ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book pursues the sense of crisis that desire between men causes, a crisis that is a matter of public and individual concern. It then looks at male sexuality in a number of Italian narrative texts reading them in the potentially antagonistic terms of the historical conditions that produced them and of the more recent debates on sexuality and sexual identity. As modes of cultural interpretation, sexuality and gender are sometimes pitted against each other. The book examines a range of novels by the decadent and, some would say, proto-Fascist writer Gabriele D'Annunzio. It also looks at the precarious status of the male body under Fascism. The book contrasts the defining and subversive energies attributed to the gay body in Pao pao, his early novel about national service, with the dystopian AIDS narrative of his last novel, Camere separate.
