A Polymorphous Activist: Mario Mieli

Maria De Capua

This article is part of the NOTCHES series on The Languages of Queer History.

On April 5, 1972, a psychiatric conference on homosexuality and other sexual “deviances” was held in Sanremo, Italy. A few months earlier, in Turin, the FUORI (United Italian Homosexual Revolutionary Front) was born. A member of FUORI registered to attend the psychiatric conference to celebrate his homosexuality, while outside the event protesters held signs countering the activities inside: “Psychiatrists, we are here to cure you”. Among these protesters was Mario Mieli (1952-1983), born in Milan, who at the time was an activist for the Gay Liberation Front in London. (This post will switch between pronouns to refer to Mieli since Mieli himself did so.)

Mieli would become one of the most interesting and visible Italian activists: Mieli joined the FUORI and often spoke publicly for/to the movement, reflecting the ideas of the “revolutionary” portion of the FUORI, but he was also a performer and writer. While the LGBT+ Italian movement would progressively become less revolutionary and more open to negotiating with state institutions, Mieli’s importance is still well recognised by the Italian queer community. Several movies and documentaries have been made about him and one of the main LGBT+ associations bears Mieli’s name.

While we cannot embrace Mieli’s ideas uncritically—she condones paedophilia and disapproves of gender confirmation surgeries—Mieli’s work anticipates relevant points made by later queer theorists (Judith Butler, Paul B. Preciado, José Esteban Muñoz, and others) by posing queerness as the basis for a sceptical gaze at societal structures and commonsensical knowledge and as a tool for existential and political imagination.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Mieli’s activity as a public speaker and writer is the way she plays with language, dismantling and rethinking it in order to understand reality through a vocabulary that exceeds both linguistic and societal norms. Rather than just being a stylistic choice, then, Mieli’s peculiar use of language is a political tool consistent with her key ideas.

In her 1977 essay Elementi di critica omosessuale (published in English as Homosexuality and Liberation: Elements of a Gay Critique), Mieli states that people are born “trans-sexual”, which in her lexicon means “transcending the sex binary”. Without cultural constraints, people would be psychologically “bisexual” (he means “sexual” as “gendered” here, “man and woman at the same time”). Mieli believes that people are born neither heterosexual nor homosexual: the refusal to have intercourse with a certain category of people would stem from the repression of desire. He coins the word “educastration”, suggesting that education castrates libidic potentialities; an early example of her wordplays. Mieli also calls “sexuality” forms of libido that involve no genital contact (for example, urophilia and coprophagia, hinging on how Freud talks about infantile non-genital forms of sexuality).

Mieli refers to sociologist Herbert Marcuse to assert that sexual repression is necessary to capitalism: repression makes most of a person’s time and most libidinal areas of their body available for alienated labour, i.e. ungratifying and isolating labour whose products belong to someone else. Repression also allows the reproduction of the workforce through heterosexual intercourse and ghettoises gay men in designated venues such as bars and saunas, monetising homophobia. The collective understanding of what is normal or true is a construction that covers the reality of a more complex, polymorphously desiring, human being. Consequently, to Mieli homosexual liberation and the communist revolution are inseparable. Homosexuality and Liberation proposes to start chipping at this system by violating societal norms regarding the body. This involves the performance of femininity by gay men, paraphilias, etc.

After leaving FUORI in 1974, Mieli took part in the COM (Milanese Homosexual Collectives), where she would co-write the play La Traviata Norma, ovvero: vaffanculo… ebbene, sì! (The Corrupted Norm, or: Fuck You… well, yes!), based on the premise of a reversed normality: the actors, acting as spectators, watch the public (assumed to be straight), waiting for the show of their (ab)normality to begin. The title gratuitously references Giuseppe Verdi’s operas “La Traviata” and “Norma”; more significantly, “vaffanculo” means “go have anal intercourse”, which is implied to be a demeaning activity. However, usually speakers use it to dismiss someone without thinking of the literal meaning. The embracing of the invitation (“ebbene, sì!”) is not an expected reaction: the recovery of the etymological meaning cracks the language open in order to deconstruct the norms that it carries.

Mieli’s belief in the potentialities of language is most evident in her novel Il risveglio dei faraoni (The Awakening of Pharaohs), posthumously published. It is a work of autofiction and a spiritual journey through experiences that violate societal norms: sexual encounters, drugs, schizophrenia, alchemy, and coprophagia, which is linked both to Homosexuality and Liberation and to Mieli’s idea that ingesting faeces allows us to develop the alchemical path within us.

One of the tools the protagonist uses is reading reality in “reverse letters”: neologisms, anagrams, and puns are understood to be flashes of a deeper truth. The following are only a couple of examples of this recurring strategy. Mario, believing to be Christ, says to his Jewish aunt that he’s Christian. She answers: “the Mielis are all mecreanti”, adapting the French word mécréantes (“unbelievers”). Mario understands it as me-creanti, “creating me”, finding confirmation of the divine nature of his family and himself. While eating faeces, Mario reasons that the word merda (“shit”) hints at his destiny: “Merda is an anagram of dream and soon my marvellous daydream would have begun! […] I was like a snake which was about to lose its old skin (merda is an anagram of derma).” Even Mario’s gender fluidity is a tool for deconstruction, as it is accompanied by the occasional use of a feminine name, Franca: translating as “frank” or “free”, it hints at her journey of liberation.

Homosexuality and Liberation suggested that the cultural understanding of the world is a set of notions that hides some truths about human nature. The novel embraces “irrational” ways of thinking and acting—something that Homosexuality and Liberation, being an essay, could not do—because reason connives with the capitalist and patriarchal system by navigating this net of concepts, which language carries and maintains, instead of breaching it.

In articles and interviews, Mieli supports the same stances of understanding the world and fighting for liberation through hermeneutic tools that defy rational thinking: not literary fantasies, they are real-life strategies. Reading in “reverse letters” is perhaps the most accessible one. In this sense, Mieli’s approach to language—and his approach to social structures in general—is extremely powerful: breaking through the veil of coded concepts to uncover a deeper, richer, more gratifying reality, daring to think that commonsensical and practical reductions of reality are not all there is, is at the same time a concrete act of self-actualization and an imaginative step towards liberated humanity.

Maria De Capua holds a PhD from the University of Siena and completed a dissertation on twentieth-century queer Italian narrative and its links with contemporary LGBT+ movements. Her current research interests also include late 1800s and early 1900s British literature.

NOTCHES: (re)marks on the history of sexuality is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at www.notchesblog.com.

For permission to publish any NOTCHES post in whole or in part please contact the editors at NotchesBlog@gmail.com