Trans Italy - the 1960s

Trans Italy

1960-70

1971-85

1986-2000

1960

The Olympics Games were held in Rome: The Ukrainian sisters Tamara and Irina Press representing the USSR, who were rumoured to be intersex or something, won gold and silver medals. Two British female athletes were accused in the press of being men.

April Ashley (just before her completion surgery) and Kiki Moustica were in Rome with a hotel booking, but when they showed male passports, the hotel manager called the police. After 10 hours in the police station, they were besieged by the press and had to take the train back to Milan. One of these press photographs would be run in the British paper, the Sunday People, a year later, and lead to April’s outing.

Dominot and Carlo Musto

• Federico Fellini (dir) La Dolce Vita. With Marcello Mastroianni, Anita Ekberg, Nico and Dominot and Carlo Musto as the two trans women at the party. Italy/France 174 mins 1960. Gio Starace quarrelled with the producer and lost his credit. He had inspired Fellini by bathing fully dressed in a fountain, which was copied with Anita Ekberg doing the bathing.

1960-4

The Ballette Verdi gay scandal, centred on parties at a farmhouse in the Municipality of Castel Mella. It ballooned to 200 suspects in a few days and was blown up by the press. Various famous persons were questioned by the police, and actions for libel were started. However, everything proved to be unfounded and prompted by upcoming elections. 16 were brought to trial, but 15 were acquitted. The owner of the farmhouse, only, was convicted of abetting prostitution. Gio Starace who was working for Lo Specchio, a scandal rag, was interrogated by magistrates, and as a protest, he appeared in court in female mourning drag.

1962

Roberta Franciolini established what was then the largest trans community in the Acqedotto Felice slums.

• Vittorio Sala (dir). I don giovanni della Costa Azzurra. With Curd Jurgens, and trans stars from La Carrousel, Coccinelle and Capucine. Italy 98 mins 1962. IMDB.
• Maria Amendola (dir) Totòdi Notte n. 1, with Totò as Nini, Erminio Macario as Mimi and the Spanish Madame Arthur. Italy 100 mins 1962. IMDB

1963

• Mino Loy (dir). 90 notti in giro per il mondo. Scr: Guido Castaldo & Nico Rienzi, narrated by Nico Rienzi, documenting Le Carrousel star, Bambi’s show, amongst others. Italy 88 mins 1963. 

1964

After a consultation with Harry Benjamin in New York and another endocrinologist in London, the then James Morris returned to Venice with a box of oestrogen tablets, but, not yet being ready, flushed them down a lavatory.

++ Le Carrousel star Dolly Van Doll went to Dr Borou in Casablanca and became the first known Italian to have completion surgery.

• Antonio Margheriti (dir) Il pelo nel mondo. With Coccinelle. Italy 1964.

1965

Professor Francesco Sorrentino in Naples was doing a few sex-change operations, and took referrals from Harry Benjamin in New York.

1966

US teacher, Ariadne Kane taught for a year at St. Stephen’s School in Rome, from 1966-67, and transvested for Mardi Gras.

1967

Giò Starace (who transitioned as Maria in 1983) wrote the scandal filled Roma Erotica. This was quickly banned, but not until after it had sold many copies. Stejano was famous. He opened a bar. He worked with the drag star Dominot. 

Dominot

Dominot had done drag shows from an early age, studied in Paris at the Comedie Francaise, and paid for the studies by performing as Dominot at Madame Arthur, and at Le Carrousel. He then lived and performed in Teheran. He also worked in avant-garde theatre.

La Romanina, had completion surgery in Switzerland. On return to Italy, she was detained and confined to a small village in the South, being considered morally and socially dangerous. Only after numerous psychiatric and gynaecological inspections, was she finally allowed to change her legal gender in 1972.

Nicola De Bartolo had been convicted for mascheramento, wearing a mask.   Except that she was not so doing.  She was wearing normal female dress without a mask.  However as the court regarded her as a "man", it ruled that her dress obscured her “natural” biological sex and made it impossible to recognize “him” and this amounted to a criminal act. De Bartolo appealed to the Supreme Court of Cassation, but it affirmed the ruling of the lower court.  This led to increased police usage of the mascheramento against queer persons in general.

•  Giò Starace. Roma erotica, Società Editoriale Attualità, Milano, 1967.

1968

After a controversial trial, the ex-Communist writer and artist Aldo Braibanti was sentenced to nine years in prison for the so-called plagiarism of the mind (plagio – from the Roman plagium, the crime of stealing a child or a slave), a medieval concept used as a repressive tool in the Fascist legal code. He supposedly brainwashed his younger male lover and another man into communism and homosexuality. Prior to the trial, his lover had already undergone shock treatments during 15 months in a mental institution, but steadfastly maintained that Braibanti had not abused him mentally or otherwise – he was discharged on condition that he live with his reactionary parents, and not read any books less than 100 years old. Braibanti’s sentence was reduced to six years on appeal. He served two in prison, and two were excused for his past participation in the antifascist Resistance. In addition, he was presented in the press as living proof that the communists corrupted Italian youth and traditional family values. Nobody had been convicted of plagio during the Fascist period, and only Braibanti afterwards. His conviction led to heated debate and the offence was declared unconstitutional by the Constitutional Court with decision no. 96 of 8 June 1981.

Giò Starace was writing for Men, a fashion and gossip magazine, as a comical agony aunt, Il salotto di Oscar Wilde. This was the only gay column in Italy at the time.

1969

Marcello Di Folco (who later transitioned as Marcella in 1980) had to deliver a letter to the Cinecitta film studios, where he was spotted by director Frederico Fellini and given a part in Fellini Satyricon. From then till 1980 Di Folca appeared in several more Fellini films, and even more films by other directors. Di Folca was usually credited as Marcello Di Falco (actually the originally spelling of the family name).

• Frederico Fellini (dir). Fellini Satyricon, based on the 1^st century novel by Gaius Petronius, with Marcello Di Folco in aminor role as Proconsole. Italy 129 mins 1969. IMDB.  Some cross-dressing and an intersex demi-god.

1970

Giorgia O’Brien from Palermo, Sicily, completed transition with De Burou in Casablanca. Giorgia worked three years at Milan's Teatro Piccolo, and collaborated with directors Franco Zeffirelli and Guiseppe Bertolucci.

-----------

Trans and gay organisings start in the 1970s - coming soon.

Francesco Sorrentino is listed here as doing or arranging sex-change operations in the 1960s in that Joanne Meyerowitz in her How Sex Changed says so based on a letter between Harry Benjamin and Robert Stoller.  However there is a problem in that nothing that I have read re trans in Italy even mentions him.

Eleonora Garosi in her "The politics of gender transitioning in Italy", Modern Italy, 17,4, 2012, also says nothing about Sorrentino.   She claims that La Romanina who had surgery in Switzerland in 1967 was the first Italian trans woman to so.  However there was earlier an Italian tailor of female clothing whom we know of only as "J", who had surgery, also in Switzerland, in 1951, by Dr Charles Wolf. 

As La Romanina had to go to Switzerland rather than Naples, and as she was semi-imprisoned on return, this does imply that Benjamin-Stoller or perhaps Meyerowitz got something wrong in their claim about Sorrentino.

In 1930 Fascist government had instituted the Rocco Code (named for the Minister for Justice, Alfredo Rocco), which did not actually mention homosexuality – repression of such was mainly a matter for the Church. However the Rocco code did prescribe plagio and mascheramento and even the use of masks on stage performance.  These came to be used only in 1967 and 1968, a generation after the end of the Fascist regime. The Fascisti did oppress male homosexual behaviour however, but mainly with administrative punishments, such as public admonition and confinement.  And more severe persecution of gays came in in the later years of Mussoilini’s regime without legal bases.