Compagna/compagno: A Conversation

This piece was initially prompted by a desire to participate in the forthcoming collection Angie Loves Mary, Vinny Loves Sal: Writings by Lesbians and Gays of Italian/Sicilian Descent edited by Denise Nico Leto and Tommy Avicolli Mecca. We wanted to engage -- to enact at the same time that we critiqued -- the stereotype of Italian-American orality. Given the warm and abiding friendly relationship we share as Italian-American academics from working class backgrounds but different generations, we thought that insights would emerge in conversation that might not come to surface if each of us sat down in our individual studies to reflect and compose. We decided to record our conversation on three separate informal occasions. What emerged were three areas of investigation, broadly construed: storytelling, orality and the narrative urge; fragmented identities and the written self; and in search of politics in our familial fictions. Some of the questions that perplexed us were: Which stories and what narrative genres do we draw on to constitute an ethnic versus a sexual identity and vice versa? How has our vexed insider/outsider statue functioned in our relationships to our families and communities? In what sense can sexuality, as an identity category, set of experiences or discourses, productively trouble ethnicity? How do we represent the fragmented nature of our identities in our writing? In what ways have the overlapping or embattled arenas that make up the space of our ethnicity and sexuality influenced the politics of our lives and our political choices? We hope that this conversation will encourage readers to cross the thresholds that we have only begun to approach. Cappello: I was thinking about the fact that we chose to talk to each other as a way of participating in this project and why we did that and what's the difference between doing that and writing a text in isolation. Also, the place of story and storytelling in our contemporary identities, in how we understand ourselves and position ourselves with regard to our familial, ethnic, and sexual identity. Sillanpoa: I think it's implicit in our decision to have a conversation with each other rather than to write separate essays that this is a cognitive operation that's part of where we came from--that people talk, or at least until recently people talked. And that, even as professional academics now who, because of institutional pressures are forced into working in isolation, that somehow, I think, both of us maintain a very deep-seated conviction that perhaps the best way for knowledge to come forth, for insight to be gained, is through a collective--however loosely or widely defined--undertaking. As far as the anecdotes go, I think it's a dangerous thing to base any kind of assessment on highly privatized anecdotes; there's a tremendous risk that one runs there. I hope I'm not wrong, but I have a deep feeling that the stories that you and I may tell each other that somehow highlight or underscore our ethnic upbringing or our sexual identities won't remain self-referential: that there would probably be points of commonality that other Italian-American lesbians and gays would recognize. Cappello: But on the other hand that makes me wonder if that's not because of conventions that are attached to ethnic and sexual identity formations as we've come to recognize them. As we're talking about this now, it's getting me to think about how it is that a particular story is conjured up in our memories and not some other story. I guess I'm wondering if at the same time that we try to reproduce "stories" that are important to us, we can also think about the implications of those particular stories being the ones that we are using to make sense of this identity as opposed to some other stories. I wonder if in the process of our having this conversation we can find something in our individual memories that may have never occurred to us as examples of certain aspects of identity that we want to talk about. …