by Antonella Grassi
This article aims to explore the gay movement of Parma in the 1970s, to show its implicit, ante litteram consonance with the queer discourse. The ability to reinvent itself was the peculiar feature of the Parma group, always aware of the constant evolution of artistic forms: this made it a unique case in Italy, as well as a privileged point of view for studying the evolution of the national gay movement. The Parma experiment has been shown to be congenial to a gay-queer speech in an undoubtedly more significant way than elsewhere, through the re-use of traditional denigration epithets and the subversive recovery of attitudes that in the past were part of the pre-gay liberation grammar. The research was conducted using oral and archive sources.
Cover picture: “Pumitrozzole,” CC by Giovanni Rodella. Web. Accessed 28 August 2017. https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=43178231