ABSTRACT
Recent historians of Italian Fascism have stopped trying to understand the regime in terms of its policies, and have focused attention instead on the way in which it sustained support through the development of certain core values, or myths. Little work has been done on how Fascism dealt with homosexuality, and less still on the experiences of homosexuals under Fascism. Homosociality and colonial ambition depend on other men and other races, yet abhor and distrust their proximity. This chapter focuses on texts by Vasco Pratolini and Giorgio Bassani, two very different writers who write almost exclusively about the Fascist period and whose fiction includes a number of homosexual characters. Their work is set in Florence and Ferrara respectively, and in both instances, a sense of place is a determining aspect of their writing. Patrizia Dogliani in the only general history of Fascism to devote any space to the issue, discusses it in a broader chapter on racial and demographic policy.
