Aldo Cazzullo (photo by Carlo Furgeri Gilbert).
Qwhen I was a boy, well not in the Middle Ages, we divided human beings into two categories: heterosexual and homosexual.
At most, the existence of bisexuals was contemplated, but I well remember a friend who told me: are you attracted to the male member? No? You see then that bisexuals don’t exist, are they closed gays?
It was very crude reasoning. But in short we weren’t really incapable of understanding and wanting; it was the spirit of the time.
A few days ago I received a letter from a young reader who, begging me not to publish it in its entirety, basically said to me: only you boomers – now synonymous with old – feel the need to define yourself; we can be one day gay, one day straight, one day bi, one day nothing.
I was reminded of Lucio Dalla, another who had never wanted labels. A friend is getting married, it occurred to me spontaneously to ask her who the lucky one is, she replied: «She’s a lucky. I’ve had men, I’ve had women. If I fell in love with a man, I would marry a man. But I fell in love with a woman.’
Thinking about it, fluidity is as old as the world. They practiced it Socrates and his pupils, among which there was Plato. Sappho and her disciples. Virginia Woolf and his group. Alexander the Great went mad with grief at the death of Hephistion, Hadrian for that of Antinous, “the most beautiful man in the world”, later deified.
Julius Caesar they called him the queen of Bithynia for his bond with King Nicomedes, Cicero in the Senate attacked him saying: “Caesar we know what he gave you, and what you gave him”.
Marco Mengoni at Eurovision 2023
Fluids were famously Leonardo and Michelangelo, even if Paolo Poli (who told me he had also had women, “as a young man, when it gets hard easily”) distinguished between the two: «Michelangelo was tormented, indecisive, restless; Leonardo, on the other hand, is definitely one of ours».
Vittorio Sgarbi claims that Giotto and Donatello were too, in short, the greatest artists that humanity has ever had. And are we still here worrying?
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