ABSTRACT

Pasolini struggled to find a language in which to confess his homosexuality; others have had less trouble. Like Pasolini, Pier Vittorio Tondelli had a reputation as an outsider to the literary establishment. The question of the public visibility of homosexuality is integral to an understanding of Tondelli's writing and its reception. Tondelli occupied a singular place in Italian culture in the 1980s. Tondelli was interested in contemporary music, video, and computer art in addition to literature. He sponsored a number of initiatives promoting young writers, and it is often on account of his activity as a promoter of new culture that he is remembered and his influence still felt. In an essay written in 1982 shortly after the novel's publication, Tondelli describes the barracks in distinctly foucauldian terms: 'nothing more or less than a monastery, school, prison, or boarding school'. Despite its centrality in his fiction, Tondelli wrote relatively little about homosexuality, and less about AIDS, in his journalistic pieces.