ABSTRACT
Pier Paolo Pasolini, poet, novelist, filmmaker, essayist, and general intellectual gadfly, died in 1975 at the hands of a young male prostitute who may or may not have had accomplices. Much vilified in his lifetime, after his death he has been commonly sanctified as some kind of secular martyr, a heroic victim to the forces of obscurantism and reaction. That he made many enemies in the course of his life, and that his death can be viewed as in some sense sacrificial, is unquestionable. Highly questionable, however, are subsequent attempts to cleanse his memory of the contradiction and sheer contrariety that were the hallmarks of his life. A consummate modern man and modern artist, he nevertheless hated most aspects of modernity, including artistic modernism. A lifelong communist with a small c, he never attempted to rejoin the Communist Party after being expelled from it in 1949, and he regularly quarreled with it even when he was a regular contributor to the Party press. Assertively and proudly homosexual, he found his sexuality a burden and was deeply suspicious of contemporary “gayness” (though he might have found the reclamation of “queer” that emerged after his death more to his liking). An atheist and secularist, his sensibility was in many ways deeply religious, and for a short period in his life he was in amicable dialogue not just with Christianity but with the Catholic Church itself.
