by Mario Mieli
Precisely because Mieli’s reflection is fuelled by homosexual activists’ everyday experience and collective work of self-consciousness, through the book – although to a lesser extent with respect to the forthcoming poetical, theatrical and narrative productions – Mieli irrigates the practices of homosexual activism with a critical and radical thought permanently matched by experimental turns, within the interstices and the orifices of his intuitions, and of his own body. The liberation of Eros, as he states in Reichian and Marcusian Freudo-marxist terms, aiming at the revolutionary destruction of the heterosexual and heterosexist geography and economics of the social body, applies to current queer critiques of the neoliberal neoliberation of sexuality, and democratic promotion of gay and lesbian rights. An unexpected alliance and, I would say, an unexpected genealogy. Indeed, if we assume that without Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Teresa de Lauretis and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, queer theories would not have existed in their present form, currently at the basis of numerous PhD dissertations, then without Mario Mieli, we could delight ourselves for hours and hours quibbling about a theoretical queer, granting ourselves the luxury not to confront the obscure material of a denied, repressed or even scared desire at which the queer marginality always stares.
III
After the publication of the book, Mieli acquires public visibility, within the movement and within the Italian intellectual environment. He participates in TV shows and releases interviews to the media. Nevertheless, his work is not limited to this book and spreads across a wide range of initiatives. Together with other comrades, Mieli founds a theatrical collective, writes and creates a pièce, which is played in several Italian cities: La traviata Norma: ovvero vaffanculo… ebbene sì! [The deviated Norma: or fuck you … well, let’s do it!]. Between 1976 and 1977, many queer theatrical collectives were born, giving life to a homosexual theatre season, whose themes reflects Mario Mieli’s book contents: critique of heterosexuality and public exhibition of the erotic perversion of homosexual desire, of which some aspects nowadays would be considered unacceptable, such as pederasty – intended as the liberation from what Mieli calls the ‘educastration’ of children, and not as a praise for pedophilia. However, this clamour of revolutionary flavour does not seem to involve the larger movement. As had already happened in France after 1974 with the disappearance of FHAR, clearing the way for alternative groups of homosexual liberation – whose project was far less oriented towards revolution and much more towards building a large, organised and structured movement – between 1974 and 1978, the leaders of the Italian Fuori! decide to turn to parliamentary politics and to federate with the Radical Party. In 1978, they organised a Congress focussed on homosexual liberation and civil rights. This turn generates a deep fracture between the movement’s reformist and revolutionary factions, which will progressively lead to the integral rewriting of Fuori’s political program. A core issue revolves around formal and political emancipation within the fields of law and rights. The revolutionary collectives, reduced to a minority and demobilised, will disappear to be replaced by other collectives that saw the revolutionary horizon no longer as a historical rupture with the past, but rather as a motivational discourse allowing the foundation of a new homosexual movement in the present.
To the extent that in 1979, during an interview for the journal Lambda, Mieli asserts that ‘he is no longer part of the gay movement’, a movement that is going in the direction of institutionalisation and normalisation. Moreover, these years mark the commercial remodelling of the ‘ghetto’, involving the consecration of gay virility and the refusal of gender crossing. In 1981, after a night out in a gay club in Milan, Mieli writes an article in which, in the guise of queer ethnographer, he accounts the failing hegemony of homosexual masculinity:
Some of them are dancing with open pants exposing their butt, some of them are half naked, others dressed in Indian clothes, others as cowboys. Not the stuff of a saloon girl. The cocks that I’m sucking taste all the same. I don’t know who’s fucking me, if he’s young or old, cute or ugly: I’m still looking ahead, with legs and cocks under my nose. Me, the sissy boy they didn’t want to let in because I wasn’t soldierlike enough, I’m animating the place. I despise all of them. They expose their own goods following the competitive market rules. No one looks at you in the eyes, or hardly. They just give a look-over. There’s a big sense of guilt. It’s impressive how in this virile acting, cocks fail.
And he tersely concludes:
Damned men, they accept the ghetto rule and they can’t even enjoy it. They have never heard of the metaphysics of sex. Tell them that if they can benefit from ghettoes like this one, they owe it to our courage. Firstly, we act to let homosexuality come out of the closet! Those idiots let capital make a craze of this.7
While he continued to be politically engaged, in such matters as ecology and the dangers of nuclear war, Mieli is disappointed and enraged by what he sees as a movement’s involution, and more generally, by what the public experience of homosexuality has become. His research of homosexual critique is turning into a poetical activity rather than a theoretical or political one. While he continues writing poems, he works on a novel, participates in a TV screenplay and performs some of his theatrical texts in several experimental theatre festivals in Milan.
In the early 1980s, Mieli is shifting in a kind of ascetic and esthetic mysticism, aiming at staying politically connected with the Italian intellectual scene while following a more spiritual route and research. He is looking for the solution to the hermetical and alchemical equation of himself being part of the real world. This search leads him to a journey in India, where he appears to be working on a second book, which unfortunately was lost. Perhaps, such loss is a sign of Mieli’s own loss of sense during these years. In the poems written during the last months of life, his style becomes disconnected, uncertain, and unstable. The fragile queer marginality that Mieli could translate in political theories and practices seems now to generate a black hole, swallowing his gay genius, even going so far as to erode his body of existence from any possible foothold. It is no longer possible to love, fight or resist, to enjoy, write or maybe simply to think. The desire to build alternative realities, still radically queer, vanishes too.
On 12 March 1983, Mieli commits suicide in his flat, after having already performed his death in a tragically anticipatory text: Ciò detto, passo oltre [That said, I’m moving on]. The book is only a small part of the author’s masterpiece, which contributed to design the matrix of queer theories and politics, even if the random architecture of this queer anticipation of the queer is revealed only après-coup. Reading Towards a Gay Communism in times of equal rights is without any doubt an invitation to think about how to resist the tautological symbolic of #LoveIsLove or the promotional rhetoric of #LoveWins. Reading Mieli today perhaps also means to rediscover the path that leads to those forms of political enjoyment, which do not feed victories – easy or difficult as they might be – but rather the failing positioning of critique and minority subjectivities, never completely coherent, never completely satisfactory and always deeply frustrating. Reading again Mieli’s work, from a queer perspective, is somehow a renewed occasion to resist the discreet appeal of gay normativity, this feeling of existential power that comes from the formal and institutional recognition of a certain kind of homosexuality made of nuptial celebrations, familiar constrictions, natalist injunctions and nationalist pride. Perhaps, this is Mieli’s queer legacy, a fucking invitation to think against, and first and foremost, against ourselves.
Massimo Prearo
__________
1. Interview with Mario Mieli, ‘Come mai?’, 1977. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5i2xnoKaB8Q
2. Mario Mieli, ‘Per la critica della questione omosessuale’, Fuori!, n. 3, September 1972, p. 1–2.
3. See page 251 of the current edition.
4. See the connection that Lorenzo Bernini proposes in his book, Queer Apocalypses. Elements of Antisocial Theory, Palgra
ve Macmillan, 2017.
5. As David Halperin lucidly relates in the introduction of How to Be Gay, Belknap Press, 2014.
6. This is the name of an International Queer Festival held every year in Europe.
7. Mario Mieli, ‘La sagra dell’impotenza. Una serata al One Way’, Grattacielo, March 1981, p. 36.
Translator’s Preface
Evan Calder Williams
Like any translation, this one is a product of several minds trying to find a language in common or, perhaps more importantly, the generative friction that comes from what always seems to elude the right combination of words. More often than not, that sort of messy confluence takes shape most explicitly between the author and the translator, even as they are shadowed by, and hopefully attuned to, all the echoes and traces of those whose dialogue, critiques, friendship, and influence irrevocably mark a text but too often go unnamed. In the case of this specific translation, there’s another layer, as my work was to return to David Fernbach’s excellent first rendering of the book into English. What I did was to translate chapters and chunks that had not been included in the version he published with Gay Men’s Press in 1980; to thoroughly annotate the text as a whole, attending to Mieli’s slippery puns and wordplay and especially to those newly added parts whose Italian cultural and political references might be otherwise obscure; and to cast fresh eyes over it, some 37 years later. In this way, what you’ll read represents a fusion of David’s and my approaches not only to trying to translate this incendiary and brilliant text, but also more generally to the questions and concerns given such unmistakable force, lucidity, and humour throughout it.
One consequence of this joint translation, with its main efforts separated by three and a half decades, is that it might let us read Mieli anew, as each of our efforts are surely marked by the relevant currents of those moments and what feels urgent to us. By reading anew, however, I don’t mean from scratch, and certainly not according to a model of disinterested interpretation or some purportedly neutral ‘objective’ approach. That would fly straight in the face of so much of what this book does, in its genre-blurring prose that joins rigor to jokes, bilious and snarky anger to careful close reading, and especially in its insistence that all critique is corporally embodied, suffused with desire and loss in historically and personally precise ways, even if too few of us admit this fully. Rather, through the interval formed by the years between the book’s appearance in 1977 (as well as the preceding years in which it took shape and David’s translation three years later) and the appearance of this new edition in 2018, a parallax takes shape, and it is this span that might cast different light on Mieli’s project. I won’t remotely try to offer a full litany of the shifts and eddies of social history in those intervening decades, and perhaps it is enough to note with horror how relevant and timely much of the book still feels, given that this signifies how much has remained the same that deserved to be abolished forever. There have been four more decades of capital’s persistence, four decades of ravages, crises, and mutations that, at the end of the day, leave its fundamental social relations intact and continually retrenched by mechanisms of racial policing, debt, social shaming, surveillance, border security, politics as usual, neofascist yearning, and all the rest of the manifold, lethal, and contradictory apparatus that constitutes the general defense system of a catastrophic status quo. Moreover, for all the gains made against the sanctioned tyranny of gendered, homophobic, and transphobic violence and control, it is all too clear both how prevalent it still is and how unevenly it is applied, particularly as an operation and logic never distinct from race and class but rather embedded within the ongoing threat and application of force aimed to bolster social order, the accumulation of capital, and the perpetuity of nations.
Towards a more modest end, then, I want to note shifts in two specific fields of inquiry within which this book seems likely to be situated and read. First, especially in the past decade, there has been a marked surge in interest amongst American and British left orbits in histories of Italian radicalism, especially of the years in which Mieli and Fuori! were active. We have seen extensive new investigations into Italian extraparliamentary formations, operaismo and autonomist Marxism, ultra-left critiques, ‘worker’s inquiries,’ and, perhaps most crucially, the Marxist feminism of the 1970s associated with Lotta Femminista and Wages for Housework as well as individual figures such as Leopoldina Fortunati, Silvia Federici, and Mariarosa Dalla Costa. Especially in the portions of the text not included in the previous translation (in part because they are indeed highly particular to an Italian situation and resist transposition beyond that), Mieli’s proximity to, and distance from, far-left currents of these years become more evident, revealing him to be a razor-sharp and engaged critic of his own moment. This can be seen, for instance, in the equally furious and mournful chapter on the murder of Pier Paolo Pasolini and in his extended theoretical devastation of the dangerous pablum of Franco Fornari, an influential Italian psychiatrist who was head of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society during the very years when Mieli was writing. Perhaps most compelling of these highly specific engagements, however, is the attempt to reckon with extraparliamentary and far-left formations at the time, as he blasts the preservation of patriarchal and homophobic structures reinforced within them, as well as the complicity with those of many who called themselves comrades.
Second, reading Mieli now necessarily means reading him not only in the history of gay liberation but also within contemporary constellations of queer theory and transgender studies more widely, fields whose development may be partially presaged by his book but were in no way as robust (and often institutionally sanctioned) as they are now. Bringing Mieli into contact with these strands is not a new endeavor, as his work has been a key touchpoint for many since the book was first published, but the timing of this edition brings it into a field that has seen not only crucial work on gender performativity and the lived histories of the AIDS epidemic (that temporal matrix of survival and mourning that makes the present haunted, ‘the future of our past’ in Didier Eribon’s words). It also involves more recent tendencies of queer and trans theory centred around race and indigeneity, the hormonal and biochemical, animal studies, the impasses of heteronormative futurity, decolonisation, and posthumanism. In such a context, there are undoubtedly certain elements of Mieli’s work that will feel too much of another time: the continual engagement with Freudian schematics; his particular version of thinking ‘transsexuality’; the potential limits of its largely binary gender schema (i.e. the focus on bisexual being), even if it opens out towards a more fluid and ‘polymorphous’ plane; the degree to which the category of homosexuality is transposed across history, geography, and species; and its sometimes questionable analogies (such as that between colonial uprisings and gay liberation). But despite this, Towards a Gay Communism feels nothing like a mere historical curiosity to me, neither politically nor theoretically. It is now, as it was then, a bracing gust of laughter, acrimony, innovation, and expansive commitment to the communist prospect of going beyond what have come to be the assumed limits of human possibility. So our hope, in this new edition, is that its potential diversions from, and frictions with, more contemporary approaches to some of its burning questions are generative and unexpected, rather than seeming dead ends. After all, as familiar and potentially dated as its more familiar hybridisation of Marx and Freud might appear, certain of its key elements have started to feel uncannily present once again, like its obstinate insistence on the revolutionary necessity of gender abolition, its advocacy for a dramatically re-configured libidinal economy, its attention to traps of pleasure and complicity that bind us to calcified subject formations, or the transsexual future it sketches. Consider, for instance, the ‘Letter from a Trans Man to the Old Sexual Regime’, published by Paul B. Preciado, author of Testo Junkie, in Le Monde, some of whose lines could come straight from the pages of Towards a Gay Communism without missing a beat:
This will be a
1000-year war – the longest of all wars, given that it will affect the politics of reproduction and processes through which a human body is socially constituted as a sovereign subject. It will actually be the most important of all wars, because what is at stake is neither territory nor city, but the body, pleasure, and life.1
Indeed, insofar as there is a substantive difference between this and Mieli’s claim that ‘we must either decide openly for life, for pleasure, or else accept the tragic scenario that capital has in store’, it may lie above all in what has not vanished or become outmoded but rather so omnipresent as to vanish into plain sight. As Preciado’s necessary work in recent years has shown, many of the mechanisms we must contest in this ‘1000-year war’ are rarely as obvious as direct political antagonism or social exclusion. Rather, they are constituted at biological, technological, and libidinal levels that structure and rewire the very categories of visibility, engagement, and attention that they use to cloak themselves and their continued confining force.