Mario Mieli


Mario Mieli was an Italian activist, writer, playwright, and queer theorist. He is considered one of the founders of the Italian homosexual movement and one of the leading theoreticians in Italian homosexual activism.
He is best known for his essay Elementi di critica omosessuale published in its first edition by Einaudi, in Turin, in 1977, along with Towards a Gay Communism: Elements of a Homosexual Critique and was one of the founders of FUORI! and the Collettivo Autonomo di Milano in 1974. He died by suicide at the age of 30.

Life

Mieli was born in Milan on May 21, 1952, into a large bourgeois family. He lived for the first sixteen years of his life on his family's house near Como. He moved back to Milan with his family in 1968. Politically precocious, he threw himself into the student uprising of that year, beginning a long commitment to revolutionary causes, estabilishing immediate contacts with the feminist movement.
In 1971, he went to London, where he took an active part in the London Gay Liberation Front. He spent intermittent time in London until 1975, while studying philosophy at the Università degli Studi di Milano. In April 1972, he, along with Massimo Consoli, Nicolino Tosoni, Angelo Pezzana and the French writer Françoise d'Eaubonne, held the first homosexual demonstration in Italy at a congress of sexology in Sanremo. They protested against psychiatric condemnation of homosexual conduct and the use of aversion therapy to "convert" homosexuals.
In 1972, Mieli helped found the collective Fronte Unitario Omosessuale Rivoluzionario Italiano. Better known by its acronym F.U.O.R.I!, Italy's first major gay-rights group. Started in Turin in 1971, F.U.O.R.I! appeared almost simultaneously in Rome, Padua, Venice and Milan, where Mieli was an organizer. After the collective united with the Italian Radical Party, Mieli criticized the move as "counter-revolutionary," since he thought the gay movement should remain independent of political parties. He left the organization over political differences in 1974–75.
After 1974, Mieli continued his activism by organizing with Corrado Ievi the Collettivo Autonomo di Milano, from which the Collettivi Omosessuali Milanesi will develop, as well as a multiplicity of similar and autonomous experiences all over Italy in 1977. In 1976, Collettivo Autonomo di Milano and its theatrical group, Nostra Signora dei Fiori, staged his play La Traviata Norma. Ovvero: Vaffanculo... ebbene sì!. This provocative production was successfully staged in Milan, Florence, and Rome. An in-your-face spectacle, it deliberately presented behavior designed to flout conventional, heterosexual norms.
A controversial personality, Mieli sometimes made a spectacle of himself. While some may have found this behavior outrageous, others knew him as a gentle person who enjoyed cross-dressing, capable of being very charming in private.
By 1976, Mieli had graduated and began revising for publication his doctoral thesis in moral philosophy. The revision was published as Elementi di critica omosessuale. An English partial translation of the book was made by David Fernbach as Homosexuality and Liberation: Elements of a Gay Critique. The translation’s last chapter – "Towards a Gay Communism"—was excerpted as a political pamphlet and became Mieli’s most widely known work among English speakers. In 2019 was released a collection of his political writings titled La gaia critica. Politica e liberazione sessuale negli anni settanta. Scritti , accompanied by an extensive critical biography and a French edition of the same.
Elementi di critica omosessuale is widely considered the most important text from the Italian gay community. With rich humor and a cosmopolitan gay sensibility, Mieli contends that homosexual liberation is an integral and indispensable part of a much wider emancipation. Mieli cites "educastration" at the core of a repressive set of norms intended to stifle the full expression of a natural human transsexuality. He combines Freud's ideas on "polymorphous perversion" with Marxist economics to argue that human liberation is possible only through a revolution allowing uninhibited pansexuality.
By 1981, Mieli became increasingly pessimistic about his cause. In 1983, he told friends about a forthcoming book titled Il risveglio dei Faraoni. It was to be an autobiographical novel. However, he expressed his dissatisfaction with the novel with many friends, and he felt he had failed to sustain the stylistic quality he was aiming at. In early March, he decided to stop publication of the book, writing in a letter to a friend that the book might inspire someone to "have his hide". In another letter dated March 11, he wrote, "My book will not be published by my free choice".
Mario Mieli took his life the following day, on March 12, 1983. He died at age 30 from asphyxiation by inhaling gas in his Milan apartment.
In 1994 an incomplete version of Il risveglio dei Faraoni was published by the Cooperativa Colibrì in Milan.
In 1983, an organization was founded in Rome to address the claims and protection of the civil rights of LGBTQ people, and it was named the Circle of [Homosexual Culture Mario Mieli] in his honour.

Thought

Universal transsexualism

"I believe that the overcoming of the current separate and antithetical categories of sexuality will be transsexual, and that transsexuality will capture the one and multiple synthesis of the expressions of liberated Eros." If people were not conditioned from childhood by a certain type of society which, through what Mieli called "educastration," forces one to consider heterosexuality as "normality" and everything else as perversion, people would be “polysexual”. The word “transsexual” employed by Mieli differs from today’s common understanding of the term; it indicates instead the erotic horizon to be conquered, experimented with, and developed, starting from Freud’s discovery of the perverse and polymorphic nature of human sexuality.

Works

Books

  • Mieli, Mario, Towards a Gay Communism, Elements of a Homosexual Critique, Pluto Press
  • Mieli, Mario, La ''gaia critica. Politica e liberazione sessuale negli anni settanta. Scritti , Marsilio Editori
  • Mieli, Mario, Poems/Poesie'',, Agincourt Press

Plays

  • Ciò detto, passo oltre
  • ''Krakatoa''

Pamphlets

  • Towards a Gay Communism