Defenseless Under the Night: How Italy Told the Story of AIDS
I was born in 1988. That means what I write about in my essay Indifesi sotto la notte (Defenseless Under the Night) had already happened before I could make sense of the world. AIDS entered my life by layering and by absence, through fragments of family conversations I didn’t fully understand, through my grandmother’s voice telling me to watch out for syringes when I went to play in the woods near home — a voice that mixed concrete worry with the vague terror of something no one could yet name precisely. When Vera Gheno agreed to discuss this book with me at the Teatrodante Carlo Monni in Campi Bisenzio, I knew it would be precious and important.
Vera was born in 1975. She has memories of those years that I can’t have — vivid, physical memories, tied to her own sexual coming-of-age and the fear that came with it. She told me that reading the book felt like a kind of reunion with herself: how is it possible, she wondered, that someone who didn’t live through those years could describe a period she remembers so clearly? It was the first thing she said to me that evening, and it stayed with me for the rest of the presentation.
Indifesi sotto la notte grew out of a book that doesn’t exist. I had in mind an essay on coming out: what it means today, for a non-heterosexual person, to affirm one’s identity in a country that in 2016 produced civil unions as its only concrete legislative answer and then stopped there — never even managing to pass a law against homo-, bi-, lesbo-, and transphobia. The essay on coming out never saw the light, at least not in that form. But inside it was already the seed of what became this book.
It was Luca Scarlini who pointed me in the right direction. He told me: read The Intruder (L’intruso) by Brett Shapiro. It’s a book you can find on Vinted or used-book sites for a few euros, before someone finally decides to reprint it. Through an exchange of letters, it tells the story of Giovanni and Brett, from their first meeting to Giovanni’s death, with the commentary of Brett — the one who survives, who rereads those letters and accompanies them.
When we think of illness, we always think of the patient’s point of view; we never think of the one left behind. The Intruder takes both into account, and that double perspective changed the way I thought about the book I was building.
The title of my essay comes from a line by W. H. Auden. I found this line in two different places almost at the same time: at the beginning of Shapiro’s The Intruder and in the introduction to Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart. I stopped on that double meaning and never let it go. On one side there is being defenseless as a condition of abandonment: the dark, the loneliness, the absence of political, social, and medical protection these people lived through.
On the other, there is something that matters just as much to me — being defenseless as possibility, as a value. The capacity to be in the world without the barriers we build every day out of fear of the other, fear of illness, fear of the future. One part of the title is a way to say how abandoned these people were; the other part is a wish.
During the evening, Vera read aloud a passage from my book that had struck her. It’s a point where I write about Pier Vittorio Tondelli and his choice not to speak publicly about his own illness. I begin to reflect on that choice and I write: I don’t think I can condemn Tondelli for his decision not to expose himself. And from there something starts that I hadn’t planned. Think of how much we expose ourselves today to fight battles that seem lost from the start; we get labeled activists, and it seems that because of this we have a duty to expose ourselves for rights that never come, when in fact we just want to live.
The system is impervious to words, deaf to our arguments, resistant to our urgencies. We shout and shout again, and in the best case we are relegated to the category of fighters, idealists, those who have a cause. As if we had consciously chosen to turn ourselves into flags waved by the wind of a progress that is, in fact, stagnant.
Vera said she saw a lot of anger in that passage, and a lot of the autobiographical. She’s right on both counts. That anger comes from people who entered my life and showed me the world from a point of view other than my own. It comes from the fact that in 2021 I wrote a book, Canone ambiguo, in which I write about twentieth-century Italian literature from a queer perspective, and from that moment on I found myself the spokesperson for concerns I didn’t always consciously choose to embody.
Sometimes I walk down the street holding my partner’s hand, and even enlightened friends say to me: my god, how brave! And I think: it’s not an act of courage, it’s holding the hand of someone I love. As long as we keep reading that gesture as brave, we’re loading an enormous weight onto something that should simply be normal.
I chose the authors I write about in the book with care. The criterion was one and one only: people who wrote, published, or made work in those years and who, through their art, tried to tell what was happening. There aren’t many, because there weren’t many who decided to do so publicly. Beauty, which closes the book, told it through poetry. Patrizia Vicinelli through evocative works, in an almost liturgical language.
Nino Gennaro, a Sicilian artist, through words and video. Tondelli never named AIDS explicitly in Separate Rooms, and yet the illness is there, present on every page, in that form of absence that is more eloquent than any declaration. Giovanni Forti and Brett Shapiro through their letters; Simona Ferraresi, in Come il cielo, told how one can decide to inhabit one’s HIV-positive status without being crushed — besieging the day, as she wrote, instead of letting the day besiege you.
For the testimonies I followed a different line of thought. I wanted the book to build what I call an emotional chronology: questions that would leave room for a personal memory. And what emerged, from all the voices I included — among them Luca Guadagnino, Luca Scarlini, Tommaso Giartosio, Marco Bagnai, Dacia Maraini, and Vera Gheno herself — was, for the most part, an absence. No one had sharp memories.
Everyone remembered something vague: an ad, a speech heard on television. Tommaso Giartosio opened by saying: I was living in America when AIDS started making the news, and I never wrote anything about AIDS. That, too, is a data point, because this gap says something as well.
Marco Bagnai, who opened the first gay venue in Italy in Florence and whom I cited several times during the evening at the Teatrodante, told of how he began handing out condoms for free in his club in the early years of the epidemic. People took them and threw them on the ground. They didn’t want to know. And this isn’t only a story of the 1980s, because the condom is still seen as a nuisance, an accessory to be carried reluctantly.
The only tool that still guarantees the highest rate of protection against transmission of the virus is perceived as an obstacle to pleasure. And meanwhile HIV infections are on the rise — not in the gay population, but among young heterosexuals. The reason is simple: in recent years very little has been done on sex education, and prevention has stayed confined to the circuits of LGBTQ+ associations, which self-organized because they had no other choice. This is the crux of the book, and of the conversation with Vera.
AIDS was framed from the very start as the gay cancer. The first American newspaper article to name it used exactly that phrase. In Italy, where most of those infected were drug users, that narrative was adopted anyway, because homosexuality was seen as an individual choice and responsibility. Drug addiction, by contrast, was a social problem, and confronting it would have meant reckoning with something systemic. It was more convenient to look the other way.
I wrote Indifesi sotto la notte because I wanted a twenty-year-old Luca of today to hold something that spoke to him, to help him understand the present. Because the things we live through now — the fear of the other’s body, the need to build families of choice as an alternative to families of blood, the need to expose ourselves to obtain rights that never come — have precise roots in those years, in those deaths, and in that silence. And until we know them, we can’t metabolize what we’ve become.
It is a privilege not to know when death will come, I write in the book’s final pages. It’s the only way the meaning of things can hold any validity — and that sentence is also a way of saying that the luxury of not thinking about it, of considering that story over, is one we can’t yet afford.
Cover photo: Anna Sofia Bastianoni
