s all I’m saying.23

In opposition to what recent scholars of Italian American studies have called a “compulsive obsession with mafia images”24 on television, Maggie 22  Younger, “IRL,” season 1, episode 3, written by Dottie Zicklin and Eric Zicklin, directed by Darren Star, aired April 7, 2015, on TV Land, https://www.hulu.com/watch/352870be-­ 29dc-­47d9-8d9e-2bc499e460c2. 23  Younger, season 4, episode 8, “The Gelato and the Pube,” directed by Peter Lauer, written by Dottie Dartland Zicklin and Eric Zicklin, aired August 16, 2017 on TV Land, https://www.hulu.com/watch/11ba02b7-8414-4a48-a352-1a4d7528c3b5. 24  Alan Gravano and Ryan Calabretta-Sajder, eds., “Introduction,” Italian Americans on Screen: Challenging the Past, Re-Theorizing the Future (United States: Lexington Books, 2021), 4.

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Fig. 14.1  Maggie leans out the window of her apartment building wearing a low-cut shirt and a wrap on her head; she is making an “ok” symbol with her hand and she looks at someone not pictured in the street below

collapses traditional associations of mobsters with sex, money, power, and Italian food into a single, unappetizing and unglamorous a cup of gelato topped with a “crazy black pube.” Similarly, in season 5, Maggie’s loft becomes a fixture on a Gray Line sightseeing tour of the city. As the double-decker bus periodically circles by her apartment and the tour guide points out Brooklyn’s historic Nitehawk Cinema, Maggie leans out of the window with half-feigned anger (Fig. 14.1): Maggie: Hey, cafon’, five times a day I gotta hear this? Tour operator: I’ve got a permit! Maggie: Yeah, well, I gotta big bucket of piss. Tour operator: Tu sei pazza! Maggie: Testa di cazzo! Tour operator: Don’t mind the locals, guys. Liza: Wait, you wouldn’t really pee in a bucket and throw it? Maggie: You do what you gotta do.25 25  Younger, “A Titanic Problem,” season 5, episode 2, directed by Steven Tsuchida, written by Dottie Dartland Zicklin and Eric Zicklin, aired June 12, 2018 on TV Land, https:// www.hulu.com/watch/e905cbe2-15f3-4ed2-acde-3026a8ad0ef6.

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In their next interaction with bus, Liza still has not grasped the role that Maggie playfully adopts when she calls down from the window, “Hey, stronzo, pipe down!:” Maggie: Relax, I know what I’m doing. Idiota, keep on moving! Tour operator: Ladies and gentlemen, on the right, we have one of our colorful locals. Her family immigrated from Italy in the 1920s. Back then, Williamsburg had thousands of immigrant families. Maggie: You know what, you’re gentrifying my neighborhood. Because of yous, my rent is going up! Now, get moving! I got a big bucket of piss here! Tour operator: [laughing] I told you she was colorful. Maggie: “Heh, heh, heh,” yourself. Liza: So, you’re a part of the tour now? Maggie: Fifty bucks a pop. And on Friday, I get to throw apple juice at ’em. Here, again, Maggie inverts top and bottom by compounding food (gelato, apple juice) with genitalia (a pube, piss) and through the upended visual imagery of the testa di cazzo (a dickhead, literally). Moreover, by performing “low” Italian  American culture through her references to mobsters and gelato and her use of code-switching and colloquialisms (gotta, yous), Maggie engages what Tamburri has described as “a thematically grounded discourse of nostalgia, for which leitmotifs such as pizza and nonna continue to possess high aesthetic currency.”26 However, rather than reinforce the “aesthetic hierarchy” that, in Tamburri’s view, divides exponents of high Italian culture from “the Italian/American community of creative writers and critical thinkers,” Maggie’s playful inversions actually serve to dismantle and liberate her character (and ultimately also the audience) from traditional cultural hierarchies, enabling her to operate both within and outside of them, making her a true eccentric. A good example of this can be found in the season 6 episode in which Maggie’s naturopath love interest, Beth (Nicole Ari Parker), inserts a clove of garlic into Maggie’s vagina as a natural remedy for a yeast infection while Maggie is preparing an Italian meal for Liza and her colleagues, 26  Anthony Julian Tamburri, A Semiotic of Ethnicity: In (Re)Cognition of the Italian/ American Writer (SUNY Press, 1998), 131.

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Fig. 14.2  Liza, Charles, and Kelsey are seated at a colorfully laid dinner table while Maggie stands over them preparing to serve polenta

Charles and Kelsey (Hilary Duff). Maggie’s kitchen often serves as an anchor for many of the characters on the show and is the locus amoenus where free and familiar contact becomes possible. At Maggie’s table, the complicated relationships between Liza, Kelsey, and Charles (who work together but also navigate tenuous boundaries between professional collegiality, friendship, and romance) dissolve as they gather around a shared table to enjoy wine and food prepared by Maggie. As she serves the first course, her guests comment on a mystery aroma (Fig. 14.2): Kelsey: Maggie, this looks so good. Charles: It does. Is there garlic bread on the menu tonight? Maggie: Oh, no. Kelsey: Really? ’Cause I’m totally smelling it. Charles: Yeah. Maggie: Well, there’s no bread. You don’t serve bread with polenta […] Liza: Oh my gosh, I just got it. Is there something in the oven? Maggie: Not exactly.27 27  Younger, season 6, episode 4, “An Inside Glob,” directed by Miriam Shor, written by Alison Brown, aired July 10, 2019 on TV Land, https://www.hulu.com/watch/5c2f28120e64-4a47-8951-d70f6cf04b6a.

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As the guests go on to compare the odor to a “garlic knot” and then “escargot,” Maggie finally admits the source of the odor. Her declaration—“It’s me! I’m the garlic knot!”—is met with laughter rather than disgust, and affirms her ability to eradicate binary divisions (high/low, clean/dirty) and appeal to a deeper connection between food and sexuality. Maggie not only consistently reinforces the connection between food, drink, and “the grotesque body,” which are so closely connected for Bakhtin that it is “difficult to draw a line between them,”28 but she also uses food as a medium for challenging the Italian/Italian American binary. While she is able to perform and parody the role of the Italian immigrant yelling from her window, she is also able to produce and uphold elements of high Italian culture, in this case in the form of a rigorous adherence to certain gastronomical norms (it is not insignificant that, at the height of this embarrassing episode, Maggie chooses to emphasize that the smell in her kitchen cannot be from baking bread since bread and polenta—two starches—cannot be served together).

“Two Worlds Coming Together”: Maggie’s Mésalliances The marriage of traditionally opposed elements is at the heart of the third category of Bakhtin’s carnivalesque, that of mésalliances, or the bringing together of “all things that were once self-enclosed, disunified, distanced from one another by a noncarnivalistic hierarchical worldview.”29 On Younger, it is undoubtedly Maggie who “brings together, unifies, weds, and combines the sacred with the profane, the lofty with the low, the great with the insignificant, the wise with the stupid.”30 While mésalliances are generally understood as the figurative union of opposites, Maggie is also involved with several literal marriages and romantic relationships between unlikely partners, most notably between the two characters that personify the Italian/Italian American binary: Diana Trout (Miriam Shor) and Enzo de Luca (Chris Tardio). Diana, the head of marketing at Empirical Press, meets Enzo, an Italian American plumber from Staten Island, in season 3 when she knocks on the door of an adjacent apartment to complain about construction  Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, 279.  Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, 112. 30  Bakhtin, 112. 28 29

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noise before city ordinance hours and encounters Enzo at work in a white undershirt and gold chain. He promptly informs Diana that what she really needs is not “peace” or “privacy,” but “to get fucked.”31 In an unexpected turn, Diana gives Liza her opera tickets for that evening in order to spend the night with Enzo, only to discover upon returning to the apartment that he has moved to another jobsite in Westchester (“Pipe’s been laid, ma’am,” another worker informs her). They reconnect in season 5 when Diana’s toilet gets clogged during a work party she is hosting (season 6 concludes with their wedding, and season 7 has them offscreen on an extended honeymoon in Italy). Various binary oppositions (suburb/city, blue collar/black tie) suggest the apparent misalliance between Diana and Enzo, who represent the nuances of Italian and Italian American culture and the tension between high and low culture. While Diana is presented as a cultured opera-lover and Italophile who studied art history in Florence and speaks Italian fluently, Enzo’s character is associated with stereotypes of Italian Americans: Working  class machismo, Latin lovers (viewers learn in season 5 that he starred in a porno),32 mammoni (Enzo lives with his mother), food, and the mafia. On their first date, Enzo takes Diana to an Italian restaurant in Staten Island and she raises an eyebrow when the waitress appears with a wheel of parmesan and begins to prepare a tableside dish “compliments of Mr. De Rosa:” Enzo: What? Diana: No, nothing. Just, the other night at my party we played Mafia, and now … Enzo: Okay, two things. One, don’t say that out loud again. And two, Mr. D. is on the City Council. Diana: But, I mean, you … you did something for him? Enzo: Yeah, I put new copper pipes in his summer house. Turned it around quick so he could throw a campaign event.33

 Younger, season 3, episode 4, “A Night at the Opera,” directed by Tricia Brock, written by Grant Sloss, aired October 19, 2016 on TV Land, https://www.hulu.com/watch/f1d0c 6a4-­99a9-­4258-8d18-334ef4096060. 32  Younger, season 5, episode 9, “Honk if You’re Horny,” directed by Todd Biermann, written by Alison Brown, aired August 7, 2018 on TV Land, https://www.hulu.com/ watch/4f298c46-868f-4d6e-a1cb-f9c456bac373. 33  Younger, season 5, episode 4, “The Talented Mr. Ridley,” directed by Peter Lauer, written by Grant Sloss, aired on June 26, 2018 on TV Land, https://www.hulu.com/watch/ b93302b0-f2e3-4e4e-afa9-cbaa788d680c. 31

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Starting with the five-hundred-dollar bottle of wine that he orders during the meal, Enzo repeatedly attempts to debunk Diana’s assumptions about him (that he has ties to the mafia, that he is uncultured) and he pursues her despite his mother’s criticism of Diana’s non-Italian background and her age (“non sono cavoli suoi,” Diana tells her in impeccable Italian). Nonetheless, race, class, and age present considerable obstacles in their relationship: In season 5, Diana attempts to leave Enzo on the grounds that they are “from two different worlds” and in season 6, after making the local news for his successful extraction of a fatberg from the New York City sewer system, Enzo almost breaks up with Diana after she admits having imagined herself with a “cultured, sophisticated, man of the world.”34 Because the fundamental incongruity between Diana and Enzo lies in the imaginary of Italian as high class (characterized by Diana’s passion for opera, fine art, fine dining, and literature) and Italian American as low class, it is only through the character of Maggie, who occupies both spheres—high and low, Italian and Italian American—that their union is made possible. Maggie first meets the couple in season 5 when her artwork is featured at the Whitney Biennial and Diana, a Fellow of the museum, brings Enzo as her date (“I’m bringing a blue-collar companion to a black-tie event. Well, at least I’ll finally meet this Maggie”).35 Later in the season, when Diana is invited to a Sunday meal with Enzo’s family and is instructed by Enzo’s mother to bring a dish, she accepts Liza’s offer to enlist Maggie’s aid: Diana: Call Sant Ambroeus. I need a knockout Italian dish. And put it in one of those casserole containers so it looks homemade. Enzo’s mother invited me to a family potluck, and she will be judging me with all of her unibrow. Liza: Oh, well, Maggie could help. Her lasagna is legendary. The first time I ate it, I cried. Diana: Crying is good. Inducing a major cardiac event would be better. Call Maggie.36 34  Younger, “Flush with Love,” season 6, episode 2, directed by Steven Tsuchida, written by Don Roos, aired June 19, 2019 on TV Land. https://www.hulu.com/watch/7462c5eb52c2-4cf5-bd14-043a35c19ee5. 35  Younger, season 5, episode 6, “Sex, Liza and Rock & Roll,” directed by Steven Tsuchida, written by Joe Murphy, aired July 17, 2018 on TV Land, https://www.hulu.com/watch/ bd1f1886-890f-4eb1-86a6-398c75b7c35f. 36  Younger, season 5, episode 10, “Girls on the Side,” directed by Todd Biermann, written by Joe Murphy, aired August 14, 2018 on TV Land, https://www.hulu.com/watch/ee1a26f25979-4370-8ce9-c085845db192.

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Enzo’s mother is impressed with Maggie’s lasagna alla bolognese, but the ruse fails when Diana puts cheese on the seafood spaghettini: Ma: Who puts cheese on seafood? Enzo: Ma, it doesn’t matter. Ma: Oh, Madonna. She may be smart in the business, but she’s a dummy in the kitchen. Diana: Okay, I’m done. I am too old to fight. Ma: Yeah. You’re too old. You’re an old lady who can’t cook. Enzo: Ma! Diana, don’t listen to her. Ma: You didn’t make that lasagna. And you’re not right for my son! You’re not Italian. The scene is one of many in which food serves as a marker of both cultural belonging and taboo; even though Diana presents an authentic dish, speaks Italian, and lived in Italy, she is deemed “not Italian” enough by Enzo’s mother through the culinary faux pax of mixing cheese with fish. Yet, love prevails, wedding planning ensues, and in the season 6 finale, “Forever,” Maggie again intercedes as a mediator. Enzo calls Diana to Queens for the unveiling of his Uncle Joe’s wedding gift. Uncle Joe (“the artist in the family” and Enzo’s godfather with a “small G”) proudly presents an ice sculpture he has designed for their reception, a full-scale toilet featuring a trout jumping out of the bowl: “Yours is my masterpiece. I had to find something that would represent your two worlds coming together […] The toilet is you, Enzo, and, Diana, you are the fish, a beautiful trota like you”37 (trota being the Italian translation of Diana’s last name). After Diana panics, Liza calls Maggie with a plea for assistance and Maggie intervenes, calling on her identity as both an artist and a fellow Italian American (Fig. 14.3): Maggie: Bellissimo, maestoso. Complimenti, Giuseppe. Joe: Coming from a real artist like you, Miss Amato, that means everything. Lauren: Aw, look at you two bonding. It’s like when Michelangelo and da Vinci would get together over drinks and talk about boys. I love it.

37  Younger, “Forever,” season 6, episode 12, directed by Peter Lauer, written by Don Roos, aired September 4, 2019, on TV Land, https://www.hulu.com/watch/ba04b8f7-f5394c77-8934-a60bc24958d5.

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Fig. 14.3  Maggie and Joe stand side-by-side in Joe’s workshop looking at his fish ice sculpture

Maggie: Isn’t this too important of a piece to throw it away at a wedding? You know, I know a gallery in Brooklyn that would love this. We invite the critics. We watch it melt. Performance arts. I mean, you must have something else here that we can give them instead, possibly a Venus de Milo or an Empire State Building? Joe: Oh, you flatter me, artista. This scene, which introduces the first of two Michelangelo references in the series in which Maggie draws on her identities as artist/queer/Italian to compare herself to the Renaissance artist, creates a dialogue between high and low art (Uncle Joe is likened to da Vinci; the Venus de Milo is lumped together with souvenir artwork of the Empire State Building). The problem of how to tactfully keep Joe’s toilet sculpture outside of the wedding venue is unintentionally resolved when Lauren straddles the sculpture to take a selfie (which she captions “Pussy on Ice, until we women get the respect we deserve”); when Lauren gets stuck to the trout, Maggie pours hot coffee on the ice to free her, destroying part of the sculpture in the process. At the wedding reception, the sculpture—repaired and re-titled by Maggie to feature a series of hearts emerging from the toilet bowl—is featured as a centerpiece:

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Liza:

Wow, “Flush with Love.” You did this? It’s beautiful. How did Uncle Joe take it? Maggie: Not well. I had to gift him three of my big blue booty pieces and a case of prosecco. Lauren: I think you should have left it just the way I did, give the bride something borrowed and blue—a piece of my cooch. Speaking of which, how are you with wound care? Maggie: I am familiar with the territory. Maggie’s familiarity with the “territory” of base materiality and in general the association between her character and the conflation of food with genitalia, excrement, and urine, which reaches its apex in the toilet sculpture on the banquet table, exemplifies the kind of “parodistic inversion” and “grotesque view of the world” that, according to scholar Renate Lachmann, challenges the natural boundaries between the human body and the world.38 For Maggie, as for Bakhtin, “dung and urine lend a bodily character to matter, to the world, to the cosmic elements, which become closer, more intimate, more easily grasped, for this is the matter, the elemental force, born from the body itself.”39 The double entendre in the title of the sculpture, “Flush with Love,” and its placement on the banquet table both reiterate Maggie’s continual facilitation of “free” interplay between high and low, mind and body, sacred and profane.

“The Shiksa in the Mikveh”: Maggie’s Profanations If the character of Enzo presents a series of stereotypes about Italian  American sexuality, most often represented two-dimensionally in mainstream television through ultra-heterosexual figures, Maggie’s relationships instead provide an example of the fourth and final carnivalistic category identified by Bakhtin, that of profanation, which encompasses “carnivalistic blasphemies, a whole system of carnivalistic debasings and bringings down to earth, carnivalistic obscenities linked with the reproductive power of the earth and the body, carnivalistic parodies on sacred texts and sayings.”40 Profanation is central to nearly all of Maggie’s sexual 38  Renate Lachmann, “Bakhtin and Carnival: Culture as Counter-Culture,” Cultural Critique (Winter, 1988–1989): 147. 39  Bakhtin, Rabelais, 335. 40  Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 123.

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and romantic relationships as she navigates the mésalliances of her queerness and her Italian heritage, her maternal role among Liza’s circle of friends despite her resistance to traditional gender roles, and her Catholic background alongside her irreverent stance toward tradition and the patriarchy. Maggie’s relationships often expose the tensions between her Italian-Catholic background and her sexual identity, a prime example being her romance in season 3 with an Orthodox Jewish woman, Malkie (Sally Pressman). After they bond over heirloom tomatoes at a community garden, Malkie invites Maggie to a party at her boutique and Maggie, not realizing that Malkie is Orthodox, once again makes her “famous bolognese”: Maggie: It’s an aphrodisiac. The secret is the sausage. Liza: I thought you guys avoided sausage.41 Here, for the second time, Maggie’s meat sauce is central to the question of in-group belonging. The consumption of meat—a food item enjoyed in excess by many during Carnival, but forbidden in Catholic contexts during the post-Carnival Lenten period—is presented as antithetical to Malkie’s sexual identity as a lesbian (who avoids “sausage”) as well as to her spiritual identity as an Orthodox Jew. When Maggie arrives at Malkie’s store, which is filled with “stylish clothing for the modest woman, mostly Orthodox Jewish women,” her realization leads to an awkward encounter (Fig. 14.4): Maggie: I thought you were gay, not Orthodox. Malkie: Well, why can’t I be both? I’m what you might call an Orthodyke.42 41  Younger, “P is for Pancake,” season 3, episode 5, directed by Peter Lauer, written by Jessie Cantrell, aired October 26, 2016, on TV Land, https://www.hulu.com/watch/ 51100c0f-f341-4db1-952d-945154999a10. 42  Younger, “P is for Pancake.” The term ‘Orthodyke’ has been embraced by several groups in the U.S. and abroad, and reception of Younger’s use of it was largely positive. Miryam Kabakov, executive director of Eshel, a national network whose mission is to provide support for Jewish LGBTQ+ families, Malkie’s appearance on the series helped to bring “this underground group to light.” See also Linda Buchwald, “An Orthodox Lesbian Character—and Other Reasons to Watch ‘Younger’,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, November 25, 2016, https://www.jta.org/2016/11/25/culture/ an-orthodox-lesbian-character-and-other-reasons-to-watch-younger.

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Fig. 14.4  Maggie is smiling, wearing elegant black attire and holding a jar of meat sauce

Malkie’s status as both rather than either/or helps Maggie to reconcile her own spiritual and sexual identities, and she later reveals to Malkie, “it’s so cool how you’ve managed to hold on to your faith and your sexuality […] You know, the nuns at Saint Mary’s almost scared me straight.”43 This is an important turning point for Maggie’s character in the show, but also for the representation of Italian Americans on mainstream television in general, as Younger’s portrayal of an interfaith lesbian relationship heeds the call put forth by Tamburri more than 20 years ago, when he wrote that “Italian/American cultural interlocutors must therefore abandon the discourse of binary oppositions—the us against them—and adopt, instead, one that also takes into consideration the similarities, of varying degrees and intensities, of experience that Italian Americans and all the other minority and majority ethnic/racial/sexual groups have and continue to encounter.”44 43  Younger, “Me, Myself, and O,” season 3, episode 6, directed by Peter Lauer, written by Lyle Friedman and Ashley Skidmore, aired November 2, 2016, on TV Land, https://www. hulu.com/watch/ce7df527-3e8d-447c-b8f0-0b057aed6411. 44  Tamburri, A Semiotic of Ethnicity, 131.

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Maggie convinces Liza to accompany her to a “spiritual spa” where Malkie is planning to meet up with her ex, Sarah. Neither Maggie nor Liza realizes that the spa is actually a mikveh, a ritual bath used by Jewish women in a rite of purification, until Liza reads the ten commandments of the “Modern Mikveh” posted at the entrance and expresses concern that they shouldn’t be there.45 Maggie brushes her off and enters the bath, where one of the women notices the crucifix tattoo on Maggie’s back and alerts the other women to the “shiksa in the mikveh,” prompting a frantic exodus from the pool (Fig. 14.5).

Fig. 14.5  Liza stands in the back, wrapped in a robe, while Maggie enters a pool full of women, with one woman in the foreground with her hair slicked back and her mouth open 45  As described by the Jewish Women’s Archive (JWA), the mikveh, which is “derived from ancient notions of purity and impurity” and the “need for women to purify themselves after menstruation or childbirth,” has in recent times been both “rejected by some as patriarchal and oppressive” and also “reinvented by diverse groups of Jews to be more inclusive and to meet contemporary religious needs and desires” (https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/ mikveh). The real-life Modern Mikveh Movement (MMM) has exponents in various parts of North America and Israel and is at the center of recent lectures given by Dr. Cara Rock-­ Singer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. See for example, https://www.wpr.org/ modern-mikveh-movement-and-alchemy-queer-immersions and https://sts.wisc.edu/ event/rock-singer-lunch-seminar/. See also Allison Hoffman, “The New American Mikveh,” in Tablet, August 13, 2012, https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/belief/articles/the-­ new-­american-mikveh, accessed May 17, 2021.

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The second time Maggie confronts her Catholic upbringing is during her trip with Liza to Ireland for Josh and Clare’s wedding, during which she seduces the mother-of-the-bride, Noreen (Deirdre O’Kane). After rescuing Maggie from a peat bog that swallowed her “best calf” the week before, Noreen invites Maggie to clean up at her house. In the next scene, the audience finds them seated at Noreen’s kitchen table: Noreen: So, tell me about yourself, Maggie. Maggie: Well, I’m born in Queens. I’m an artist, gay… Noreen: Oh! Maggie: You sound surprised. I mean, they do have lesbians here in Ireland, right? Noreen: We call them nuns. I was reacting to “artist.” ’Cause I sort of fancy myself as being one too.46 The scene cuts to a view of the back of a canvas as Noreen explains to Maggie that she has been stuck painting the same landscape since her husband’s death: Noreen: It’s this image that just comes to me in my dreams. These two rounded hills, and then there’s this valley where they meet, and right in the center, there’s an opening or a cave. I can’t explain it. I’ve never been in there, but I’d love to. I really would (Fig. 14.6). Maggie: And what’s that pink thing? Noreen: A boulder, I guess. Just a round little nubby sort of thing right on top of the cave. You can touch it if you want. Actually, no. It’s still wet. You know… ever since I lost my husband, I’ve thought about being a nun. Maggie: No shit. The explicit humor of Noreen’s vaginal dreamscape belies the important insight that it provides into Maggie’s influence on other women’s creative endeavors. Noreen’s painting is in fact rather reminiscent of the 46  Younger, “Irish Goodbye,” season 4, episode 12,” directed by Todd Biermann, written by Don Roos and Joe Murphy, aired September 13, 2017, on TV Land, https://www.hulu. com/watch/7cef1005-699c-4fc7-a752-e722edb8a9b5.

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Fig. 14.6  Maggie and Noreen sit in the studio, on either side of the painting, their backs to us so we share their point of view. The painting shows a landscape with pink hills, a dark pink cave and a blue sky or, looked at another way, a naked woman on her back, legs open, breasts in the background

“world” of the unnamed woman in Hélène Cixous’ essay, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” in which the French feminist exhorts women artists and writers to abandon phallogocentric models in favor of “female-sexed texts:” I have been amazed more than once by a description a woman gave me of a world all her own which she had been secretly haunting since early childhood. A world of searching, the elaboration of a knowledge, on the basis of a systematic experimentation with the bodily functions, a passionate and precise interrogation of her erotogeneity. This practice, extraordinarily rich and inventive, in particular as concerns masturbation, is prolonged or accompanied by a production of forms, a veritable aesthetic activity, each stage of rapture inscribing a resonant vision, a composition, something beautiful. Beauty will no longer be forbidden. I wished that that woman would write and proclaim this unique empire so that other women, other unacknowledged sovereigns, might exclaim: I, too, overflow; my desires have invented new desires, my body knows unheard-of songs.47

47  Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” trans. Keith Cohen, Paula, Signs 1, no. 4 (Summer, 1976): 876.

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Maggie’s support for Noreen’s burgeoning artistic impulses and sexual desires is not dissimilar from the dynamic between Maggie and Liza throughout the series, as Liza’s “younger” identity becomes less a masquerade than a vehicle for embracing her literary aspirations. Just as Cixous insists in her essay that it is “time to liberate the New Woman from the Old by coming to know her—by loving her for getting by, for getting beyond the Old without delay, by going out ahead of what the New Woman will be,”48 Maggie pushes both Liza and Noreen to abandon the “old” paradigmatic framework within which both women’s identities as wives and mothers had previously been inscribed. Maggie introduces herself to Noreen by listing her identity as an artist first, and her sexual identity second, but Noreen’s interest in Maggie actually lies in the intersection between the two. Thus, through two weddings in the series (between Enzo and Diana and between Josh and Clare), Maggie’s disparate identities (Italian American, artist, gay) begin to coalesce as part of a unified identity rather than a mésalliance. What’s more, her relationships with Malkie and Noreen challenge the place of the LGBTQ+ community within organized religions, disclosing the natural overlap between some queer, Orthodox, and Catholic communities that already exists. Moreover, Younger consistently offers examples of how sexuality can be fluid even for those in heterosexual relationships (Noreen was previously married to Clare’s father, Diana’s first marriage ended because her husband was gay, Lauren’s character has a serious relationship with a cis-male character, Max, in season 3, though Max eventually ends up with a male partner). However, Noreen’s painting is also significant because it foreshadows Maggie’s inability to reconcile female sexuality and selfhood with parenthood (in season 1 she attributes Liza’s naivete to having spent “an entire decade […] in a PTA fugue”49). Maggie’s encounter with Noreen’s painting is the first in a series of Bakhtinian “obscenities linked with the reproductive power of the earth and the body,” which comes to a literal head in season 6 when Maggie helps Josh and Clare during the emergency delivery of their daughter, Gemma, in the backseat of an Uber. Finding herself in the back of the cab, Maggie wonders if someone else should take her  Cixous, 878.  Younger, “Hot Mitzvah,” directed by Tricia Brock, written by Dottie Dartland Zicklin and Eric Zicklin, aired June 2, 2015 on TV Land, https://www.hulu.com/ watch/79e036d5-ea70-46de-8c3c-62ef9aace9fb. 48 49

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Fig. 14.7  Close-up of Maggie’s face in the back of a cab, lipstick red lips slightly open, eyes rolled back in her head; a white booted foot rests on her shoulder

place “in the splash zone,” to which Clare replies: “You and I are the only two women on the planet who’ve been inside my mother. We’re bonded!”50 Maggie’s foray into midwifery proves so traumatic that, following the birth, she is unable to even look at Clare (Fig. 14.7): Maggie: I haven’t been able to look at her since, you know, the incident. Lauren: What … what incident? Maggie: The birth. I mean, she hoisted her legs over my shoulders, and shot that baby into my arms in the back of an Uber. I can’t unsee that. Lauren: Oh, diva! Maggie: I haven’t been able to look at a … Lauren: Oh my god, can you not even say vagina? Maggie attends a support group for partners whose traumatic experience of witnessing a live birth prevents them from seeing “the vagina as

 Younger, “Flush with Love,” cit.

50

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sexual again.”51 Maggie abandons the meeting, claiming to be “beyond help,” but ends up dating the group leader, who offers to introduce Maggie to “other methods.” Nonetheless, Maggie’s road to rehabilitation is not without several bumps (starting with the above-mentioned yeast infection in the episode entitled “An Inside Glob”). To recover her sexuality, Maggie invokes her Italian artistic heritage; in a later episode of season 6, Liza walks into the living room to find Maggie prepping the floors: Liza:

Oh, god. Tarps. Are you, uh, are you having another one of your special parties? Maggie: No, I’m going to paint the ceiling like the Sistine Chapel—suspended. Liza: Ooh, hot! Maggie: Ugh, you know what? I’m not feeling so hot today. I waited ten minutes last night to get a drink at Cubbyhole. Liza: Well, that doesn’t seem so bad. Maggie: Liza, the bartenders used to fight over who would serve me. Not argue, fight. I’m telling you, I’m losing my mojo.52 Maggie’s attempts to channel Michelangelo fail when she gets “hog-­tied” in her harness and the resident of another building hears her cries for help and, instead of calling 911, masturbates to the scene. With no one to untie her, Maggie manages to retrieve a pocket knife from her bag and cut herself free while still upside down. She later relays the episode to Liza (Fig. 14.8): Maggie: The guy that lives across the street watched me while he jerked off to it. Liza: Oh my god! That is awful. Are you okay? Maggie: Am I okay? I’m great. I got my mojo back. The experience provides a counterpoint to Maggie’s distress at being ignored at Cubbyhole, the famous West Village lesbian bar, because it 51  Younger, “The Unusual Suspect,” season 6, episode 3, directed by Brennan Shroff, written by Grant Sloss, aired June 26, 2019 on TV Land, https://www.hulu.com/watch/ 6b449752-9881-46c3-94da-5ae0b41bc834 52  Younger, “Merger, She Wrote,” season 6, episode 6, directed by Peter Lauer, written by Ashley Skidmore, aired July 24, 2019, on TV Land, https://www.hulu.com/watch/ bd1bf27a-c242-436d-82df-6f57f3672c3a.

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Fig. 14.8  Maggie is upside down, her back to us; she hangs by straps from the ceiling, her legs and arms flail as she swings in front of the window in her apartment

affirms her internal drive and ability to literally liberate herself from restraints, turn herself around, and, naturally, get herself off (the moment Maggie frees herself from the harness coincides with the peeping Tom’s orgasm, and she cannot help but quip, “I’m done, are you?”). There is much to unpack in Maggie’s “Sistine Chapel” episode, which offers one of the most explicit examples of how high and low are conflated. First, Maggie posits herself as a contemporary, female analogue to Michelangelo, a symbol of Italian spiritual art but also known for the representations of same-sex desire that his paintings, sculptures, and poetry intimated.53 Maggie’s fall from the scaffolding and subsequent entanglement provide a visual representation of the collapsing of binaries (female/ male, high/low, sacred/profane, subject/object, seen/unseen). And while the male orgasm that the scene produces is entirely unproductive and unwelcome, serving no one but the voyeur himself, the event as a whole triggers the return of Maggie’s “mojo” because it affirms the source of her desire and desirability as internally motivated and independent of 53  For a recent study on Michelangelo’s homosexuality, and Italy’s “queer canon” in general, see Gary Cestaro, Queer Italia: Same-Sex Desire in Italian Literature and Film (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).

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the Other’s gaze. Her response to the male orgasm—“I’m done, are you?”—replaces the absent female orgasm with a willful refusal to be objectified outside of her own terms. The scene can therefore be interpreted as the apotheosis of Maggie’s journey as a queer artist who defies normative perspectives of female sexuality, spirituality, and success. Maggie is eccentric in the Bakhtinian sense of operating outside of established relational structures, but she is also eccentric in the sense intended by scholar Teresa de Lauretis in her collocation of feminist theory as both “inside its own social and discursive determinations and yet also outside and excessive to them.” Maggie’s dis-location in this scene is in line with what De Lauretis sees as the principal terms of recent feminist theory: (1) a reconceptualization of the subject as shifting and multiply organized across variables axes of difference; (2) a rethinking of the relations between forms of oppression and modes of formal understanding—of doing theory; (3) an emerging redefinition of marginality as location, of identity as dis-­ identification; and (4) the hypothesis of self-displacement as the term of a movement that is concurrently social and subjective, internal and external, indeed political and personal.54

Conclusions: Putting Queer Italian American Identities on the Map As Bakhtin notes, freedom from the hierarchical structures of class, rank, and age is what leads to the “eccentric and inappropriate” behaviors associated with the carnivalesque. At no point does Maggie find herself more entrenched in questions of rank and impropriety than in the seventh and final season of Younger, in which her work is included in a silent auction for a scholarship fund hosted by The Arts College of New York. At the event, the dean, Cass DeKennessy (Janeane Garofalo), explains that she has included Maggie in the show in the hope that she might accept a teaching position in their visual arts program. As Maggie later tells Liza, the evening is like “a dream” that begins with praise from “art snobs” who gush over her pieces and concludes with a one-night stand with a mystery woman. However, upon her visit to campus to discuss the job offer,

54  Teresa De Lauretis, “Eccentric Subjects: Feminist Theory and Historical Consciousness Source,” Feminist Studies 16, no. 1 (Spring, 1990): 116.

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Maggie is horrified to discover that the woman she slept with is the dean’s wife, Kamila (Kelli Barrett). Ultimately, Maggie is unable to refuse the dean’s invitation to join the faculty as an Artist-in-Residence and, dulcis in fundo, to attend dinner at the dean’s house. Maggie asks Lauren to pose as her girlfriend at the dinner, during which the dean invites them for a girls’ weekend: Cass:

You guys are fun. So much fun. You should join us for a girls’ weekend in Provincetown. We have a nifty share house in the Gallery District. Lauren: P-town? Uh, yes! Sign our P’s up. What are your dates? Labor Day’s a no-go. When is Carnival?55 While the reference to Carnival, Provincetown’s LGBTQIA+ pride festival held annually in late August, is perhaps incidental, Maggie clearly in the realm of the carnivalesque as she navigates her place in Cass’ department and failing marriage. Maggie finds herself embroiled in a personal, professional, and political Gordian knot when, during the dean’s class observation, Maggie shows slides from an early art show about trans women, problematically entitled “Gypsies, Trannies, and Thieves,” and at the same time accidentally projects some of the nude photos Kamila has been texting her.56 Cass defends Maggie in class, asking the students to consider the context in which the show was curated, and in the following episode claims to be acting in Maggie’s best interest while she is in fact trolling her on Twitter with a series of accusations of transphobia posted under pseudonyms: Maggie: How am I inappropriate? Cass: You’ve got to be careful. These kids are incredibly woke and your work goes all the way back to the nineties. Just think, there could be other skeletons in your closet. And what about the Halloweens? Maggie: What Halloweens?

55  Younger, “The F Word,” season 7, episode 6, directed by Jennifer Arnold, written by Sarah Choi, aired April 29, 2021 on TV Land, https://www.hulu.com/watch/9f261ea7b185-4bb1-a530-413e35ea77c5. 56  Younger, “The Son Also Rises,” Season 7, Episode 7, directed by Jennifer Arnold, written by Joe Murphy, aired May 6, 2021 on TV Land, https://www.hulu.com/watch/ 8be5f714-4070-448a-aa90-40b8481ba188.

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Cass:

Maggie, there’s been a lot of Halloweens. Look, I’m your ally here, but if the students turn on you, I Maggie: It’s one or two, tops. Maybe they don’t like Italians. I’m the one who should be angry.57 Maggie’s reaction to having one component of her identity questioned (her legitimacy as an artist within the LGBTQ+ community) is to become fiercely defensive of another, ostensibly unrelated component (her Italian heritage). However, considering that Maggie’s show from the 1990s would have been contemporary to Kimberle Crenshaw’s now-­famous essay on “Mapping the Margins” and Crenshaw’s coining of the term “intersectionality,” it becomes clear that Maggie is keenly aware of how her perspective is informed by multiple identities.58 By rejecting Cass’ implication that there is a purely performative aspect to Maggie’s art (“What Halloweens?”), Maggie begins to fully inhabit all of her identities simultaneously. Although the audience understands that Cass is actually motivated by a personal vendetta, Younger writers use the storyline (reminiscent of the 2014 incident on the University of Chicago campus in which gay rights activist and columnist Dan Savage was targeted for his use of the term tranny, and the 2015 Halloween controversy on the Yale campus59) to tackle contemporary debates around wokeism and cancel culture on university campuses. 57  Younger, “The Baroness,” season 7, episode 8, directed by Jennifer Arnold, written by Don Roos, aired May 13, 2021 on TV Land, https://www.hulu.com/watch/9c3421d1cfc9-4fe9-b25e-8e59481ff697. 58  In a now-famous paragraph of the essay, Crenshaw writes: “The concept of political intersectionality highlights the fact that women of color are situated within at least two subordinated groups that frequently pursue conflicting political agendas. The need to split one’s political energies between two sometimes opposing political agendas is a dimension of intersectional disempowerment that men of color and white women seldom confront. Indeed, their specific raced and gendered experiences, although intersectional, often define as well as confine the interests of the entire group.” Kimberle Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (July, 1991): 1251–52. 59  For more on the incident at the University of Chicago, see Matthew Tharrett, “Trans Activist Demands Apology from University for Allowing Dan Savage to Say ‘Tranny,’ Making School ‘Unsafe,’” Queerty, June 5, 2014, https://www.queerty.com/trans-activist-­demandsapology-from-university-for-allowing-dan-savage-to-say-tranny-making-school-­unsafe20140605, accessed May 15, 2021. On the debate over Halloween costumes that led to the resignation of two of Yale’s faculty members, see, for example, Conor Friedersdorf, “The New Intolerance of Student Activism,” The Atlantic, November 9, 2015, https://www. theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/11/the-new-intolerance-of-student-activism-atyale/414810/, accessed May 15, 2021.

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Fig. 14.9  We see a glass storefront painted with the words, “MAGGIE AMATO: Mythologies in Movement.” A man is working at erasing the “A” from Maggie’s last name

Maggie does not apologize for her past use of the term trannies, stating only, “That’s my problem, I’ve never been a tiptoe person, but, you know, thank God, ’cause that show put me on the map.” At the same time, she does not put up a fight when she is fired from her position at the university and subsequently “canceled.” As she approaches the gallery where her exhibit, Mythologies in Movement, was set to open, she finds a man removing her name from the storefront of the Perspective Gallery (Fig. 14.9). Maggie: […] this show is who I am, I can’t wait to see … Hey, what are you doing with that sign? Man: Maggie Amato’s been canceled. Maggie: You mean postponed. Man: No, canceled, and not just the show, the person. She’s canceled. Have you read what they’ve been saying about her on Twitter? Who are you? Maggie: Nobody, I guess. Playing Ulysses to a modern-day Polyphemus, Maggie transitions swiftly from identifying fully with her art (“this show is who I am”) to

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circumventing her own demise (“nobody” is canceled). Against the non-­ diegetic backdrop of Israeli pop singer Noga Erez’s “Off the Radar,” which comes on during the end credits, Maggie goes “off the radar” at the same time as she puts herself “on the map” in a characteristic refusal to align herself with any singular perspective. An ideal eccentric, from her (re-) invention of Liza in season 1 to her own cancelation in Season 7, Maggie’s character, by coming to embrace the intersection of her unique identities (queer, Italian American, artist), represents groundbreaking progress toward a more diverse and diversified representation of Italian Americans in contemporary media.

Works Cited Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Edited and translated by Caryl Emerson. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984a. ———. Rabelais and his World. Translated by Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1984b. Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa” Trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. Signs 1, no. 4 (Summer, 1976): 875–893. Crenshaw, Kimberle. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (July, 1991): 1241–1299. De Lauretis, Teresa. “Eccentric Subjects: Feminist Theory and Historical Consciousness Source,” Feminist Studies 16, no. 1 (Spring, 1990): 115–150. Denninger, Lindsay. “‘Age Queer’ Is Not A Thing and ‘Younger’ Should Have Known Better,” Bustle.com, July 10, 2018. https://www.bustle.com/p/ youngers-­u se-­o f-­q ueer-­l anguage-­r eally-­m issed-­t he-­m ark-­f ans-­d eser ve-­ better-­9693934. Gilchrist, Tracy E. “Sutton Foster, Younger Stars on Queer Rep and Its One True Love Story.” Advocate. May 3, 2021, https://www.advocate.com/ television/2021/5/01/sutton-­f oster-­y ounger-­s tars-­q ueer-­r ep-­i ts-­o ne­true-­love-­story. Gravano, Alan and Ryan Calabretta-Sajder, “Introduction.” In Italian Americans on Screen: Challenging the Past, Re-Theorizing the Future. Edited by Alan Gravano and Ryan Calabretta-Sajder, 1–12. United States: Lexington Books, 2021. Lachmann, Renate. “Bakhtin and Carnival: Culture as Counter-Culture.” Cultural Critique (Winter, 1988–1989): 115–152. Lawton, Ben. “What is ItalianAmerican Cinema?” Voices in Italian Americana 6, no. 1 (1995): 27–51. Parsemain, Ava. The Pedagogy of Queer TV. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.

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Tamburri, Anthony Julian. To Hyphenate or Not to Hyphenate: The Italian/ American Writer: An Other American. Montreal: Guernica Editions, 1991. ———. A Semiotic of Ethnicity: In (Re)Cognition of the Italian/American Writer. SUNY Press, 1998. ———. Italian/American Short Films and Music Videos: A Semiotic Reading. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2002. Tortorella, Nico. “An It Gets Betters Message.” It Gets Better Project, December 2018. https://itgetsbetter.org/blog/initiatives/an-­it-­gets-­better-­message-­from-­ nico-­tortorella/ ———. “E32: A Human I Love Named Janeane.” The Love Bomb (podcast). August 1, 2017. Accessed May 1, 2021, https://the-­love-­bomb-­with-­nico-­tortorella. simplecast.com/episodes/e32-­a-­human-­i-­love-­named-­janeane-­jVoDcW1n ———. Space Between: Explorations of Love, Sex, and Fluidity. New  York: Crown, 2019.

CHAPTER 15

Spotlight: Laura Fedele & Rita Houston Laura Fedele and Rita Houston

In casual conversation, to the world around me, I’m Italian. But it’s complicated.

I’m actually half-Italian on my father’s side, but Italian-identified. That’s pretty common; I always say that it’s like mixing together chocolate and vanilla ice cream, it all ends up chocolate. My wife, Rita Houston of WFUV Public Radio, was also half-Italian, but on her mother’s side. And definitely also chocolate. Three of five siblings in her family married Italian (or at least half so). Outside my New York City-area home, I’m “New York Italian,” which is pretty well understood, even in Italy. (They don’t get the gay thing so easily there, though. The first phrase we picked up from conversation in Rome was, “Where are your husbands?”).

L. Fedele (*) New York, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] R. Houston (deceased) © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Heim, S. Anatrone (eds.), Spaghetti Sissies Queering Italian American Media, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10197-7_15

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Fig. 15.1  Houton and Fedele at a music festival. (Photo courtesy of WFUV)

Rita and I were together for 20 years before cancer took her at the end of 2020. We married twice in 2011: once for the legal part, and once for our big Italian families. It’s not a “wedding” without a four-course meal and dancing. We met when I joined the staff at WFUV, a great radio station that crosses genres and decades and generally disregards boundaries. We say, “music makes the world a better place,” and we all work hard every day to bring cross-cultural joy and understanding to the greater New York City area (and everywhere online). A very early date with my wife was the one that clinched it for me: A concert night out in New York City that ended with a stop at lesbian bar/ restaurant Rubyfruit (RIP). We were the last two patrons in the place, so we ordered a couple of Godfathers (Scotch and Amaretto DiSaronno on the rocks) and, music-obsessed as we both were, dashed over to the jukebox. It was full of Sinatra! We played them all. Slow-dancing to Frank,

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talking about growing up in Italian American households, we found a hundred shortcuts to describing our childhoods. I was smitten. The benefits of an Italian-Italian gay marriage are enormous. Not only do you have to do a lot less explaining to your spouse about why you do what you do, but there are core cultural values that form a very solid foundation. There is no question that family comes first. That is true even when it’s not easy, though we were both blessed with family members we really loved spending time with. Building a wider family of friends was a natural extension of that. Plus, we were lucky enough to have even more gays in our extended clan. From the start we mixed the families together, in small or large doses, in restaurants or concert dates or dinner parties, or at our big dance parties. One of the first icebreakers I clearly remember in the blending of our families was when someone was telling a story about being caught out with no cash on hand; Rita’s sister and I both pulled out our wallets, reached into deep hidden side pockets, and pulled out folded (but crisp) $100 bills. We always have cash! Because, godforbid. Or in case you end up in a casino. When Rita and I decided to get married, we pulled together some cash to buy engagement rings. We went to a quaint town and walked through antique stores. When we spotted a perfect, mid-century extendable dining room set that would seat up to 12—with padded chairs no less—we bought that instead and found costume rings for 20 bucks. Imagine the family dinners and card games we could play at that table! Italians don’t have the exclusive license to host excellent events and dinner parties—but we all think we do. Any usual role-based ideas about “who should do what” would go out the window; if we had people coming over, my wife would hike up her jeans, throw a kitchen towel over her shoulder, and start frying eggplant. And though she may have looked tough, she had an enviable collection of linens and serving pieces. There are two kinds of mothers—the ones who teach you how to cook so you can carry on the family traditions, and the ones who tell you “get the hell out of the kitchen because you’re making a mess.” I had the former and Rita the latter. In terms of day-to-day life with a romantic partner, one of the big benefits of gay life is that in most cases, you enter a relationship with less baggage about gender roles. Tasks get split up by either ability or availability. Rita did end up as a good cook, but she got there via developing the more “husbandly” grilling skills before becoming comfortable in the kitchen.

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(Meanwhile her sister never had to develop a big culinary repertoire, as she married a man of Sicilian descent, who learned how to cook from his father.) We both grew up with clear and strongly defined gender roles at home; there were all sisters in my family, but we spent enough time with the extended family for us to figure it out. The girls had to clean: a little every day, and a lot on Saturdays. The boys had to…I’m still not sure what they actually had to do. Wait, I got one—on holidays they had to bring up the extra chairs and table leaves from the basement. When the last fork was put down after dinner, every female in the room would stand at once and carry everything into the kitchen. Aunts and cousins, young and old, fell into an assembly line that I never remember being instructed about; you just started scraping plates or rinsing pots, depending on your size. It was clear from the looks on our mothers’ faces that it was not optional. The rites were ostensibly the same for Rita’s family, but she blurred the lines more than I did. She could wash a dish with the best of them, but I know there were many times growing up that she’d excuse herself, hide in the bathroom for a while, and end up back at the dining room table cracking filberts and telling jokes with the men. Besides the details of cooking and cleaning, what we learned from our mothers and aunts was pride. Pride in a clean home, a delicious meal; in taking care of their husbands even better than their mothers did, which is saying something. They never sat down, sometimes not even at dinner, as if they were driven by silent motors hidden under their housecoats. They taught us that it was worth all that work to make your partner and your kids happy, to make your home a welcoming place, to be a good caretaker. We both knew that deep down, they were exhausted. As soon as they sat down at the end of the evening, they fell asleep wherever they landed. They would never let it show outside the house, though. That important LGBTQIA+ advantage of developing more fluid gender roles can lead to some unexpected results. Not all the Italian-­centric values and stereotypes are warm and fuzzy. In a lesbian house, “You’re acting like an old Italian man” is not a compliment. It means that the dark side of “pride” is showing: Jealousy, being quick to judgment, possessiveness (especially over women), and being as quick to make an enemy as make a friend. There’s also the tendency to approach the world as if everyone is trying to screw you over somehow, and that you have to remain vigilant at all times to make sure you stay one step ahead of them. One of

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the most frequent refrains in family conversations: “THAT’s how they GET you.” There are the self-sacrificing Italian women, and the warm-yet-­defensive Italian men, and then there are a generation of women who fall in between: The Aunts Who Would be Gay. Sturdy, practical, short-haired, and sensibly shod, they are the women who will chase a supermarket butcher into the back room to make sure they get the best cut of veal. Their kids are well-behaved, or else. No one can speak ill of a family member in their earshot (which has bat-like range). They pump their own gas, haul their own trash, and scold any kid in the neighborhood, if called for. They cook for strangers, drive trucks, and generally behave like lesbians, except for one key point: they are devoted to their rough Italian husbands (who may or may not deserve it). Their gay nieces shake their heads, lamenting that if their favorite aunt had been born 20 or 30 years later, she would have settled down with a similarly sturdy gal and had a happier life. We blame the Church. About the Church…the elephant in the room for LGBTQIA+ Italians is Catholicism; it’s a no-win situation from the start. Personally, I was spared the extra guilt and more lurid iconography by a strong Protestant mother on one side, and a family history of mean nuns scaring the heck out of my Dad’s side. But the Catholic spirit permeates Italian American culture nonetheless, and I married into it as well. I’ve had friends who struggled for years over the anti-gay messages of the Church. Being led to believe that your inborn font of identity and attachment is a sure-fire ticket to a twisted, burning Hell is an internal torture that young men and women battle for decades. Not everyone gets over it, obviously. Culturally, it makes for a fraught—and often delayed— transition into adulthood. “Coming out” stories in Italian families go one of two ways: silent or dramatic. For both Rita and myself, it was the former. By a certain point, everyone in the family KNEW, but nobody talked about it. (Like a limp, a stutter, a divorce, or any other handicap.) There was no big announcement, just a point in time when your “friend” became introduced as your “special friend.” Rita’s gay brother’s story was the showy opposite: He took their 60-something parents to a crowded downtown piano bar to meet his boyfriend for the first time. Whichever way it happens, even when (thankgod) there aren’t strong objections, the older and more Catholic never give up hope. My own wife’s grandmother, who knew and loved me for years, would still ask how she was going to get a man “dressed like that.”

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Fig. 15.2  Houston with Brandi Carlile and Amy Ray at Housing Works Bookstore, 2008. (Photo courtesy of WFUV)

Rita was as good as she was at her job because she was Italian. She always said that being Italian was more important to her identity than being gay. Every industry has a self-identified gay subset, like a “club” that includes closeted members. We communicate on two levels at once, like speaking a second language. When we first meet each other, we know we can skip past the usual social vetting and get right into a closer friendship. And that is valuable. Plus, business dinners at Italian restaurants are always the best nights out (and they appreciate when you know to bring cash). And in the nightclub world, it’s handy to be able to tell who’s “connected.” But Rita’s Italianness formed her personality, from even before she knew what a lesbian was. And it operated in her not just as a group dynamic but as a kind of personal and social code on how you treat other people. She welcomed artists into her radio studio—her home court—with the same heart-forward care that she would offer guests in our house. She offered coffee, or whiskey, or water; she respected them enough to

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prepare by researching their work; she made them comfortable, and really listened to them. The resulting relationships she built, including her thoughtfulness and follow-through skills (yes, you send a written note, maybe even a gift), were at the core of her media success. Our jobs sent us to music festivals, where we’d set up a mobile home-­ away-­from-home, bringing musicians back to our camp for home-cooked meals and comfort. We’d feed them, nurture them, maybe play some Sinatra for them, and send them back out. Now, that’s Italian. The combination of Italian heritage and a queer mindset is formidable. The attention we paid even as kids to how both women and men operated in the world—since we contained a bit of both ourselves—meant we learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t. Rita learned from her mother, sister, and aunts how to set up a home (wherever you are) for someone when they came to see you. She learned from her uncles and cousins how to define the boundaries of her professional turf and how to defend them. If part of being queer meant being able to draw more freely from the examples and stereotypes of both genders in your sphere, she absolutely did that, to her great advantage, and to the advantage of the music community. She would pick out an artist—anyone from Courtney Barnett to Tom Jones—and invite them into her “home,” her world. It’s why her interviews were legendary. She could play the part of mamma and papà at the same time. Being queer and Italian means our lives have been doubly blessed. We have two well-defined communities we can fit into, speak the language of, appreciate and belong to. Carrying the combination of LGBTQIA+ identity and Italian American heritage into a public life in the media means you’ve got built-in friends and enemies. There are levels of assumed understanding you can invoke with a silent nod, a sassy finger snap, or a finger at the side of your nose. And when you’re the life of the party, as Rita was, in an industry that has its roots in finding joy, you know it’s your connections that make your career.

Index1

A Abuser, 35, 37, 37n63 Adulthood, 33, 55, 267 Advocate, 104, 142 Aesthetic/Aesthetics, 14n29, 67, 70, 103, 132, 150, 171, 173, 175, 177n19, 182, 189, 191, 240, 252 African American battalion, 82 military unit, 67 and soldier, 68, 81–84, 83n36, 87, 89 Age, 25, 27, 34, 37n63, 39n74, 45, 47, 51, 53, 64, 150 AIDS, 125, 127n104, 131, 146 HIV, 109, 125, 126n94, 130, 137 Alto (film), 16, 172–174, 182, 195, 196

American, 2, 3n2, 4–6, 12, 12n25, 13n26, 18, 19, 21–56, 61, 62, 66, 70, 72, 79–89, 81n34, 83n36, 91, 92, 95–97, 95n79, 103, 104, 141–143, 152, 153, 155n21, 158, 163, 172, 176n17, 179, 180, 185, 190, 201n8, 212n44, 227, 233, 265, 267, 269 American Pulp, 88 Analyze This (film), 174 Androgenous/androgyny, 6, 92, 95 Antigay, 189, 267 Antiracism, 92, 95 Archetype, 6n9, 7, 9, 173, 175–178, 175n15, 180, 181, 190 Archive, 11n22, 66n1, 67, 81, 95, 157, 159, 176 See also Italian American

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Heim, S. Anatrone (eds.), Spaghetti Sissies Queering Italian American Media, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10197-7

271

272 

INDEX

Armed Services Editions, 80 Army, 66n1, 68 Arthur, Bea, 17 Asexual, 233, 237n17 Assimilation, 10, 11, 152 Audience, 4, 12, 18, 118, 127, 129, 130, 159, 176n17, 187, 190, 193, 200, 200n2, 200n4, 208, 209, 211, 212, 214–219, 216n53, 221, 234, 259 Autobiography, 23, 35 self-writing, 40 Avicolli Mecca, Tommi, 14, 15 B Baker, Aaron, 202 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 208, 221, 230, 231, 237, 242, 247, 257 Baldwin, James, 87 Ball, 17, 154, 160 circuit, 145 culture, 150 See also Drag Barolini, Helen, 11 Barrett, Kelli, 258 Basile Greene, Rose, 11 Bassano del Grappa, 83 Battle of Rapido River, 85 Bayman, Louis, 173n8, 174, 174n13, 176 Beauvoir, Simone, 29, 29n33 Benedetta in Guysterland (novel), 173 Bennett, Tony, 12, 14, 14n29 Bergman, David, 70n8, 80, 80n32, 88n52, 89n56, 94n76 Berkley Books, 73, 74 Bernard, Molly, 232, 232n4 Bérubé, Allan, 94n7 Big Night (film), 9 Binary, 124n88, 157, 208, 235, 242, 243, 249, 256

and gender, 25, 26, 28, 28n27, 29, 34, 42, 49–51, 66, 69, 71, 94, 96, 143, 265, 266, 269 See also Non-binary Biography, 23n10, 47n106, 155–157, 155n21 Biopower, 108n2, 113, 137 BIPOC, 164 Black identity, 115, 152 people, 86n45 Body, 16n38, 28, 28n27, 36, 39n72, 47n108, 51, 84, 87, 88, 114, 115, 136, 146, 160, 177, 182, 216n51, 218, 227, 242, 247, 252 Boellstorff, Tom, 148 Bolognese, Don, 75, 75n25 Bon Jovi, John, 12 Bona, Mary Jo, 203 Book Cover, 74, 76–78 Bovasso, Julie, 215 Boys/boyhood, 26, 37, 37n63, 41n82, 45, 50n117, 194, 245, 266 Brody, Evan, 217 Bronski, Michael, 70n9, 72n16, 79, 79n28, 216 Brown/brownness, 87, 111, 112n18, 119, 123–125, 124n88, 132, 132n144, 133 Brute, 176, 179, 180 Bugsy Malone (film), 173 Bumbalo, Victor, 16, 108–137 Burgess, Tituss, 203 Burns, John Horne, 82 Bury your gays, 171, 171n1, 172n6 Butler, Judith, 28, 28n27, 50, 177 C Caffe Cino, 10 California, 84, 169

 INDEX 

Camp, 19, 83, 84, 90, 172, 173, 175, 177, 177n19, 178, 181–184, 189, 191, 191n36, 269 Camping, 172, 175, 181, 189 Cannavale, Bobby, 200 Capitalism, 110, 120, 173, 183 Capone, Giovanna, 15, 23–29, 23n10, 25n17, 29n30, 31–33, 32n42, 47n107, 50n117, 55, 56 Caponegro, Mary, 12 Cappello, Mary, 14 Caricature, 2, 104, 202 Carlsen, Mike, 203 Carnival/carnivalesque, 17, 208, 230, 231, 237, 242, 248, 257, 258 Carosone, Michael, 41, 41n83, 42, 52n124 Caschetta, Mary Beth, 15, 23, 23n10, 24, 33–47, 33n51, 34n53, 35n58, 39n74, 40n77, 55, 56 Catholic/Catholicism, 26, 32, 36, 44, 47, 125, 163, 182, 187, 214, 225, 231, 233, 248, 251, 253, 267 Church, 32, 36, 37, 39, 39n72, 41–43, 42n87, 48, 69, 117, 126, 170, 189, 267 Church Feasts, 158, 163 Caucasian, 110n11, 116, 160, 161, 164 Cavallero, Jonathan, 200, 211 Cavallo, Diana, 11 Celluloid Closet, The (book), 17n40, 179 Censorship, 89, 96, 69, 69 Champagne, John, 115n35 Chow, Rey, 113, 129 Christ in Concrete (book), 11 Cino, Joe, 10, 15 Cinotto, Simone, 21, 22n2, 26, 43, 44, 158 Cixous, Hélène, 252

273

Class, 30, 35n58, 37, 41, 66, 115, 146, 161, 201, 201n8, 244, 257 blue-collar, 201 Closet, 31, 42, 53, 55, 79, 189, 190, 206, 217–220, 258, 268 Coates, Ta-Nehisi, 112, 112n20 Comedy, 172, 173, 208, 213 jokes, 209, 211, 212, 214, 216n51, 218 See also Humor Coming out, 16, 25, 34, 42, 52, 53, 68, 122, 143, 189, 214, 216–220, 233, 267 National Coming Out Day, 209 Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II (book), 94n77 Community, 2n1, 6, 7, 7n13, 8n15, 14, 22, 23, 23n10, 27, 27n25, 31–33, 35–37, 40, 42n87, 47, 68–70, 81, 90, 95–97, 150, 156n24, 160, 163, 181, 182, 201, 208, 213, 216n52, 225–227, 236n16, 253, 269 Confetti for Gino (book), 15, 65–97 Confines, 28, 31, 37, 42, 47, 56 Conflict, 24, 27, 52n125, 79, 85 Contact Zone, 22–25, 55, 88 Corgi Books, 73, 73n20, 78 Coppola, Sofia, 142 Costello, Lou, 142 Counihan, Carole M., 22 Coury, Kristen, 172, 174, 189 COVID, 111 Cox, Laverne, 157, 160 Crenshaw, Kimberle, 259 Crime/criminality, 5, 6, 42, 46, 50, 203, 210, 212, 216n51 Critical Race Theory, 95, 108, 108n2 Culinary/cooking, 25, 25n16, 26, 30, 49, 55, 118, 142, 179, 194, 199, 225, 245 See also Food

274 

INDEX

Culture, 3n2, 5n8, 6n11, 8n16, 13n26, 21–25, 30, 33n50, 35, 38, 41–43, 52, 67, 79, 145, 146, 169, 176, 178, 180–183, 186, 187, 189, 191, 201n8, 203, 212n44, 227, 230, 238, 240, 242, 243, 267 cancel culture, 259 Cusanelli, Katelynn, 141–143 Customs, 30, 32, 37, 68 D D’Acierno, Pellegrino, 9 Daughter, 25, 36, 37, 41, 42, 44–47, 50, 51, 55, 64, 91, 93, 104, 174, 175, 182, 187–189 Davies, Helen, 212 DDL Zan, 13, 13n28 De Beauvoir, Simone, 29, 29n31 DeGeneres, Ellen, 217 De Lauretis, Teresa, 257 De Stefano, George, 17n41, 171, 172n6 De Villiers, Nicholas, 146, 148 Dead Name/deadnaming, 154–158 DeCerchio, Thomas, 202 Del Monico, Mitch, 19, 182, 183, 185, 188 DeLaria, Lea, 17 DeLillo, Don, 11 DeSalvo, Louise, 22, 23n10, 24, 24n12, 33n50, 34n53, 35n58, 40n77, 111n16 DeVito, Danny, 142 Di Prima, Diane, 11 Di Scala, Jamie-Lynn, 217 Diaspora/diasporic, 4, 5, 5n8, 12, 14n29, 18, 65–97, 112, 114, 162, 230 Difficult People (TV program), 17, 200, 201, 206, 209–211, 212n44, 213, 220

Dinner, 21, 27n25, 28, 30, 34, 37, 41, 43, 45, 49, 51, 52, 52n124, 55, 56, 142, 143, 158, 164, 200, 258, 265, 266, 268 Dion and the Belmonts, 12 Disability studies, 51 Documentary, 145, 146, 150, 151, 156, 158 Dolezal, Rachel, 210 Domestic/domesticity, 2, 7, 8n15, 14, 28, 29, 45, 48, 80, 92, 219 D’Onofrio, Vincent, 202 Don’t Tell Mama: The Penguin Book of Italian American Writing (book), 11 Doubleday (publisher), 75, 75n25, 77 Drag, 2, 145, 152, 181, 200n4, 208 drag queen, 152, 181, 200n4 Du Bois, W.E.B., 67, 85, 86, 86n45, 95 Duff, Hilary, 241 Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (book), 67, 85, 86, 86n45, 95 E Eaklor, Vicki L., 218 Eco, Umberto, 8 Effeminacy, 179, 180, 180n29, 205, 208 Eichner, Billy, 209 Ellen (TV program), 209, 217 Ellena, Lilliana, 83n36, 92, 92n69 Ellis Island, 104, 159 Ellison, Ralph, 95 El Palenque, 71 Embrace of the Vampire (film), 17 End, The (book), 11 Epistemology, 31 trans epistemology, 154–155 Equality, 16n37, 23, 24, 28, 122 Esquire (magazine), 72

 INDEX 

Ethnic/Ethnicity, 159, 191n36 ethnoracial, 153, 157 non-ethnic, 161 Exotic, 84, 114, 132 F Falco, Edie, 218 Family, 7–9, 19, 21, 22, 25–38, 29n32, 40, 41, 43–47, 43n89, 50–56, 52n124, 62, 63, 84, 85, 85n43, 87, 93n73, 96, 117, 121, 141–143, 146, 149–151, 154, 155n21, 158, 159, 161, 163–165, 169, 170, 182, 184, 186, 187, 189, 195, 196, 200, 200n2, 203, 213–219, 225, 227, 233, 240, 244, 248n42, 263, 265–267 Family history television, 149, 158 Fantasy, 37, 88, 126, 127, 132, 135, 136, 201, 202 Fante, John, 11 Farfariello, 10 Fascism, 92 Father, 25, 26, 28n29, 29, 30, 34–36, 40–48, 41n82, 53–55, 93, 103, 104, 112, 146, 152, 162, 163, 165, 181, 182, 186–188, 200n4, 215, 263, 266 Feasts, 33, 43 Fedele, Laura, 2, 263–269 Feeling Backward (book), 97 Femininity, 24, 28, 29n32, 32, 206, 208, 218 Feminism, 22, 24, 84, 118 Fesso, 7, 178–180, 190, 211, 212 Fetish/fetishism, 183 Fiction, 66, 84 pulp (see Pulp/pulp fiction) Finding Your Roots (TV program), 149, 159

275

Finook, 187, 187n32 Fishermen, 69, 70n8, 72, 75, 79n27 Flamboyant, 176, 180n29, 183, 189–191, 206 Floyd, George, 110 Fluid bodily, 40 gender expression, 15, 22n2, 201 Food, 6, 21, 22, 24, 25, 25n16, 27n25, 28–30, 29n32, 32, 33, 38, 43–45, 43n89, 49, 50n117, 52, 52n124, 52n125, 55, 112, 117, 141, 142, 176n17, 184–186, 194, 196, 200, 212, 225, 239–243, 245, 247, 248 Forbidden, 50, 88, 248, 252 Foster, Sutton, 79, 229 Foucault, Michel, 108n2, 113, 160 Francis, Connie, 12, 12n25 Freedom, 24, 37, 50n117, 71, 94, 150, 203 Freeman, Elizabeth, 96 Freud, Sigmund, 132, 136 Friedan, Betty, 48n144 Friends & Family (film), 16, 172–174, 179, 180, 182, 189 Friends (TV program), 8, 211 Fugget About It (TV program), 9 Fuori (book), 14 G Gabaccia, Donna R., 21, 32 Gaga, Lady, 13, 14n29 Gallery, The (book), 82, 89 Gambuto, Julio Vincent, 225–228 Gandolfini, James, 218 Gangster, 6n9, 177, 179, 180, 190, 191, 211 Gardaphé, Fred, 4, 5n8, 6n11, 12, 95, 95n79, 111n16, 173, 203, 204 Garland, Judy, 176, 206

276 

INDEX

Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie, 51 Garofalo, Janeane, 142, 232, 233, 233n8, 257 Gay, 94, 117, 200, 206, 227 culture, 123, 130, 211 desire, 33n50, 35, 45, 47, 50, 54, 69, 75, 84, 87, 171n1 identity, 31, 62, 70, 97, 176, 267, 268 novel, 68–70, 69n6, 79, 86, 87 sensibility, 97, 178 Gemini (play), 16, 16n38 Gender, 26, 28, 202, 209, 221, 227, 233 cisgender, 154, 156n24, 199n1, 212 identity, 194, 233 nonconformity, 161 performance, 176, 191 presentation, 175, 180n29, 201 roles, 120, 143, 208, 265, 266 transgender, 26, 127, 145, 148, 153–156, 156n24, 160, 162, 193, 194, 196 Genealogy, 92, 147–166 Genre, 14, 19, 71, 148, 149, 155n21, 156, 158, 159, 171, 172, 172n6, 174n13, 175n15, 177n19, 178, 181, 190, 200, 200n5, 209 mobster movies, 172 mutation, 174 sitcom, 200, 209 Gino (book), 65–97 Girls, 14n29, 25, 26, 28, 35–38, 37n63, 41, 44, 45, 47, 50n117, 74, 79, 91, 135n152, 143, 147–166, 187, 194, 266 Giuliani, Gaia, 83n36, 96n80 Giunta, Edvige, 22, 23n10, 24 Golden Girls (TV program), 4, 8, 17 Gossip, 71, 121 Gramsci, Antonio, 42n87, 42

Grande, Ariana, 12 Greenberg (publisher), 73, 73n19, 87 The Green Book (film), 7 Guidette, 210, 211 Guido, 7, 17, 30, 201n8, 221 H Habit, 31, 32, 58n125, 71, 72, 80 Halberstam, Jack, 90n64 Hayes, Sean, 206 Herman, Judith L., 40 Heteronormative/heteronormativity, 2n1, 7, 94, 97, 120, 132, 149, 159, 161, 164, 178, 186, 201, 206–208, 219n65, 221 Heterosexual/heterosexuality, 50, 122, 253 Hey Paesan: Writing by Lesbians and Gay Men of Italian Descent, 14 Hierarchy, 19, 26, 143 Hoffman, William, 109 Hollywood, 4–6, 19, 70, 174, 180, 180n29, 190, 211, 214, 216, 218, 236n16 Holzer, Sarah R., 38 Home, 6, 6n11, 8n15, 25–28, 29n32, 30–33, 35n55, 37, 37n63, 38, 43n89, 45, 47, 49, 51, 52n124, 55, 62, 63, 67, 79, 91, 93, 112, 117, 142, 143, 151, 152, 163, 216n51, 263, 266, 268, 269 Homoaffectivity, 172 Homoerotic, 87 Homonationalism, 108n2 Homonormativity, 122, 122n80 Homophobia, 89, 130, 131, 133, 213 gay bashing, 126 internalized, 131, 176, 181 Homosexual/homosexuality, 16, 51n120, 55, 67, 72, 73n19, 89, 90, 94, 113–116, 118, 122n80,

 INDEX 

123, 170, 171, 186, 207, 230, 235n14, 256n53 lifestyle, 190 Homosocial, 72, 94 hooks, bell, 39, 39n76, 41, 41n82, 46 Hoover, J. Edgar, 176 House of Xtravaganza, 151 Housewife, 28, 36, 48 Houston, Rita, 263–269 Hudson River piers, 150, 150n7 Humor, 221 of incongruity, 175 of superiority, 179 See also Comedy Husband, 187, 234n11 I Identity/identification, 2, 21, 22, 24, 28, 31, 34n52, 39n76, 42, 44, 47, 51, 52, 55, 62, 85, 87, 95, 96, 96n80, 143, 146, 152, 172, 267–269 marginalized identities, 67 national identity, 4 (see also Nation; Sex/sexuality) See also Italian American If This Be Sin (book), 73, 75, 76, 80 Ilott, Sarah, 212 Independence, 27 Indigestion, 56 Innaurato, Albert, 16, 16n38 Interracial desire, 69, 75, 87 identity, 81 relationship, 75, 83 romance, 68 taboo, 84 Intersection/intersectionality, 13, 18, 19, 70, 81, 81n34, 128, 129, 146, 180n29, 182, 186, 191, 231–234, 253, 259, 259n58, 261

277

Intimacy, 53, 62, 88, 134 Invisibility, 95, 96, 96n80 Invisible Glass, The (book), 15, 65–97 Invisible Whiteness, 96 Italian, 103, 169 Italian American, 21–56, 62, 66–68, 70, 72, 81–83, 81n34, 85, 87, 92, 95–97, 95n79, 103, 104, 141–143, 147–166, 178, 267, 269 Italian Doo-Wop, 12 Italianness, 3, 6, 13, 104, 114, 141, 143, 146, 152, 158, 172, 180–184, 186, 187, 189, 190, 227, 234, 268 language, 186, 268, 269 population, 91, 143 resistance, 248 women, 24, 69, 81, 82, 83n36, 267, 269 Italian American, 1–2, 4, 13–19, 13n27, 17n40, 21, 25, 35, 41, 44, 47, 52, 55, 81, 85, 95, 103, 108, 109, 111, 111n16, 112, 115–119, 121, 125, 137, 141–143, 147, 151, 162, 169, 172, 174, 175n15, 178, 181–184, 189–191, 193, 195, 199–202, 201n8, 206, 208, 210, 211, 213–216, 220, 225–227, 230, 233n8, 244, 265 archive, 11n22, 67, 81, 85, 96, 97 heritage, 16, 35, 103, 141, 143, 146, 157, 163, 269 identity, 3, 8, 13, 14n29, 19, 21, 22, 24, 44, 55, 108, 117, 118, 158, 159, 182, 201, 214n50, 231, 232, 234, 269 Italian American Studies, 22, 67, 95, 125, 193, 203, 214, 231, 238 Little Italy, 238

278 

INDEX

Italian colonialism, 92 Italian, The (film), 5, 152 Italy, 3, 5, 13, 26, 42, 42n87, 62, 63, 66, 66n1, 67, 70, 82, 83n36, 91–94, 96n80, 103, 115, 163, 164, 169, 170, 187, 197, 227, 232, 234, 238, 245, 256n53, 263 J Jersey Shore, The (TV program), 9, 184 Jokes, 175, 266 K Karim, Fatima, 173 Kemper, Ellie, 214 Keys, Alicia, 12, 12n25 Kimmel, Michael, 204 Kin/kinship, 33, 44, 150, 151, 160, 161n39, 169 Kinsey Reports, 79 Kiss Me Guido (film), 16 Kitchen, 19, 21–56, 142, 187, 216n51, 241, 242, 265, 266 Klausner, Julie, 209 Korpi, Norman, 169–170 Kramer, Larry, 109 L LaBruce, Bruce, 183 Lachmann, Renate, 247 Lambda Literary Awards, 108, 108n4 Lanzilotto, Annie, 15 Latinx, 145, 150n7, 151 Lauper, Cindi, 13 Laverne & Shirley (TV program), 8 Le Blanc, Matt, 211 Lee, Spike, 234 Legitimacy, 129, 259 Leno, Jay, 142

Lesbian/lesbianism, 17, 22n2, 24, 26, 31, 32, 34, 41, 44, 45, 47, 50, 54, 55, 61–63, 71, 79, 90, 94n76, 97, 171n1, 175, 180n29, 184, 187–189, 217–219, 233n8, 235, 235n14, 248, 249, 264, 266–268 lipstick lesbian, 218 LeVito, Agostino, 163 LGBTQIA+, 13, 14, 16, 31, 97, 108, 143, 172, 174, 189, 199, 201, 211, 216, 220, 232, 235, 258, 266, 267, 269 allies, 259 community, 14, 18, 209, 217, 253, 259, 269 identity, 269 Life with Luigi (TV program), 8 Lim, Eng-Beng, 135n153 Livingston, Jennie, 145, 146, 152 LoGuidice, Joseph Anthony, 161 Lorde, Audre, 54, 54n135, 56 Lost Gay Novels (book), 69 Love, Heather, 97, 155 Lowbrow, 71, 92 Lunt, Peter, 159 M Macaronis Riot, 18 Machismo, 104, 176, 182 Madalena, Lawrence, 66 Madalena, Lorenzo, 66–73, 69n6, 69n7, 70n8, 73n20, 75n25, 77–79, 79n26, 81, 85, 86, 93n73, 95–97 Wahl, Loren, 15, 66, 74, 76 Madalena, Lorenzo, 66–73, 69n6, 69n7, 70n8, 73n20, 75n25, 77–79, 79n26, 81, 85, 86, 93n73, 95–97 Mad Men (TV program), 17 Madonna, 13, 13n27, 63, 211, 234, 235

 INDEX 

Mafia, 7, 171–178, 172n6, 175n15, 180–184, 186, 189, 190, 193, 203, 238, 243, 244 gangster, 171, 173 mafioso, 177, 178, 180, 184, 199 Mafioso, 177, 178, 180, 182, 184, 199 Mainstream, 2, 10–12, 17, 33, 42, 51, 183, 193, 207, 213, 221, 231, 232n4, 247, 249 Mama Rosa (TV program), 8 Mambo Italiano (film), 16 Man/manhood, 29, 29n32, 32, 36, 39, 41, 45, 62, 75, 79, 84, 87, 90, 91, 93, 94, 94n76, 96, 148, 177, 188, 190, 203, 204, 206, 208, 212, 227, 266 Maniscalco, Sebastian, 142 Manuel, Sheri L., 221 Marie, Rose, 17 Martin, Dean, 12, 182 Masculinity, 66, 72, 118, 134n150, 173, 178, 190, 201–208 hyper masculinity, 178, 202, 204, 208 machismo, 171, 204, 243 Mazar, Debi, 229, 232, 234, 235 McCarthy era, 80 McCormack, Eric, 208 McRuer, Robert, 50, 51n120 Memoir, 11, 23, 23n10, 24n12, 25n16, 39n74, 47n106, 53, 111n16, 155n21, 233 See also Autobiography Memory, 36, 44, 84, 92, 142, 159 Merchant, Natalie, 12 Merentino, Anthony, 17 Merlo, Joey, 16 Mésalliances, 231, 242–248, 253 Midcentury, 71, 84, 97 Migliaccio, Eduardo, 10

279

Migration, 11, 31, 85, 119, 146, 151, 152, 161n39, 162 Milan, 85n43, 89 Milano, Alyssa, 17, 85 Military, 67, 75, 80, 83–85, 83n36, 91, 94 Miller, Arthur, 10, 79n26 Miller’s Crossing (film), 172 Minelli, Liza, 13, 206, 213 Miscegenation, 113, 117, 124, 125 Mittell, Jason, 9 Mob Wives (TV program), 173, 184 Mock, Janet, 160 Moffatt, Wendy, 155n21 Moonstruck (film), 7 Mother/motherhood, 7, 8, 25, 27–29, 32, 33n50, 36, 38, 39n76, 40, 41, 41n82, 44–56, 48n112, 50n117, 52n124, 63, 68, 93, 104, 118, 125, 143, 146, 163, 180, 184, 187, 194, 200n4, 215, 229, 230, 243–245, 254, 263, 265–267, 269 Motley, Willard, 81n34 Muñoz, Jose Esteban, 119 Murphy, Ryan, 211 Murray, Kristen, 209 The Music of the Inferno (novel), 173 Muscio, Giuliana, 5, 5n8 My Big Fat Italian Funeral (play), 16, 16n37 My Big Fat Italian Wedding (film), 16, 16n37, 16n39 My Big Fat Italian Wedding (play), 15 My Cousin Vinny (film), 7 N Naples, 66n1, 82, 93, 93n73 Nappi, Rudy, 73 Nation, 7, 8, 8n15, 96n80, 108n2 national identity, 96

280 

INDEX

Nationalism, 5 Nationality, 70 Natural, 28, 28n27, 50, 92, 113 Navy, 68 Neapolitan, 25, 89, 93 Negro, 68, 83, 85, 87, 90, 93 Negro Digest, 75 New Jersey, 146, 150n7, 151, 170, 210, 233, 238 New York, 148 New York City, 10, 24n12, 25, 31, 123, 145, 150, 151, 160, 163, 170, 196, 200, 201n8, 203, 210, 229, 234, 236, 236n16, 263, 264 Niagara Falls (play), 137 Ninja, Willi, 154 Njegosh, Tatiana Petrovic, 92 Non-binary, 156n24, 204, 232, 233 Non-normative, 22, 42, 52, 67, 81, 94, 159 Normativity, 187, 257 See also Heteronormativity O Omertà, 35, 35n58, 203, 206 On the Waterfront (film), 79 Oppressive, 56 Other, 24, 29, 32, 37, 51, 115, 214, 257 Our Naked Lives (book), 14 P Page, Elliot, 157 Pansexual/pansexuality, 114, 132, 232, 235 Paperback, 66, 72n16, 73, 73n19, 73n20, 75, 79n27, 80, 81n34, 88 Parents, 3, 25–27, 29, 35, 37, 41–43, 47, 52n124, 52n125, 91, 93, 96, 103, 104, 126, 142, 174, 175, 180, 184–186, 201n8

Paris is Burning (film), 145, 146, 152–154, 164 Parsemain, Ava, 235 Partisan, 93, 94, 96 Patriarca, Silvana, 83n36 Patriarch/patriarchy, 36, 45, 46, 52n124, 53, 248, 250n45 Pellagatti, Frank, 163 Pellagatti, Mike, 148, 150n5, 150n8, 152, 158, 161, 162 Pellagatti, Thomas, 146, 147 Pérez, Hiram, 107, 111, 113–116, 119, 123, 136 Perilli, Vincenza, 83n36, 92n69 Pesci, Joe, 142 Petowsky, Shadi, 157 Petrovich Njegosh, Tatiana, 92 Piccoli, Dana, 103–105 Pisanelli Alessandro, Antonietta, 10 Plasketes, George, 200, 211 Pleasure/pleasurable, 88, 134, 190 Pocketbook, 73 Pornography, 17, 44, 69, 80, 202, 220 obscenity, 87 Pose (TV program), 127, 150 Power, 22, 24, 28, 29n32, 32, 50, 53, 61, 62, 156n24, 160, 239, 247, 253 structures of, 41, 143, 160 Pratt, Mary Louise, 22, 23, 88 Prezzolini, Giuseppe, 178 Puar, Jasbir K., 113, 122, 129 Public discourse, 153 Puerto Rican, 146, 152, 153, 160, 163–165 Pulp/pulp fiction, 18, 66, 67, 71, 73, 80, 81, 96 comics, 71, 72 magazines, 71, 72 Pulp Friction (book), 72n16 “Pulp Writing 1A”, 71 Puzo, Mario, 11

 INDEX 

Q Queer, 81, 90, 104, 108–137, 142, 170, 178, 199, 201, 203, 217, 219, 220, 226, 227, 246, 269 Critical Race Theory, 95, 108n2 culture, 134 desire, 35, 45, 47, 50, 75, 84 identity, 21, 22, 24, 28, 31, 42, 46, 47, 50–52, 55, 87 interracial desire, 75 queer of color, 135 queer studies, 95 representation, 81, 104, 142, 172, 200, 209, 231, 232 temporalities, 96, 135 theory, 135 Queer History of the United States, A (book), 70 Queer Pulp, 72n16 Queer temporalities, 96 Questa (play), 107–137 R Rabelais and His World (book), 230 Rabinowitz, Paula, 88 Race/racial/racism, 70, 75, 83–85, 90–92, 94, 97, 112, 113, 124n88, 126, 128, 130, 135–137, 135n154, 244 color blind, 91 and inequality, 85 interracial, 81 and justice, 86 and oppression, 67 and segregation, 67, 75, 95 Ragusa, Kym, 24 Rappoport, Leon, 175, 179, 190 Readership consumer, 72 male, 72

281

Recipe, 25, 32–34, 44, 56, 142, 194, 197 Reich, Jacqueline, 173 Relationship, 2, 5n8, 8n15, 19, 24–26, 28, 30, 34, 35, 38, 45, 47, 52n124, 53, 73, 75, 81, 83, 83n36, 91, 93, 97, 161n39, 178, 182, 187, 208, 219, 227, 230, 231, 241, 244, 247–249, 253, 265, 269 Representation, 2–4, 2n1, 5n8, 7, 10–12, 13n27, 18, 19, 25n16, 70, 81, 104, 110, 129, 136, 142, 146, 154, 155n21, 158, 159, 166, 172, 173, 175n15, 180, 190, 191, 199, 200, 200n5, 208, 209, 211–215, 218, 220, 221, 229–232, 232n4, 234, 235, 235n14, 236n16, 249, 256, 261 Resistance, 24, 93, 94n76, 248 Italian, 170 WWII, 93, 94n76 Rodriguez, MJ, 157 Romance/romantic, 26, 34, 45, 68, 75, 126, 179, 201, 206, 208, 219, 242, 248, 265 Romano, Ray, 32, 142 Roots, 35, 38, 42–44, 55, 149, 182, 184, 234n9, 269 Rose Tattoo, The (play), 10 Rubin, Gayle S., 26, 31 Rubyfruit (bar), 264 Russo, Vito, 17n40, 18, 179 S S/M, 131n136, 132, 133, 135n152 Sacco, Nicola, vi San Diego, 66, 66n1, 68, 69, 75, 79 San Diego State University (SDSU) Digital Archives, 85n43 Special Collections, 66n1

282 

INDEX

San Francisco, 31 Saracino, Mary, 23, 24, 47–56, 47n108 Saturday Night Fever (film), 7, 214, 215 Saturday Night Live (TV program), 9 Scambray, Kenneth, 66n1 Schuller, Kyla, 113 Scorsese, Martin, 216n52, 234, 234n9, 235 Sealey, Nicole, 153 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 31, 53 Segregation, 67, 75, 86, 95 Self-fashioning, 156 Sex/sexuality, 6, 13n27, 15, 26, 51, 79, 87, 94, 115, 122, 127n106, 130–136, 135n154, 146, 150n7, 158, 162, 173, 177, 180, 180n29, 182, 184, 189, 190, 191n36, 201, 202, 209, 221, 227, 233, 234, 237, 239, 242, 247, 253, 256, 257 identity, 248 sex work, 26, 126, 127n106, 145, 161 Sex and the City (TV program), 200n2, 236, 236n16, 237 Sexism, 205 misogynist, 219 Sexual abuse, 34, 34n52, 36, 37n63, 38, 39n74, 42, 47n108, 52 Shakespeare, Tom, 51 Shame, 26, 41, 50, 93, 96, 142, 154 Shor, Miriam, 232, 242 Sicilian, 169, 180, 203 Sicilia Queer Filmfest, 63 Sicily/Sicilian ethnicity, 85 identity, 111n16 Silence, 24, 35, 39, 40, 46, 53–56, 206, 219 See also Omertà Sinatra, Frank, 12, 142, 213, 264, 269

Sinner, 32, 53 Sitcom, 221 Slide, Anthony, 70n8, 71n12, 82n35, 89n58 Snorton, Riley C., 113 Social, 3n2, 6n10, 22, 27, 28, 37, 41, 42, 51, 61, 79, 95, 96, 110n13, 112n19, 130n124, 155, 159, 178, 230, 257, 268 issues, 209 justice, 165 media, 111 norms, 121 Society, 23, 37, 42, 46, 51, 56, 68, 70n11, 79, 86, 92, 94, 95, 213, 221 Solloway, Joey, 157 Some Like it Hot (film), 173 Son, 40, 41, 175, 179, 180 Sontag, Susan, 177 Sopranos, The (TV program), 3, 17, 172, 200, 200n2, 216n52, 217, 218 Space, 21, 22, 24, 25, 30–32, 45, 48, 52n124, 53n71, 103, 135, 150n7, 158, 230, 231 space between, 233 Spaghetti Western, 19 Sphere, 27, 28, 52, 269 Spike from Bensonhurst (film), 174 Spivak, Gayatri, 110, 110n12 Spunger, Benjamin, 217 Star, Darren, 229, 236, 236n16 Staten Island, 238, 243 Stefani, Gwen, 142 Stereotypes, 2, 5, 6, 7n14, 8–10, 81, 118, 121, 125, 130n124, 135, 158, 159, 175, 175n15, 176, 184, 190, 199–201, 203, 211, 213, 216, 218, 221, 230, 235n14, 243, 247, 266, 269 Stoler, Ann Laura, 113

 INDEX 

Stonewall Riots, 97, 211 Stryker, Susan, 72n16, 79 Subjectivity, 112, 134n150, 146–166, 155n21 Sunday, 21, 27n25, 29, 30, 49, 51, 52n124, 55, 104, 142 Surveillance, 96 T Table, 21–56, 214, 216, 241, 251 Taboo, 35n58, 44, 52, 68, 72n16, 84, 201, 209, 245 Take Me As I Am (book), 73–75, 73n19, 80 Talese, Gay, 11 Tamburri, Anthony, 249 Tardio, Chris, 242 Television, 7, 8, 8n15, 8n16, 13, 17–19, 110, 127, 149, 158, 159, 170, 183, 201, 208, 209, 220, 229, 231, 235, 235n14, 238, 247, 249 Teenager, 36, 45, 56, 104 Television, 7–9, 8n15, 8n16, 13, 17–19, 110, 127, 148, 149, 158, 159, 170, 183, 199–221, 229, 231, 235–238, 247, 249 This Boy Cometh to the Mountain (play), 16 Threat, 6n10, 36, 92, 179, 190 Tijuana Bibles (comics), 70n8 Tomasi, Mari, 11 Tortorella, Nico, 229, 232–234, 232n4, 233n8 Tradition, 4, 5, 142, 151, 152, 158, 160, 164, 184, 203, 212n44, 225, 226, 248 Transcultural, 70, 81 Transgender, 127, 136, 142, 145, 146, 148, 149, 153–155,

283

156n24, 160, 162, 166, 193, 194, 196 trans community, 162 trans experience, 156 trans identity (see also Identity/ identification) See also Gender Transition/transitioning, 23, 154, 155, 157, 260, 267 pre-transition, 157 Transmedia and transmediatic, 73 Transnational, 5n8, 9, 13, 24, 67, 81, 120, 155 Transphobia, 258 Trans studies, 155 Trashy, 82 Tucci, Stanley, 142 U Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (TV program), 17, 200–203, 214, 215, 220 Urie, Michael, 232 V Valentino, Rudolph, 6, 7, 7n12, 180, 180n29 Valli, Frankie, 12 Vanzetti, Bartolomeo, vi Verdicchio, Pasquale, 66n1, 69, 79n27 Viego, Antonio, 113 View from the Bridge, A (play), 10 Vallarino, Amy, 72n16 Violence, 35n58, 41, 46, 73n19, 112, 131, 133, 203, 216, 216n52 Visual, 240, 256, 257 storytelling, 75 Vitullo, Juliann, 202 Vogler, Candace, 134 Voyeur/voyeurism, 79, 88, 94, 132n142, 133, 256

284 

INDEX

W Wachowski, Lana, 157 Wachowski, Lilly, 157 Wahl, Loren, 15, 66, 74, 76 Welcome Back Kotter (TV program), 8 Western, 19, 26, 28, 33 WFUV, 263 Whiteness, 85, 95–97, 96n80, 111, 112, 114, 116, 124, 125, 128, 129, 133, 135n152, 136, 137, 160, 161, 161n39, 164, 191 Who’s The Boss (TV program), 8 Will & Grace (TV program), 17, 200–202, 200n6, 206, 208, 209, 214, 215, 217–220 Williams, Tennessee, 10 Woman, 23, 25, 26, 28, 31, 32, 37, 42, 44, 46, 53, 61, 62, 64, 73, 75, 79, 91, 105, 130n124, 142, 152, 188, 189, 194, 236n16, 252 Woolf, Virginia, 39, 39n74, 40

World War II (WWII), 79, 94 historiography, 81, 94 Worley, Jennifer, 72n16, 80n29, 81n33 X Xtravaganza, Angie, 146 Xtravaganza, Venus, 17, 145, 147–166 Y Yankee Bar, 89 Younger (TV program), 17, 229 Youth, 16n37, 26, 33, 79, 130, 193, 206 Z Zeitgeist, 17, 164