The Construction of Homosexuality in the Italian Documentaries (1959-1971)

Throughout the 1960s, a huge number of documentaries followed the success of “Europa di notte” (1959) and “Mondo cane” (1962), both exploiting and fostering the faster and faster evolution of Italian sexual mores. If even Pasolini’s “Comizi d’amore” (1965) was presented as an example of cinéma-vérité but was instead a heavily manipulated film with a thesis, it can be easily understood that popular documentaries were far from being objective depictions of reality, particularly as far as a still hazardous topic such as homosexuality was concerned. The paper will focus on the treatment of homosexuality within Italian documentaries produced before the first gay rights movement was established in 1971, to show how and why they were influenced and at the same time creatively participated to the cultural construction of homosexuality instead of just reflecting its reality, as they nonetheless tried to make the public believe.