Mario Mieli

Mario Mieli at a public demonstration by homosexuals in Sanremo (1972)

Mario Mieli (21 May 1952, Milan – 12 March 1983) was an Italian left-wing activist, writer, playwright, and gender studies theorist. He is considered one of the founders of the Italian homosexual movement, and one of the leading theoreticians in Italian homosexual activism. Alongside French writer and feminist Françoise d'Eaubonne (1920–2005), he led Italy's first demonstration for gay rights at the Congress of Sexology in San Remo, where they protested against using aversion therapy to "convert" homosexuals. He is best known for his essay Elementi di critica omosessuale (Homosexuality and liberation: elements of a gay critique), published in its first edition in 1977 by Gay Men's Press (GMP) and later republished and expanded as Toward a Gay Communism: Elements of Homosexual Critique (2018). Mieli came to London in 1971 as a student and joined the British Gay Liberation Front (GLF), before returning to Italy and becoming one of the founders of FUORI!, known as the Fronte Unitario Omosessuale Rivoluzionario Italiano or United Italian Homosexual Revolutionary Front - an acronym which means "OUT!" in Italian. Similar to many early LGBTQ+ activists, and other French intellectuals such as Guy Hocquenghem, Michel Foucault, and Simone de Beauvoir, Mieli recognized young people's normative sexuality, and made supportive statements on pedophilia and pederasty. He died by suicide in 1983, aged 30.

Mario Mieli's Support for Transsexuality and Pedophilia

According to one academic, Mieli believed that “everyone is born with a complete range of erotic capability,” which meant that “homosexual desire is universal.” It was only through a process he termed “educastration,” designed “to eradicate those congenital sexual tendencies society deemed perverse,” that people “become either heterosexual or homosexual” by “repressing their homoerotic impulses in the first case, and their heterosexual ones in the second.” For him, it was “the forces that inhibit and restrict the direction of the sexual drive” that were unnatural. Seeing humans as innately "polymorphously perverse," Mieli believed that every person is potentially transsexual, if they were not conditioned from childhood by a society which forces one to consider heterosexuality as "normality" and everything else as perversion.

On pedophilia, he wrote in Gay Communism:

We revolutionary queers can see in the child not so much the Oedipus, or the future Oedipus, but the potentially free human being. We, yes, can love children. We can desire them erotically by responding to their craving for Eros, we can grasp with open face and open arms the intoxicating sensuality they lavish, we can make love to them.

This is why paedophilia is so is so strictly condemned. It sends messages of love to the child, through the family, traumatizes, educates, denies, lowering the Oedipal grid on its eroticism. The repressive heterosexual society forces the child into the latency period; but the latency period is but the deathly introduction to the lifespan of a latent "life." (p. 54).

According to Bernini (2021), for Mieli the outcome of sexual liberation "will be ‘the discovery and progressive liberation of the transsexuality of the subject’, ‘the negation of the polarity between the sexes’, the advent of ‘the new man-woman, or far more likely, woman-man’ (1977/2018, p.254) who will live the fullness of desire beyond all identitarian enclosures." Here, the "liberated subject [...] is a true polymorphous pervert: neither man nor woman (though more woman than man), transsexual, anal, coprophagous and even paedophile."

Similar to Feminist Andrea Dworkin (1974), Mieli considers a future civilization where freedom for transsexuals, pedophiles and children would exist alongside one another. He writes:

The problem of over-population can be genuinely resolved by the spread of homosexuality, the (re)conquest of autoerotic pleasure, and the communist revolution. What will positively resolve the demographic tragedy is not the restriction of Eros, but its liberation.

The harnessing of Eros to procreation, in fact, has never been really necessary, since free sexuality, in conditions that are more or less favourable, naturally reproduces the species without needing to be subject to any type of constraint. On the other hand, if the struggle for the liberation of homosexuality is decisively opposed to the heterosexual Norm, one of its objectives is the realisation of new gay relations between women and men, relations that are totally different from the traditional couple, and are aimed, among other things, at a new form of gay procreation and paedophilic coexistence with children.

In a relatively distant future, the consequent transsexual freedom may well contribute to determining alterations in the biological and anatomical structure of the human being (p. 227).

See also

• Gabrielle Russier - Contemporary teacher-student sex scandal. Of national importance during the history of the student revolution of May 1968 and its aftermath.
• Tony Duvert - Open MAP and contemporary intellectual
• Roger Moody - 1st person to come out as "paedophile" in English press.
• Gayle Rubin - American queer theory founder
• Judith Butler
• Steven Angelides
• Gert Hekma
• Andre Gide