# Mario Mieli

Mario Mieli (21 May 1952, Milan – 12 March 1983) was an Italian activist, writer, playwright, and gender studies 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 (Homosexuality and liberation: elements of a gay critique) published in its first edition in 1977, and was one of the founders of FUORI! (Fronte Unitario Omosessuale Rivoluzionario Italiano, United Italian Homosexual Revolutionary Front). He died by suicide at the age of 30.

## Life

Mieli was born in Milan on May 21, 1952 into a large and prosperous family. He lived for the first sixteen years of his life on his family's estate 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.
In 1971 he moved to London as a student, where he took an active part in the London Gay Liberation Front. Though he spent intermittent time in London until 1975, in 1972 based himself in Milan where he studied at university. In April 1972, he, along with Massimo Consoli (1945–2007), Nicolino Tosoni (b. 1943), Angelo Pezzana (b. 1940) and the French writer Françoise d'Eaubonne (1920–2005) held the first homosexual demonstration in Italy at a Congress of Sexology in San Remo. 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 (Italian revolutionary homosexual united front). Better known by its acronym F.U.O.R.I! (Come out!), it was 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 in 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 the Collettivi Omosessuali Milanesi (Homosexual collectives of Milan). In 1976 the group’s gay theatrical group, Nostra Signora dei Fiori, staged his play La Traviata Norma. Ovvero: Vaffanculo... ebbene sì! (the title’s numerous puns defy translation). This outrageous 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 or frightening, 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 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.
This major theoretical work 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" (see Polymorphous perverse) 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 (The Awakening of the Pharaohs). It was to be an autobiographical novel, set in Egypt featuring a resurrected Jesus. However, 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 killed himself the following day, on March 12, 1983. He died at age 30 from asphyxiation by inhaling gas in his Milan apartment.
It seems that Mieli's suicide stemmed from adverse reaction he expected from the book’s publication. Although a pirated edition was later published, his family brought legal action and had all copies destroyed. Only in 1994 was Il risveglio dei Faraoni published legally.
In 1983, it was founded in Rome an association dealing with the claim and protection of the civil rights of LGBTQ people, that named the Circle of Homosexual Culture Mario Mieli in his honour.

## His thoughts
### Universal transsexualism

Mario Mieli's thinking consists of the belief that every person is potentially transsexual if he or she 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. By transsexuality Mieli does not mean what is understood today in the common understanding of the term, but the innate polymorphous and "perverse" tendency of man, characterized by a plurality of Eros tendencies and the original and deep hermaphroditism of every individual.

### Pedophilia

Children, according to Mieli's thought, could "free themselves" from social prejudices and find the realization of their "polyform perversity" through adults who were aware of the above assertion:
   "We revolutionary queers can see in the child not so much the Oedipus, or the future Oedipus, but the potentially free human being. We, yes, can love children. We can desire them erotically by responding to their craving for Eros, we can grasp with open face and open arms the intoxicating sensuality they lavish, we can make love to them. This is why pederasty is so harshly condemned: it addresses amorous messages to the child that society instead, through the family, traumatizes, educates, denies, lowering the Oedipal grid on its eroticism. The repressive heterosexual society forces the child into the latency period; but the latency period is but the deathly introduction to the lifespan of a latent "life." Pederasty, on the other hand, 'is an arrow of lust shot toward the fetus' (Francesco Ascoli)"
(Elements of Homosexual Criticism, p. 62, 2002)
Footnote 88 reads:
   "By pederasty I mean the erotic desire of adults for children (of either sex) and sexual relations between adults and children. Pederasty (in the proper sense) and pedophilia are commonly used as synonyms."
(Elements of Homosexual Criticism, p. 62, 2002)

## Works
### Books

* Mieli, Mario (1977), Elementi di critica omosessuale (in Italian), G. Einaudi, ISBN 978-88-07-10339-1, OCLC 3670522
* Mieli, Mario (1980), Homosexuality and liberation: elements of a gay critique, Gay Men's Press, ISBN 978-0-907040-01-9
* Mieli, Mario (1994), Il risveglio dei Faraoni (in Italian), Edito per conto dell'Associazione culturale Centro d'iniziativa Luca Rossi dalla Cooperativa Colibri, ISBN 978-88-86345-01-9, OCLC 34221019
* Pezzana, Angelo (1976), La Politica del corpo (in Italian), Savelli, OCLC 3446167

### Plays

* Collettivo Nostra Signora dei Fiori (1977), La Traviata Norma : ovvero, Vaffanculo ... ebbene sì! (in Italian), L'erba voglio, OCLC 4005687
* Ciò detto, passo oltre
* Krakatoa

### Pamphlets

* Towards a Gay Communism [London: pirate productions, 1980]
* Mieli, Mario; Santini, Francesco (1974), Comune futura (in Italian), OCLC 84592884