Living Queer in Florence

What is the margin? In a city like Florence, how can queerness protect its spaces and, at the same time, open them up and inhabit them? An inquiry into the languages, the imaginaries, and the lived experience of those who have grown used to carrying an identity that refuses to conform to the idea of normality — and who search, day after day, for a space of their own where they feel safe.

I have lived in Florence since 2008, and though I have had to leave twice — first for Bologna, then for Rome — I have always come back. The impression that has settled in my mind over the years (and I stress that it is a strictly personal one, because if this fragmented life has taught me anything, it is that everyone’s experience can resemble everyone else’s without ever collapsing into a single story) is that in Florence the indifference with which we treat one another is so pronounced that it comes full circle and turns into tolerance, brushing up against something close to acceptance.

For a few years now, since the publication of my first book of essays, Canone ambiguo, I have traveled up and down Italy talking about queerness — an English word impossible to render in Italian, one that reached the ears of hundreds of thousands of Italians through the words of Michela Murgia, who used it to describe her chosen family. In English, queer carries an older, now largely obsolete sense: “odd,” “ambiguous,” “unclassifiable,” “undefinable” — a word reclaimed by the very people it was once hurled at as a slur. The LGBTQIA+ community took it back, laying claim to its “bent” nature, the opposite of what counts as straight: “upright,” “normal” in the eyes of society.

How to translate queer into Italian is still an open question. Take William Burroughs’s novel, whose title is precisely Queer: in 1985 the publisher Sugarco brought it out as Diverso (“Different”), while Adelphi, in 1998, chose Checca (“Queen”). Both attempts fall flat because, for all their accuracy, no Italian word manages, to my mind, to capture the deepest nature of the term — which stands not only for those who belong to the LGBTQIA+ community, but also for anyone who feels themselves set against a single, unifying social norm.

It is no accident that the “Q” of queer is folded into the acronym itself, precisely to make room for those who are part of the LGBTQIA+ community but do not identify with any of the letters on offer (lesbian, gay, bi, trans, intersex, asexual, and so on). Queer is an identity that refuses identity: ungraspable, shifting, fluid — belonging to no imposed category, following instead a personal nature that extends even to how one inhabits one’s own body.

I need this introduction, this point of view, for what I would like to be a statement of intent. One of the most important features of the queer community is the margin. Living at the edges of a society that makes no room for them, queer people began to build their own spaces to gather in, to compose a language of their own, a politics of their own — and, in the end, to defend those margins and make them what they truly are: safe spaces.

For me, the aim of this column is to try to make the “crooked Florence” known — the Firenze storta, the one that lives inside bubbles which, once brought into the light, can become safe places for those who are still looking for them. I would also like to dedicate this space to anyone who still struggles to understand this “crookedness,” in the hope that they come to see that, behind the labels and the definitions, there are people.

So who are the protagonists of this “crooked Florence”? The queer people who have chosen to live here; the gathering places that hold on in order to build a present in which difference need not be frightening; the cultures and imaginaries that are fertile ground for a possible future. I am convinced, today more than ever, that to care for another person means to make yourself known and to recognize one another — and in a city like Florence, where the streets seem to belong to someone else more and more with each passing day, making yourself known means surviving.

Photos by Kristinn Kis