Abstract
This article analyzes the figure of the homosexual fascist, the ‘homo-fascist,’ in postwar cultural memory through the lens of Alberto Moravia's 1951 novel Il conformista (The Conformist). Il conformista exemplifies the place of the homo-fascist narrative in crafting postwar cultural discourses around fascism, especially in the Italian case. Beginning from a close reading of the text combined with analysis of its historical context, the article deconstructs the narrative's interpretive logic to identify the many politically convenient fictions the homo-fascist offered within the growing project of postwar memory. These fictions, as embodied in the homo-fascist, facilitated the dual condemnation and excusal of fascism as the pathological weakness of the separate few, not the collective many. This analysis illuminates the often-overlooked historical role that narratives of homosexuality have played in the fluid construction of cultural, political, and social memories of fascism and its adherents. Viewing Il conformista within a specifically Italian vein of the narrative distinct from the German, moreover, critically reorients the text within Italy's individual and politically potent relationship to its Fascist past. Understanding the homo-fascist through Il conformista, therefore, enlightens not only the history of the homo-fascist figure, but also the histories of modern Italy, postwar memory culture, and sexual politics.
Introduction
Il conformista follows Italian man Marcello Clerici from his youth in the 1920s through the Fascist period (1922–1943). 1 The work's primary theme is Marcello's obsession with conforming to society in every way and with suppressing his feelings of anormalità (‘abnormality’). After an adolescent Marcello shoots and, he believes, kills an adult man trying to seduce him, this fixation with normality deepens. Marcello pursues conformity in all his decisions, from marrying Giulia, a woman he does not love, to becoming an agent with the Fascist secret police. While in Paris on a mission to assassinate his former professor, Quadri, Marcello becomes infatuated with Quadri's wife Lina, though Fascist agents eventually kill both without his intervention. Moravia's famed novel gained even broader recognition with Bertolucci's 1970 film adaptation of the same name, which largely follows the novel's plot.
Why associate Fascism with homosexuality at all? Historical context clarifies the cultural conversation at stake in Il conformista and in homosexual fascist discourse overall. Scholars commonly agree that promoting hypermasculinity as distinct from femininity was a key goal of the Fascist regime and fascism in general (see Dagnino, 2016; Mosse, 1996; Ponzio, 2015; Spackman, 1996; Tumblety, 2012: 135–65). This image of masculinity depended upon heterosexuality. Though homosexuality was not specifically outlawed under Fascism, recent research in the relatively nascent field of queer histories of Italian Fascism has shown that the state enforced heterosexuality in other ways, including internal exile and blackmail (Benadusi, 2012; Dall’Orto, 2015; Ponzanesi, 2014; Richardson, 2021; Romano, 2018). Nazi Germany, in contrast, systematically deported male homosexuals to concentration camps during the Holocaust, a phenomenon well documented in the historiography since the 1980s (see Giles, 2018; Mosse, 1985; Plant, 1986). Fascist regimes and political organizations in other countries have commonly sanctioned homophobia as a matter of policy as well (Meyers, 2006: 110). Conversely, scholarly work has noted many fascist groups’ intense homosociality and even homoeroticism, especially in art, with hypermasculinity expressed through the male body and male bonding (Moretti, 2015; Pursell, 2008; Spurlin, 2009). Masculinity, therefore, was both a potent site and vector of fascist authority.
Despite the prevalence of fascist homophobia, the discursive linkage of homosexuality and fascism has been nearly ubiquitous. The ‘cultural fantasy’ of the homosexual fascist, in Meyers’ (2006: 110) terms, has appeared throughout the West on an essentially continuous basis in various forms since the 1930s or even earlier. This image of the ‘homo-fascist’ likely arose as a relatively straightforward tool of homophobic attack for use by anti-fascists throughout Europe (Meyers, 2006: 110; Plant, 1986, 15). Both before and after the war, this image evolved, as critical theorists and cultural commentators sought to rationalize the homo-fascist figure. Some Frankfurt School adherents were particularly influential in this line of thinking, as they asserted that a theoretical Freudian homosexual personality type was predisposed to fascism due to tendencies towards submission and masochism. This repressed homosexuality, in turn, would trigger outbursts of fascist violence (Halle, 1995; Heineman, 2005). Postwar scholarly and critical work continued to uphold the cultural legitimacy of the homo-fascist idea (see Sontag, 1975). European masculinity historian George Mosse, for example, argued that French fascism attracted gay men because of the fraternal comradeship and ‘aesthetics of the male body’ it fostered (Mosse, 1996). The homo-fascist figure has thus circulated in remarkably consistent form throughout many national and discursive contexts over time.
Understanding the homo-fascist contributes not only to the scholarly conversation around homosexuality and fascism, but also to the history of sexual politics, the history of post-fascist cultural memory, and modern Italian history. Studies of the homosexual fascist narrative have risen in the last few decades in accordance with the growth of the history of sexuality and queer history in 20th-century Europe overall (see Champagne, 2019; Duncan, 2006; Oosterhuis, 1995). The most salient work in this vein is Dagmar Herzog's Sex After Fascism (2007), which argues that cultural representations of sexuality under Nazism powerfully shaped how Germany and its political actors have dealt with the Nazi past. Herzog identifies the conflation of Nazism and homosexuality, whether ‘actual/manifest or repressed/latent,’ as an essential force in constructing post-Nazi memory (Herzog, 2007: 12). This article brings Herzog's framework of historicizing sexual politics in postwar memory to Il conformista and the Italian case. Few extended discussions of the specifically Italian homo-Fascist exist, with the notable exception of Hewitt's Political Inversions: Homosexuality, Fascism, and the Modernist Imaginary (1996), which devotes a chapter to Il conformista despite a focus on Nazi Germany. Hewitt, a scholar of comparative literature, employs queer theory and psychoanalysis to analyze the status of fascism and homosexuality in public discourse (Hewitt, 1996: 36). While Hewitt effectively argues for Il conformista as an ideal example of the homosexual fascist figure, my analysis orients away from the Freudian and critical theory of some queer studies scholars (such as Morrison, 2001: 140–174, Sedgwick, 2008: 48–51, Spurlin, 2009: 72–78) towards a history of cultural discourse in constructing postwar memory. This approach aims to yield a deeper understanding of the narrative's historical logic and political implications.
Utilizing a combined historical, literary, and queer approach, I demonstrate that the linkage of homosexuality and fascism embodied in the homo-fascist functions at the core of Il conformista. The text drew upon and perpetuated a narrative of conflating the two concepts in postwar memory discourse to better comprehend, condemn, and excuse fascism as the pathological weakness of the separately defined few, not the many. Il conformista thus exemplifies the key historical role that narratives of homosexuality have played in the fluid construction of post-fascist cultural memory. Most importantly, the text highlights the Italian case as distinct from the German or other national contexts to unpack Italian public discourse's specifically powerful and complex relationship to its Fascist past. Understanding the homo-fascist through Il conformista, therefore, sheds meaningful light on not just the homo-fascist, but also the histories of sexuality, postwar memory culture, and modern Italy. The article will proceed in three sections: firstly, a close reading of the text and its specific iteration of the homo-fascist; secondly, a deconstruction of the interpretive logic behind the homo-fascist narrative; and thirdly, an invocation of the significance of the Italian national context.
Il conformista as case study
Hewitt (1996: 278) asserts that Il conformista is ‘paradigmatic of any attempt to represent fascism.’ What makes the text ‘paradigmatic,’ and of what paradigm? Because the novel originated the story's plot and because the film generally follows the novel, I focus on Moravia's 1951 work over the 1970 adaptation. Close literary analysis of the text shows that the novel's core political claim is an association between the protagonist Marcello's struggle with homosexuality and his all-consuming desire to conform to Fascist society and ideology. The nearly identical iteration of the homo-fascist in the 1970 film, moreover, reflects the enduring resonance of the homo-fascist in public discourse. In both forms, therefore, Il conformista richly manifests the homo-fascist narrative within emerging and evolving postwar understandings of the fascist past.
The characterization of the novel's protagonist, Marcello, centers around his aberrant sexuality and accompanying nagging feeling of anormalità from childhood. Moravia writes that young Marcello ‘discover[ed] in himself a totally abnormal character, of which he should be ashamed… he was different from the boys his age…and, moreover, different in a definitive manner’ (Moravia, 1951: 10). 2 Even as a child, Marcello senses that some vague source of shame within himself is inherently and ‘definitive[ly]’ different from other boys. This childhood sentiment of being somehow different from one's peers, particularly one's same-gender peers, is a common trope in depictions of queer sexuality and sexological profiles of homosexuals (Lang and Sutton, 2016: 419; Weststrate and McLean, 2010: 226). The text grounds this sense of difference in Marcello's physicality and thus his sexuality. When Marcello craves a neighbor boy's approval and suddenly has a ‘physical awareness of this abnormality’ inside of him, for example, his ‘totally abnormal character’ springs from his bodily desire (Moravia, 1951: 20). 3 Stereotypical confirmations of Marcello's homosexuality include other schoolboys’ insulting his ‘feminine character’ and his damaged relationship with his father (Moravia, 1951: 31–32; Meyers, 2006: 110). 4 From the start of both the novel and Marcello's life, therefore, his homosexuality, unstated and instinctual yet deviant, defines his very self.
A traumatic interaction in which homosexuality appears as a source of shame that must be violently suppressed crystallizes this sense of abnormality at the center of young Marcello's psyche. When Marcello is thirteen years-old, bullies try to force him into women's clothing, itself an indication that others perceive his gender non conformity and find it objectionable (Moravia, 1951: 35–36). An adult man named Lino saves him and invites him to his house. Marcello fixates upon Lino's ‘quality as embarrassing as it was mysterious,’ a quality that triggers a ‘humiliating heartbeat’ within him he does not understand (Moravia, 1951: 51, 54). 5 Marcello's attraction to ‘mysterious’ Lino both makes his heart flutter and is ‘humiliating,’ dually visceral and disgraceful. Lino reciprocates the boy's feelings, and the two later embrace on the man's bed, close but not yet kissing. While the two hug, Marcello grabs Lino's gun and shoots him (Moravia, 1951: 58). This moment will come to be a turning point in his journey for normality, as Marcello has tried to avoid becoming like Lino and rejected his ‘humiliating’ feeling of homosexual attraction through violence. Marcello's own desire, an unnamed abnormality, is so threatening that it must be ended with a bullet. Homosexuality in Il conformista, both unspecified and automatic, brings only pain and violence, even as it functions at the core of the novel's protagonist.
Marcello's pursuit of sexual self-repression inextricably drives the other fundamental aspect of his character, his fascism, to neatly manifest the homo-fascist trope. After the Lino incident, the novel jumps forward to 1937, with an adult Marcello reflecting on the rise of Fascism (Moravia, 1951: 58). The fact that the text jumps from a transformative moment in the development of Marcello's queer sexuality to his thoughts on the emergence of Fascism as an adult creates an immediate link between homosexuality and fascist politics. Marcello ponders how he joined the Fascists because it made him feel like he was not ‘a loner, an abnormal, a madman; he was one of them, a brother, a citizen, a comrade,’ a fact he found ‘consoling to a high degree’ (Moravia, 1951: 70). 6 Just as Mosse theorized about the appeal of fascist camaraderie for French homosexuals, Marcello's desire to belong amongst other men drew him to the fascist cause. Marcello did not turn to fascism for political reasons, but rather to quell his fears of being abnormal in a world in which, from the character's perspective, Fascism could offer some feeling of normality through conformity. His fascism is disingenuous, merely an extension of his homosexuality and urge to repress it. This dynamic, which fuses sexual and personal repression with political belief, partially derives its logic from Freudian psychoanalysis, as many scholars (see De Cauwer, 2013; Rigoletto, 2012; Wood, 1989) have argued. Despite Marcello's insincerity, the novel reveals further, he has gone beyond the expectations of the average Fascist party member to join the movement's elite secret police. As Marcello's fascism is his homosexuality, therefore, it is impossible to understand one aspect of the character without the other, as he entirely personifies the homo-fascist.
Even when homosexuality appears in other characters, it still reinforces the image of Marcello as the quintessential homo-fascist that drives the novel. Lina, the wife of the anti-fascist that Marcello attempts to assassinate, also represents a queerness characterized by gender nonconformity. The first thing Marcello notes about Lina is that her large feet and hands seem ‘almost masculine’ (Moravia, 1951: 197–98). 7 Marcello becomes infatuated with her, as he believes she will solve his inner ‘loathing of decadence, corruption, and impurity’ that marriage had not pacified (Moravia, 1951: 203). 8 This rhetoric of homosexuality as moralized ‘decadence, corruption, and impurity’ in contrast to the virtue of heterosexuality echoes anti-fascist invocations of the homo-fascist as bigoted political attack. Marcello's sudden obsession with Lina is not love, but excitement at the opportunity to act out the heterosexuality he craves with a woman who exhibits the masculine traits he truly desires. The fact that Lina's name is the feminine version of Lino, the name of the man who had pursued him, reinforces the association between Marcello's pursued heterosexuality and his repressed homosexuality. Lina herself even harbors same-sex attraction, as she makes sexual advances towards Marcello's wife Giulia. Giulia rejects her, later telling Marcello she was uncomfortable that Lina gazed at her ‘like men do’ (Moravia, 1951: 212). 9 This revelation does not temper Marcello's infatuation; the woman he claims to love is herself homosexual, as if homosexuality only exists in relation to Marcello, his fascism, and his pursuit of normality. Even female homosexuality, therefore, buttresses the construction of Marcello as paradigmatic male homo-fascist.
The 1970 film adaptation largely replicates the novel's portrayal of fascism as a homosexual pathology in an indication of the continued resonance of the homo-fascist narrative over time. The most pertinent change from the novel to the film makes its equation of homosexuality and Fascism even more concrete. While the novel ends with Marcello's waiting for death via aerial bombardment towards the end of the war, the film finishes with the night of Mussolini's downfall in July 1943 (Bertolucci, 1970). Marcello comes across Lino, whom he believed to be dead, flirting with a male prostitute in the streets of Rome. Marcello becomes enraged and shouts at people in the street, ‘He's a pederast! A Fascist!’ 10 Just like the construction of his own character, Marcello himself connects homosexuality and fascism as both phenomena and as crimes worthy of denunciation. He accuses Lino of his own crimes of homosexuality and Fascism, without even knowing if Lino is a Fascist. Marcello's absence of moral conviction in this moment underlines the fundamental inauthenticity of the Fascist politics he has pursued for his entire adulthood. Marcello still cannot help his same-sex attraction, as the film's next and final shot shows him gazing intensely at the prostitute, his gaze heavy with desire. At the end of both the film and his failed journey for normality, therefore, Marcello still cannot escape the homosexual longing core to his character. His homosexuality is an inescapable pathology intertwined with his lack of principle; he is a weak gay Fascist, and that is all. Despite twenty years of distance between the novel and the film, the story's portrayal of the homo-fascist narrative remained impactful and useful in creating representations of the Fascist past.
Comprehending fascism through the homo-fascist
To return to Moravia's assertion that Marcello ‘is a fascist because he is a homosexual,’ how does homosexuality meaningfully describe fascism? What is the cultural and political thrust of the homo-fascist within Western culture's ‘fascination’ with fascism (see Betts, 2002)? The clear explanation of homophobia as a means of dismissing or delegitimizing fascist politics is a factor, as scholars (Duncan, 2006, 47; Herzog, 2007: 12, Richardson, 2021: 9; Spurlin, 2009: 78) have established. Indeed, one of the most effective elements of the homosexual fascist as insult is a reliance on notions of homosexuality as weakness and depraved immorality. As this section demonstrates, however, the homo-fascist is not just a straightforward expression of bigotry easily brushed aside, but a complex constructed narrative with its own internal reasoning, including in Il conformista. Deconstructing the interpretive logic behind the homo-fascist illuminates the implicit claims the narrative makes about both homosexuality and fascism. This approach shows that the conflation of homosexuality and fascism has rendered fascism more comprehensible by bringing together two concepts that are often described as themselves incomprehensible. Translating fascism into homosexuality through the homo-fascist, therefore, enables the dual condemnation of and abnegation of blame for fascism. Appreciation of Moravia's intent in relation to the impact of the work further highlights how this joint denunciation and excusal of fascism has enabled politically useful fictions of fascism as a pathological madness of a select few individuals, not any broader culture, within postwar memory.
From the perspective of critical theory, both homosexuality and fascism have occupied a space of unknowability and unspeakability in postwar discourse. Holding the two closely together within the homo-fascist almost paradoxically renders both more easily understood. Queer theorists and historians of homosexuality have powerfully argued that ambiguous unknowability has characterized homosexuality in the modern West (see Heineman, 2005: 22; Hewitt, 1996: 6–8). Queerness, Sedgwick (1992: 45) writes, exists within a ‘space of overlapping, contradictory, and conflictual definitional sources,’ not a ‘coherent definitional field.’ In this vein, Marcello's homosexuality is never explicitly named not because it does not exist, but because it exists beyond a single ‘definitional field.’ The novel emphasizes the indefinable ambiguity of people that appear queer, the ‘ambiguous figures of men-women and of women-men who crossed, redoubling and mixing their ambiguity, [that] seemed to allude to another ambiguous thing’ (Moravia, 1951: 213). 11 The fact that a critical queer lens recognizes these ‘ambiguous figures of men-women and of women-men’ as homosexual does not acknowledge a presence of uniquely Italian gay identity in national discourse, as Duncan (2006: 48) claims, but the extent to which homosexuality remained shrouded in ambiguity and unknowability within that discourse. Indeed, the nagging abnormality Marcello feels inside himself remains frustratingly ill-defined throughout the novel in the character's own words, even as it clearly refers to his homosexuality.
Fascism has resisted attempts at definition in public discourse and in Il conformista in a fascinatingly similar way. The exact nature of fascism, and even whether it exists at all as a coherent ideology, has been contentious in modern European historiography, including in the Italian context (see Golsan and Hawthorne, 1997: 1–3). Academics, theorists, and artists have tackled the same questions: what is fascism, and why does it seem to defy definition? Frost (2018: 15), for example, argues, ‘For democratic twentieth-century culture, fascism marked the limits of what is human, moral, and right’ as the ‘epitome of barbarism’ beyond speakability. Scholars (Champagne, 2019: 16–18; Frost, 2018: 9, Spector, 2001: 482) have noted that this lack of definition often lends fascist politics a vacuous discursive quality. Consequently, Il conformista's fascism does not exist within a set of political principles or the regime's policies. Rather, it is an imprecise goal Marcello pursues and lusts after as a mark of normality. For both Marcello and Moravia, fascism is a vessel to be filled to fit one's own needs, whether psychoanalytically or representationally. The fact that Marcello immediately offers to abandon Fascism altogether for anti-fascist Lina, for example, exemplifies his lack of commitment to the ideology (Moravia, 1951: 200–201). It is normality he craves, not politics. As in broader discourse, fascism in Il conformista is as ambiguous and ill-defined as homosexuality.
If homosexuality and fascism are doubly unspeakable and unknowable, bringing them together within the figure of the homo-fascist ultimately makes both more visible and thus comprehensible from multiple perspectives within a greater processing of fascism in postwar memory. Hewitt (1996: 48) writes that ‘a certain conception of homosexuality… has facilitated the reappropriation of the unimaginable to the terms of the political imaginary… to represent the unrepresentable.’ The homo-fascist of Il conformista exemplifies both this trend and its overlooked place within the construction of postwar cultural understandings of fascism. Hewitt (1996: 246–256) argues that this dynamic leverages psychological discourses around melancholy and loss to create cultural meaning. Hewitt's reliance on psychoanalysis echoes the many (see Pursell, 2008: 111–112) who have leveraged such thinking to argue that repressive governments lead to repressed sexualities, especially queer or homosexual sexualities. These sublimated sexualities then fueled the violence and hate characteristic of, in Dean's (2004, 107) terms, fascism's ‘pathological politics.’ From a historical rather than psychoanalytical framework, however, the interpretive choice to envision fascism as homosexuality operates differently, as a distortion of the historical reality of fascist hypermasculinity and masculine sexuality. Even beyond its culturally provocative nature, this distortion functions in a politically useful way, to insult and dismiss fascism and its believers. From this view, by bringing together two concepts already nebulous in public discourse, Moravia defines each better by its relationship to the other. The unknowability of both eases this connection, as the homo-fascist transforms real, historically recognized fascist obsession with masculinity into conceptualized and politicized homosexuality. As the homo-fascist expresses fascism through homosexuality, therefore, it endows the seemingly vacuous political ideology with new, more easily understood meaning.
What purpose does this dynamic serve in Il conformista? From the viewpoint of authorial intent, orienting Moravia's subjectivity in the work indicates that the text fundamentally acts as an allegorical analysis of fascism, its psychology, and its adherents primarily though the vector of sexuality. While Moravia's personal relationship to Fascism was complex, he firmly aligned himself with the postwar anti-fascist left (O’Healey, 2004b: 155). 12 He plainly stated that Il conformista sought to describe fascism. In a 1951 letter, he commented (quoted in Casini, 2010: 394), ‘I wrote the whole novel to explain to myself and to others why and how it was possible for such tragedies to occur… I want to note that the many sexual abnormalities contained in the book intend to form a contrast with the protagonist's thirst for normality.’ 13 Il conformista thus operates not autobiographically, but representationally and analytically as part of the quest to understand fascism. This quotation also highlights that homosexuality in the novel acts as a purposeful representative tool, not as an independent value but an empty signifier of ‘contrast.’ This literary approach falls within Moravia's broader mixing of sexuality, violence, and political repression in his works (De Ceccatty, 2010: 18), which further fed his status as cultural provocateur (Casini, 2010: 104). Moravia drew additional inspiration for Il conformista from Jean-Paul Sartre's 1939 short story L’enfance d’un chef (Childhood of a Leader; see Pavolini, 2019: 9–10), which also features an adolescent who has an early same-sex experience with an older man that impacts his intertwined personality and politics. These details together demonstrate that Moravia structured Il conformista primarily as a study of fascism, with embodied homosexuality as its core axis of meaning.
Looking beyond authorial intent towards the novel's larger impact, what does the text reflect about or contribute to the discourse forming postwar cultural memories around fascism? What does its rhetoric actually achieve in formulating a relationship to and explanation of fascism, both at the time and in retrospect? The representational logic behind Marcello's homosexuality in Il conformista paints and, ultimately, excuses fascism as a pathological weakness defined by individual moral depravity, not any sincere political conviction. In this view, even if condemnable, fascism remains a loosely held belief of weak people struggling with their own mental issues and immoral deviance. This depiction justifies fascism as a movement of specific individuals, not a phenomenon arising from a broader fault of a culture or nation. It is not necessarily Italy's, nor Germany's, nor Europe's fault for the injustices and horrors of fascism; unwell, immoral individuals are alone to blame. This portrayal relies on its depiction of fascists as other, as separate from the core of society. Hill (2017: 157) argues that along with disability and mental illness, homosexuality has long operated in public discourse as a cultural shorthand for immoral deviance from the norm. Homosexuality represents, Morrison (2001: 149) asserts, ‘the essence of whatever sociopolitical order one happens to deem “other.”’ If fascism is fundamentally a departure from the cultural norm, it is again illegitimate, not a genuine part of the cultural fabric of a nation, community, or society. If heterosexuality is normality, as in Marcello's eyes and in broader societal understanding, then homosexuality, like fascism, is best understood as an abnormal blip, a quickly ended and self-defined deviation (see Ravetto, 2001, 28–29; Dean, 2004: 194). Fascism and homosexuality are both negative aberrations with the individual to blame.
This neutralizing narrative, both in Moravia's specific manifestation and in general (see Herzog, 2007: 12), is not necessarily either fully effective or totally coherent in its logic. Il conformista by no means offers a positive view of fascism and its effects on the individual, even as it offers some rationalization of it. Nor is homosexuality its only representational avenue for exploring fascism. Another fascist character, Orlando, for example, commits the brutal murders of Quadri and Lina, while Marcello learns of their killings in newspapers. 14 This structured perspective allows Marcello as the protagonist and primary representative of fascism in the novel to avoid the bulk of culpability for the text's central act of violence. Reading about the events secondhand, moreover, grants the murders an element of joint tragedy and distance from both Marcello and the reader. Fascism's deep flaws are made even more apparent when Marcello hears that the Fascist authorities had tried to cancel the assassination but that the news had not come in time. The killings, even when not committed by Marcello himself, are useless, a sign of Fascism's flaws as well as the novel's driving ‘cosmic fatalism’ (O’Healey, 2004b: 155). This anecdote illustrates how homosexuality is not the only means through which Moravia represents and criticizes fascism, even if it is perhaps the most nullifying.
Towards an Italian history of the homo-fascist narrative
As alluded to at the start of this article, the homo-fascist character has appeared broadly throughout the cultural discourse of the West: in Germany, France, the United Kingdom, the United States, and more. Now, however, I turn more towards the specific national context relevant to Il conformista: Italy, Italian Fascism, and Italian postwar memory. Scholarship has often grouped Il conformista with the homosexual Nazi and has accordingly underexplored the ways in which the ‘homo-Fascist’ of Italy may differ from the ‘homo-Nazi’ of Germany or the homo-fascist overall. Disentangling Il conformista from studies of the homo-Nazi towards an understanding of the specifically Italian homo-Fascist in 1951 and in 1970 illustrates the formative influence of the narrative in Italian postwar conceptions of Fascism. This insight calls attention to the meaningful and usually overlooked role that political narratives around sexuality, especially queer sexuality, have played in Italian post-Fascist memory and national identity formation.
Understanding Il conformista solely within the context of Nazism and the homo-Nazi can lead to inaccuracy and a lack of understanding of the historical and cultural specificities of Italian Fascism. Unfortunately, this trend in the scholarship is prominent, as many scholars (such as Dean, 2004: 183; Giori, 2017; Jensen, 2005: 323) only mention Il conformista briefly within a broader discussion or list of cultural works that equate fascism and homosexuality, almost exclusively within Nazism. Dean (2004, 194–195), for example, inaccurately calls Il conformista an Italian ‘exception’ to the Nazi homo-fascist and argues that the focus of scholarly analysis of the homo-fascist must be Nazism as a matter of course. This view neglects the recurrent representations of the homo-Fascist in Italian culture, such as Vincenzo Gamna's film La vita provvisoria (Temporary Life, 1963; see Giori, 2017: 129–130) and Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom, 1976), as well as leaving the Italian case little understood. This tendency may spring partially from a general historiographical emphasis on Nazism over Italian Fascism and on Germany over ‘that notoriously ‘under-developed’ place, Italy,’ as phrased by Champagne (2019: 18). This bias within homo-fascist scholarship can paint Fascism as a subset of, or a phenomenon subordinated beneath, Nazism, even to the point of inaccuracy. Jensen (2005: 323), for example, claims that Il conformista numbers among ‘a series of Italian films’ that ‘portrayed National Socialism as rooted in same-sex attraction.’ This claim is incorrect. Il conformista does not portray National Socialism at all, and this characterization is a fundamental misunderstanding rooted in a partiality towards German over Italian history. This misreading exemplifies the dangers of not allowing sufficient space for Italian manifestations of the homo-Fascist: a blindness towards even the potential for any historically specific differences between Fascism and Nazism.
The most critical national difference in the case of Il conformista and the Italian homo-Fascist is the significantly divergent development of visible gay identity in Italy compared to many other Western countries. This dynamic is especially relevant for historicizing the politics of the homo-fascist operating within the 1970 Il conformista film. While Italian sexologists furthered studies of homosexuals at the turn of the 20th century, public visibility of gay identity historically remained relatively low, as organized gay activism appeared later in Italy than in Germany, France, or the United States (see Beccalossi, 2014: 303–325; Fortney, 2012; Pasquini, 2020: 55–57; Seymour, 2019: 167–183.) Italy essentially lacked any homophile or similar attempts at gay organizing before the 1970s; the country's first ever gay publication, for example, only emerged in May 1971, years or decades after other countries and seven months after the premiere of Il conformista in Italian theaters (Pasquini, 2020: 53; Seymour, 2019: 167). The reasons for the historic comparative underdevelopment of gay identity in Italy are complex, with the predominant conservative Catholicism of many Italians and Italian institutions an influential factor. By the time of the 1970 Il conformista film, therefore, other countries’ public discourse had advanced considerably further in constructing a coherent image of the self-acknowledged, ‘liberated’ homosexual than Italy (Seymour, 2019: 183). Appearing largely before the emergence of gay identity in Italian culture, Il conformista thus molded in both 1951 and in 1970 the image of not just the homo-fascist, but also of homosexuals overall in the public imaginary.
Purposefully seeking out the Italian context of Marcello as a character and Il conformista as a work, therefore, reveals that its iteration of the homo-fascist is not a figure of any fully or even mostly formed homosexual identity or gay liberation movement, as contemporary homo-fascists in other countries might have been, especially in 1970. Instead, Marcello's homosexuality brings only pain, negative life experience, and immorality. The unspeakability of Marcello's homosexuality makes even more sense, moreover, in a cultural context that had itself yet to fully grapple with the nature and definition of queer identity in the public arena. Moravia's moralized and deeply denigrating depiction of homosexuality as depraved pathology held steady from the novel in 1951 to the film decades later in 1970. Indeed, both the novel and film enjoyed generally positive reception in the Italian press (such as L.P., 1971; Pestelli, 1970; Praz, 1951). This dynamic underscores the relative lack of progress in developing public gay identity in Italy over that period in contrast to what one might expect in other Western countries. Studies that overlook the Italian context of Il conformista might miss this nuance altogether.
Comparing Il conformista's homo-Fascist with contemporary Italian depictions of homo-Nazis, moreover, demonstrates the power of the homo-Fascist as a tool of political mythmaking. As one example, scholars (see Halberstam, 2011: 155; Plant, 1986: 16; Sirmons, 2020: 18) have focused on Luchino Visconti's 1969 film La caduta degli dei (The Damned), for both its setting in Nazi Germany and an infamous scene in which male Nazi officers have an orgy on top of swastika flags. The film's related subject matter and proximity in time to Il conformista suggests a natural contrast between the exaggerated, debauched Nazi homosexuality of La caduta degli dei and the restrained, emotionally painful Fascist homosexuality of Il conformista. Visconti's sexually explicit homosexual Nazi degeneracy differs from the comparatively more subtle, psychologically tortured image of Italian Fascist Marcello. Il conformista never depicts him even fully kissing a man, much less engaging in an orgy. Some of these differences surely spring from the attitudes of the individual directors. Visconti, for example, was a gay man and claimed to prefer Marxist, rather than psychoanalytical, techniques to portray fascism (Greene, 1981: 33). 15 His cinematic aesthetic also emphasized decadence and exaggeration (see Sirmons, 2020). The film's aesthetic choices thus built upon the long-standing association between homo-fascism and decadence that had existed since fascism's beginnings (Hewitt, 1997: 119). Even with these factors in mind, the contrast between Visconti's and Bertolucci's approaches to homo-fascism remains noteworthy. Indeed, La caduta degli dei's depraved homo-Nazis still added to a broader cultural conversation in which total condemnation of Nazism often came more easily than that of Fascism (see Greene, 1981; Giori, 2017: 213). In this vein, the film numbers but one among many such ‘Naziexploitation’ films made in Italy in the late 1960s into the 1970s that often depicted Nazis as flagrantly sexual and deviant (see Banwell and Fiddler, 2018; Impey, 2011; O’Healey, 2004a). Even within Italy, therefore, homo-fascist discourse differed meaningfully when applied to Nazism versus Italian Fascism.
This difference illuminates the true sociocultural and political thrust of the homo-Fascist narrative in an Italian context: promoting a narrative of benign Fascism relative to evil Nazism. La caduta degli dei's Nazis in a gay orgy are less respectable than the boyhood Marcello struggling with same-sex desire. This specific example shows how from this viewpoint, Fascism appears more acceptable, and less grossly horrifying, than Germany's Nazism (see Focardi, 2014), though even Il conformista faced accusations of obscenity (such as Caiumi, 1951). Historically, this narrative of Fascism as somewhat non-threatening, especially when held in comparison to Nazism, was powerful and plentiful beyond the homo-Fascist in Italian discourse. This narrative served to minimize Italian participation in wartime atrocities and Fascism overall. Instead, Italian politics, culture, and even scholarship has often emphasized Italian victimhood in the face of Nazi crimes, especially during Germany's occupation of northern Italy in 1943–1945 (Focardi, 2014). Whether in intent or in effect, therefore, Moravia's Italian homo-Fascist contributed to attempts at an essential neutralization of Fascism as a political and cultural force within Italian postwar memory.
This dynamic underpins Italy's very national identity in the postwar period as well, an additional indication of the overlooked significance of the Italian homo-Fascist as manifested in Il conformista. Since the mid-1990s, historians (see Cooke, 2011: 39, Forlenza, 2012: 74; Foot, 2011) have argued that the Italian postwar liberal political order staked its legitimacy on literal and metaphorical claims of continuity from the wartime Resistance against Fascism. Political parties, much like discourse overall, defined Fascism as the madness of a select group, not of the Italian people overall (Forlenza, 2012: 74). In this view, Italy's Fascism had been inauthentic, with the Resistance symbolizing the true Italian national character. If, as Ruth Ben-Ghiat (2005: 339) argues, the homo-Nazi figure ‘externalized… Italian Fascism's aggression,’ the homo-Fascist provided an internally oriented explanation that helped rationalize some of Fascism's flaws and justify its place within the history of Italian identity. In effect, Marcello as homo-Fascist perfectly serves this overarching narrative.
From a historical perspective, the figure remained useful over time in Italian public discourse in differing ways. In the novel's immediate postwar moment of 1951, this political mythmaking was still in its early stages, yet, as Marcello's character shows, remained active, as the post-Fascist political order began to solidify around a denigrated Fascism and valorized Resistance (see Forlenza, 2018). Moravia argued that Fascism was part of an urge ‘to seek out the protection of grand collective myths’ (quoted in Pavolini, 2019: 6). In this light, Il conformista and its characters are an early attempt to expose or explain the ‘myths’ of Fascism in dialogue with similar conversations beginning to happen throughout Italian society in the immediate postwar era. Il conformista thus appears as a self-consciously ‘meticulous existential novel inside of history,’ as Pavolini (2019: 11) argues. 16 In the 1970's, amidst the Anni di piombo (‘Years of Lead’), with its domestic unrest and national questioning of Italy's political and social orders, this formulation of Italian national identity remained a potent force (see Moss, 1989). Il conformista played a role in maintaining this vision of Italian identity. In 1974, for example, the Piedmontese government publicly screened Il conformista throughout the region to expose youth to ‘the most relevant aspects of the Fascist period’ along with Resistance films, the newspaper La Stampa (1974: 8) reported. 17 Beyond merely contributing to or reflecting public discourse creating Italian post-Fascist memory, Il conformista was actively deployed by the state as a reaffirmation of the illegitimacy of Fascism and its lack of standing within Italian identity. In both moments in time, therefore, the politically convenient homo-Fascist operated within a broader project of constructing specific understandings of Italy and Italians, a project of urgent political, social, and cultural importance.
Pursuing the distinctive elements of the homo-Fascist within Italian cultural memory underscores the importance of sexuality and sexual politics as axes of inquiry into Italy's memory of and relationship to Fascism, itself an underdeveloped field. The study of homosexuality during Fascism, much less narratives of homosexuality in postwar memory discourse, is both newer and far less robust than queer histories of Nazi Germany, Britain, or elsewhere (most notably, see Benadusi, 2012; Cestaro, 2004; Dall’Orto, 2015; Romano, 2018; Seymour, 2019). The homo-Fascist's power in advancing the potential nullification of the threat of Fascism in postwar memory and, accordingly, in the postwar national order suggests the need to bring not just histories of Italy to queer studies, but queer studies to histories of Italy. Without the historical specificities of Italian Fascism, queer studies of the homo-fascist can miss the critical nuances of the Italian case. Without an emphasis on sexuality, histories of Italian postwar memory can overlook the effects that sexual politics have had in the construction of narratives of Fascism. Crafting an Italian history of the homosexual Fascist, therefore, brings fresh insight into studies of Italian memories of Fascism much like Herzog's Sex After Fascism brought to the German case. Many attractive questions about the homo-Fascist for further research remain: how did the origin of the homo-Fascist differ from that of the homo-Nazi? How did the narrative's meaning evolve along with the Italian right-wing's evolving relationship to Fascism over time? Why and how did the narrative function differently in right-wing versus left-wing contexts? As analysis of Il conformista has shown, these questions are not only relevant, but necessary for better understanding both Italian and queer history.
Conclusion
This article has analyzed Il conformista as a window into the role and construction of the homo-fascist narrative in postwar memories of fascism. The conflation of homosexuality and fascism did not originate in Il conformista, but rather sprang from and contributed to a wide-ranging discursive presence of the homo-fascist narrative within cultural memory. Close reading of Il conformista as an important manifestation of this phenomenon reveals that linking homosexuality and fascism has been politically and culturally productive for comprehending, condemning, and, ultimately, avoiding some blame for fascism and its crimes. Finally, reorienting focus towards a specifically Italian history of the homo-Fascist sheds new light on the mechanisms behind Italian post-Fascist memory, mechanisms that have been of continual importance to Italian national identity. Il conformista thus occupies a place at the core of the scholarly debates around not just the homo-fascist, but also the history of modern Italy, the history of sexuality, and the history of postwar cultural memory.