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| Author Gay Talese raises this question and related issues in a March 1993 article for the New York Times Book Review. In his discussion, Talese laments the dearth of opportunities facing heterosexual male writers of Italian-American descent. It’s true that as Italians living in the Americas we have had little opportunity to express ourselves in literature. As a group, we have been almost invisible in the written media, or only visible in very stereotypical ways. For Italian/Sicilian-descended lesbians and gay men, if our writing has explicit queer content and explicit ethnic content, we face an additional layer of invisibility and prejudice in the publishing world. Consequently, few images of us exist in literature. The focus of this book is on the lesbian/gay members of the Italian/Sicilian diaspora living in North America. We are tired of the stereotypical portrayals of Italian/Sicilian men as violent mafiosi and Italian women as glamorous bombshells or long-suffering martyrs. In the gay media, Italian/Sicilian gay men are commonly depicted as exotic and well-endowed, oversexed and extremely passionate. There are very few images of Italian-descended lesbians in gay or straight literature. Obviously, a whole range of our experience is missing. When it is discussed, Italian/Sicilian cultural heritage is often considered that of Northern Italy: All Italians/Sicilians are lumped in with the stereotypical spaghetti-chomping ones, or the ones who produced great art during the Renaissance. We are admired for our love of beauty, our opera and our sexual prowess. But the Southern Italian/Sicilian peasant experience is rarely mentioned and is certainly not glorified in the same way as the canals of Venice or the magnificence of Rome. The poverty and disenfranchisement of the South is overlooked. The life experiences of lesbian and gay Italian/Sicilian ethnics are also overlooked. Despite this fact, we do exist, and we are coming out stronger and more visibly every year. We are the new world descendants of those Italian/Sicilian peasants. We have deviated substantially from la via vecchia, the ways of the old, the much revered traditions by which we were raised. We are also shunned by the Catholic Church, and often develop an awareness about our sexuality steeped in a climate of repression, fear, and homophobia within the family. As lesbians and gay men who are also of Italian/Sicilian descent, it’s clear that our experiences bring together a number of potentially volatile issues, including: ethnic identity and poverty-class heritage versus the lie of the American dream, old world mores versus our new world queer experience, and lesbian/gay sexuality versus the homophobia of the Catholic Church. For too long, as lesbians and gay men, we have suffered on dual fronts. We face intense homophobia, silence and invisibility within our own ethnic community, yet we have found only limited solace within the queer community, where we are all but invisible in gay/lesbian literature. Why is that? While many in the queer community acknowledge Italy as a strong source of history and culture, most have no awareness of the real history of this country. For example, the southern region, for 1500 years following the fall of the Roman Empire, was conquered by one invading army after another, leaving Spanish, Moorish (North African), Norman, Greek and Arab blood. The darker skin and mixed racial heritage of the southerners was one reason the North thought these peasants “barbarians.” Today, because of our mixed heritage, to classify us as “white,” once we have come to these shores, is a mistake, but this is how we are usually seen. However, our reality as mixed-heritage people is much more complex. Likewise, Northern Italians are also of mixed heritage, but the mix is different. Their experience is misunderstood and stereotyped, too. This book provides a forum for discussing these complexities. Some of the writers included in this anthology address ethnic-identity questions based on their own life experiences. Many of us fuori d’ Italia are coming up with our own new words to describe our experience as mixed-heritage people. But as gays and lesbians, we are too often excluded from participating in this new discourse with our paesan. We are kept in the closet. We face homophobia within our own ethnic group because of their fear and shame towards gays and lesbians. We face ignorance within the queer community, where our Italianness has become lost, diluted or is misunderstood completely. In response to Gay Talese’ s original inquiry, we would ask a more incisive question: Where are the Italian/Sicilian-descended queer writers? We are being silenced on all fronts and we are fighting to have our voices heard. It is with this consciousness that we as editors offer Hey Paesan: Writing by Lesbians and Gay Men of Italian Descent. For the first time in Western literature we present a more inclusive and accurate reflection of who we really are. But it is only a reflection of where we stand at this point in time as a marginalized group–without consensus about who we are, where we come from, or where we’re going. Fewer gay men responded than we hoped, and not all the themes we proposed in our “call for submissions” were addressed. We are not surprised, after all we are not yet a flourishing community in the sense that only a handful of organized Italian/Sicilian lesbian groups exist; few gay men’s groups exist. The writers in this collection have never before appeared in such a context. They are finally speaking in the company of their peers. But this anthology is not the last word. Not by any means. Our hope is that our work here will spawn other anthologies and projects that will reflect our presence, our identity, our diversity. This, then, is our contribution. Tommi Avicolli Mecca Giovanna (Janet) Capone Denise Nico Leto |