1. Introduction

4Before turning to the novels, I offer a brief overview of recent scholarship on LGBTQ families and of the socio-political and legal context for same-sex families in Italy.

2. Between Queer Parenting and Homonormativity: The Kids are Alright, but What About the Parents?

6In a related vein, work on queer kinship has explored how the normative family form has been challenged by those who seek alternative models for intimate relationships, ‘families of choice’ (Weston, 1991), and who reclaim “the right to define significant relationships and decide who matters and counts as family”, and “the right [of an individual] to create family forms that fit her or his needs to realize the human potential for love in non oppressive relationships” (Goss, 1997, p. 19). A crucial question that has emerged in recent years is the degree to which these new family forms are creatively subversive, as Weeks, Heaphy and Donovan have suggested (2001), or whether they are problematically assimilationist and homonormative. That is, do gay and lesbian couples espouse “a politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions [such as marriage], but upholds and sustains them, while promising the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption” (Duggan, 2002, p. 179)?

3. Rainbow Families in Italy: A Precarious Existence

1. strong defences of gay and lesbian parents by the national association Famiglie Arcobaleno (Rainbow Families, founded 2005), a minority of centre left politicians (particularly Monica Cirinnà who led the civil unions bill) and some key media personalities (such as Luciana Litizzetto);
2. homophobic and essentialist statements that seek to defend the apparently besieged ‘natural’ heterosexual family and attack same-sex families, coming from the Church, many leading politicians, and ‘anti-gender’ campaign groups (La Repubblica, 2018);
3. some feminists and lesbians who disagree with the practice of surrogacy, which is currently illegal in Italy, and have made public statements specifically against gay men who decide to have a child with the help of a surrogate (Ross, 2020).

4. Happy Endings vs Mobilizing Shame and Melancholy

11In Italy, as elsewhere, LGBTQ-identified individuals have historically been under-represented, or associated with pathological defects and afflictions (Beccalossi, 2012; Ross, 2015). Even in recent years, representation has not seemed to be able to shake off the shackles of past discourses. Indeed, what has struck me in my research on this topic so far is that there are some unsettling resonances between Italian literary representations of lesbian and gay parents, and some of the more offensive political statements that have been circulating recently, including the idea that same-sex families simply do not exist, as Fontana argued. Strikingly, the novels that I analyse not only draw attention to problems such as the lack of legal protection for same-sex families, but also heap on what I would argue are disproportionate amounts of personal tragedy. To varying degrees, these novels are what Heather Love (2007) would call ‘backward’: focussed on the past, on shame, on closeted identities, on the impossibility and potential damage of same-sex parenting, and even of same sex relationships in some cases. In these novels, same-sex parents are also inextricably linked to death, loss, and the disintegration of the family: same-sex parents exist, but only briefly, before they are narratively erased. The first part of my analysis therefore explores the persistence of the historically-entrenched, problematic trope of queerness as a harbinger of doom and death in relation to same-sex parenting. The recurring narrative drive to kill off queer characters, perhaps to restore heteronormativity, or to underline how queerness leads inevitably to tragedy, or just through authorial lack of imagination and desire for sensational drama, is such a widespread phenomenon that it is known informally as the habit of ‘burying your gays’ (Hulan, 2017). I am interested in the degree to which these texts move beyond a problematic association of same-sex parenting with damage, coupled with a desire to ‘bury’ the offending parents, towards a queer critique of homophobic discourse.

13In Alicata’s second novel, Verrai a trovarmi d’inverno, Elena is a closeted medical student struggling to come to terms with her lesbianism. She lives with her father, Aldo, and adopted brother Mattia. Aldo, and Mattia’s father Giovanni, now dead, were best friends in the 60s, and were the ones left to look after the children when Elena’s mother died and Mattia’s mother abandoned them. Elena is deeply depressed because of her manipulative lover Viola, and attempts a sort of bungled suicide by driving her scooter into a wall. While she recovers, she discovers that Giovanni and Aldo were lovers, making the family not just non-normative—two single fathers with children living as a blended family—but more explicitly queer. However, this is only discovered when Elena’s internalized homophobia has almost cost her her life, and when the relationship is no more because of Giovanni’s death.

14In Mazzucco’s Sei come sei, Eva is the 11-year-old daughter of Giosè and Christian, who has died in a motorcycle accident. Conceived thanks to the help of a surrogate in Armenia, Eva lived happily with her fathers, until she was separated from Giosè because he was not the biological parent, and therefore had no legal relationship with her after Christian’s death. Her uncle and aunt, whom she hates, become her guardians, and she loses touch with Giosè. The novel opens with Eva pushing a classmate under a train because he was bullying her. She then runs away to find Giosè. He is compelled to bring her back to her guardians but it seems like they have begun to rebuild their relationship.

15Chiara Francini’s Non parlare con la bocca piena and Mia madre non lo deve sapere, depict the adventures of Chiara, the protagonist, a young woman whose birth mother decided she was not cut out for parenthood and so entrusted her child to two friends: a gay male couple. Chiara is trying to make her heterosexual relationship work, but ends up moving back to her family home. During this time, one of her fathers, Giancarlo, dies: His last words are about love:

dobbiamo amare, amare, come regine’ […] Giancarlo se n’era andato per un infarto. Quel cuore gonfio e stanco Chiara se l’era immaginato talmente pieno di valzer, vita, zucchero e ideali che a un certo punto doveva aver deciso di mettersi a dormire. Giustamente (Francini, 2017, p. 51).
[We have to love, love like queens. […] Giancarlo left us because of a heart attack. That tired, swollen heart that Chiara imagined as being so full of waltzes, life, sugar and ideals that at a certain point it had decided to lay down to sleep. And rightly so.]

16Here we have a clichéd view that gay men are so caught up in a stereotype of hyperbolic, affected camp that they wear themselves out with it and die.

18In these novels, we see same-sex couples choosing to have or raise children, and to defy heteronormativity and Italian laws regarding reproductive technologies, but there is a great deal of shame, hiding and a pervasive, stubborn sense of impossibility. We see the linguistic erasure of the non-biological mother in Quattro as the children don’t refer to their non-biological parent as ‘mamma’, and don’t even seem to know what relationship they have with them; in Mi verrai a trovare d’inverno, Giovanni and Aldo hide their relationship for decades and are unable to live it freely. There is almost an inescapability about the deaths that interrupt these brave new family configurations that, it is implied, are just too risky. The protagonist of Francini’s novels is a slight exception since she has made it through to adulthood with both parents, but the death of her father Giancarlo is also presented as inevitable, while her birth mother then comes back into the picture as an enduring presence, symbolically ghosting out the gay male parent.

19I argue that these novels are imbued with queer melancholia. In her discussion and reworking of Freud’s theories of mourning and melancholia, in The Psychic Life of Power, Butler develops a useful perspective on this issue. Simply put, in Freud’s view, mourning involves a feeling of loss that is openly acknowledged, and then the subject moves on with their life; melancholia, on the other hand, is produced by a denial or deferral of loss, and an introjection or incorporation of the loss itself into the ego, so that the subject’s own identity is thereafter intrinsically bound up with loss. Butler considers this phenomenon in relation to homosexual identity, commenting that the normative prohibition on homosexuality that structures dominant social relations results in widespread melancholia as queer subjects experience their desire through loss. She calls this:

a preemptive loss, a mourning for unlived possibilities. If this love is from the start out of the question, then it cannot happen, and if it does, it certainly did not. If it does, it happens only under the official sign of its prohibition and disavowal (Butler, 1997, p. 139).

20She goes on: ‘homosexuality is not abolished but preserved, though preserved precisely in the prohibition on homosexuality’ (Butler, 1997, p. 142).

21If we apply this view to the narratives of same-sex parenting, we see that the novels are infused with a profound sense of queer melancholy. While we are presented with various examples of same-sex parents, they are all disavowed, narratively sidelined, but preserved as loss. In Quattro, Andrea wants to preserve the memory of his child’s grandmothers, as though they were a rare example of a historical phenomenon that will never be seen again. They are written into the text, but as a foreclosed impossibility that remains socially and politically prohibited. Giovanni, Christian, Martina, Francesca and Giancarlo are derealized or ghosted, to use Terry Castle’s expression: they are evoked only to disappear (Castle 1993, pp. 2-6).

22Of course, some of the novels also contain a good deal of nuanced, subversive narrative and characterization, which complicates this reading. Francini’s novels are really a series of vignettes, of mini chapters of a couple of pages that recount anecdotes. However they do sketch out, albeit in a rather stereotypical way, scenes of happy, ‘queer’ family life, as we learn about the eccentric decor in their family home and see lively dinners with a crowd of gay ‘uncles’ round the table providing witty observations. In my view, Quattro is the most problematic text, since the mothers, Martina and Francesca, seem to have approached parenting with the desire to conceal their relationship from their children, and to have taken active steps to ‘heterosexualize’ their children. While they are portrayed sympathetically, they are complicit with heteronormative society and have jointly sought to obfuscate their relationship to their own children, which is extremely confusing and potentially quite damaging: this is a far cry from what a queer politics of damage might look like.

23Mi verrai a trovare d’inverno is a more progressive novel. While Elena is recuperating from her accident on the island of Pantelleria, she meets a pre-op male to female transsexual called Liz, who berates her for her internalized homophobia, and encourages her to accept her lesbianism, and to live it more openly. Conversations between Liz and Elena show the difficulties that individuals may experience in a hostile context, and the power of queer solidarity to overcome this. Later in the novel we see that homophobia is not necessarily the instinctive response when learning about a relative’s homosexuality. When Mattia, Elena’s step-brother, learns that Giovanni and Aldo, his fathers, were lovers, he doesn’t flinch, maintaining that it changes nothing about his sense of who he is:

Elena: “Non ti sconvolge che…”
“…che stessero insieme?” m’interuppe Mattia riferendosi al babbo e a Giovanni.
“Si”.
“Dimmi cosa cambierebbe della mia vita. Prova a dirmelo” (Alicata, 2011, p. 258).
[Elena; Doesn’t it shock you that…”
“…that they were together? Mattia interrupted me, referring to Dad and Giovanni.
“Yes.”
“Tell me what it changes about my life. Just try”.]

24In this novel, the queer parenting has already happened, silently, and is only really recognized as such after the fact. We see how affective bonds are strong enough to weather the potential shock of an unexpected revelation about a parent’s sexuality, and how a parent’s sexuality does not necessarily impact on their ability to bring up a child. Moreover, we do see some signs of a more progressive future, as Elena begins to come to terms with her own sexuality through learning about her father’s personal life. Her own fears about her sexuality and of rejection by her family are proved to be unfounded and the narrative supports openness about identity.

25Sei come sei merits more attention, since it is a complex novel that is also more self-aware of the topics it is dealing with. Mazzucco constructs a narrative that aligns itself alternately with different characters, remaining in the third person but offering insights into their personal experiences. The narrative subtly evokes and dissolves prejudices about how other people live, by juxtaposing different views. For example, Eva’s classmate Loris feels sorry for her, not having a mother. He has a strong bond with his own mother, and a rather icy relationship with his father, and therefore imagines family life with two fathers as a tense, cold and stressful situation. In contrast, the novel shows Eva’s home life as infused with affection and fun, and makes it abundantly clear that she idolizes her fathers. This challenge to Loris’ prejudiced view narrativizes and invalidates the common practice of making assumptions about how non-normative family models might work, based on a heteronormative view. Eva’s fathers are entirely different from Loris’ stern, patriarchal parent but he has no cultural models to go on aside from the homophobic clichés that the children use to bully Eva.

26In this novel we also see subversive narratives of fatherhood: Christian and Giosè’s desire to have a child together is linked, quite unexpectedly, to Catholic iconography as Giosè’s desire to become a father is catalysed by a painting from 1645 by Francisco de Herrera the Elder (Fig. 1). It shows St Joseph with Jesus: a non-biological father whose tenderness towards the infant transfixes Giosè and moves him to tears (Mazzucco, 2013, p. 121-23). This unusual depiction of the Holy family, which puts at the centre a figure who is often eclipsed, and whose role is passed over in silence, reminds us of the queer elements in even those families that are presented as the most normative.

27Mazzucco’s narrative also engages with ongoing debates about frustrations with the recurring trope of queer pathologization. She injects a very self-conscious moment in which Christian is reflecting on literary representation of gay lives:

Christian aveva iniziato a dire che lo avevano stufato i libri che proponevano una visione maledetta dell’omosessualità, i cui protagonisti erano sempre senza scampo, condannati all’infelicità, alla punizione e perfino alla morte. Comunicavano un’idea ormai datata, rancida, esaurita, anche artisticamente. Voleva l’happy end. Voleva una commedia, qualcosa che rispecchiasse la condizione contemporanea dell’omosessualità liberata e vissuta senza sensi di colpa (Mazzucco, 2013, p. 172).
[Christian had started to say that he was fed up of books that offered a negative view of homosexuality, whose protagonists could never be saved, they were condemned to unhappiness, punishment and even death. They conveyed a dated message that was rotten, worn out, even from an artistic perspective. He wanted the happy ending. He wanted a comedy, something that reflected contemporary liberated homosexuality, that was lived without a sense of guilt.]

28Despite this, Mazzucco then obviously decides not to provide the longed for happy ending, perhaps because this would be unrealistic, or would seem simplistic and hackneyed after this reflection. While Christian rightly critiques the inevitability of queer tragedy in many texts, it would be equally problematic and unrealistic to insist on a guaranteed ‘happy’ outcome. Here, Mazzucco’s text resonates with Sara Ahmed’s discussion of happiness and unhappiness, in which she argues that we need to retain an open sense of possibility about these different states, rather than seeking a received idea of ‘happiness’ to be sought at all costs, thereby trapping ourselves in normative logics (Ahmed, 2010, p. 219). Unhappiness can be productive, she observes (Ahmed, 2010, p 217). Instead of a clichéd ‘happy’ narrative, Mazzucco shows how unexpected tragedy can hit any family, and how families who are not properly protected by law are so much more vulnerable. Giosè, for example, has to endure the humiliation of being interrogated by a police officer about his relationship with Eva, since they don’t have the same surname, and he is then called a ‘friend of the family’ by Eva’s uncle, her legal guardian (Mazzucco, 2013, p. 137). Thus Mazzucco uses her novel politically to critique the Italian socio-cultural and legal context, not just to describe personal loss. Yet this is not a novel that can be easily classified as ‘pro’ gay fatherhood, since it also depicts the ethically-challenging practice of surrogacy in a rather uncomfortable way. Christian even suggests that surrogacy can be seen as reducing women’s bodies to reproductive vessels that can be rented out. Christian and Giosè differ in their views: Christian is more aware of how physically hard and invasive it must be for the surrogate, while Giosé is rather idealistically convinced that it is an undertaking that requires a special vocation.

29We later see the surrogate herself, a poor widow from a family of shepherds in Armenia—as the novel explains, surrogacy costs much less there than in the US. She is pale and exhausted in the hospital after giving birth, silently weeping and grieving for her husband, who died several years previously, whose absence she is feeling keenly. When asked to pose for a photograph with the two new fathers, she refuses, saying that she is not sure that she wants to remember this moment, or this experience (Mazzucco, 2013, p. 216). The juxtaposition of the different perspectives of Giosè, Christian and the surrogate complicate this story, as ethical dilemmas are raised but no specific side is taken. The novel is clearly anti-homophobic, but more ambiguous on the ethics of how gay men might become parents. Here it takes a more nuanced view of surrogacy than recent debates in the Italian media and some activist communities (Ross, 2020). While sexual difference feminists have been vocal in their condemnation of surrogacy as an inevitably exploitative, commodifying practice Mazzucco presents us with a narrative that sheds fascinating but partial light on why each character makes particular choices, or how free those choices might be. The novel’s ultimate concern is not to decry surrogacy as universally unacceptable, but to follow Eva and Giosè, as they navigate unchartered territory in hostile waters.

31This image has been interpreted, most influentially by Walter Benjamin, as symbolizing impotence in the face of the growing pile of wreckage that is history. Benjamin sees the angel as paralysed before the ever increasing disaster, unable to turn its back on the past and look to the future, but propelled backwards towards this future by a gathering storm (Benjamin, 2003, p. 392).

32It might be argued that rather than bold figures forging non-normative families of the future, the novels analysed here show us cowed individuals, like the Angel, who are fearful, looking backwards, and sometimes in thrall to homonormativity; that is, they seek to prove that they can be as normative or more normative than any other family, instead of redefining in challenging and exciting ways what a family might look like. This is particularly the case in Quattro. There is a political significance to narrating that the children of same-sex parents actually do very well, as countless scientific studies have now argued (Schumm, 2016, p. 662). However, in this novel, the children’s stability seems to be achieved through a deeply normative, assimilationist agenda: what Shelley Park has called the concealment of queerness in the drive to be accepted (2013, pp. 8-9). This drive for concealment is exemplified in Francini’s novels too, since the protagonist develops a lifelong addiction to sweets because her fathers got into the habit of popping sweets into her mouth constantly while they were out in public, so that she wouldn’t be heard calling them both ‘Papà’, drawing attention to their difference. These apparently ‘light’ and ‘amusing’ anecdotes testify to a literal, damaging silencing of queerness. Moreover, returning to the narrative trope of burying your gay parents, there seems to be some inescapable destiny that truncates the lives of queer parents in dramatic and tragic ways; the narratives literalize and externalize the introjected loss of the melancholic subject. At least one parent is already dead at the start of Quattro, Verrai a trovarmi d’inverno and Sei come Sei. They are always already doomed.

35Butler’s suggestion for how this might be achieved is complex. Following Freud, she notes that actually, the distinction between mourning and melancholia is ambiguous at best: even when the subject acknowledges the loss, grieves and ‘moves on’, some loss is introjected and marks the ego (Butler, 1997, p. 193). In other words, melancholy is a permanent and inescapable existential state. However she does make two suggestions: “Survival […] requires […] raging against the dead in order not to join them” (Butler, 1997, p. 193); “Survival is a matter of avowing the trace of loss that inaugurates one’s own emergence” (Butler, 1997, p. 195). We cannot and should not try to forget or minimize queer damage and loss, but Butler also advocates some anger, some action, some self-reflexivity and a will to move forward with loss rather than being paralyzed by it. Similarly, Ahmed reflects that “bad feelings” are not simply something we should try to forget, but might be considered as “creative responses to histories that are unfinished” (2010, p. 217). Rather than try to overcome such feelings, they need to be experienced and explored.

37Mi verrai a trovare d’inverno offers a more combative picture, as we discover a letter that Giovanni wrote to Elena’s father Aldo, before his death: he alludes to the ‘thing’ that happened between them, which took place while they were caught up in leftwing radical politics of the early 1970s. This was not a particularly gay-friendly context or period, which explains the secrecy and oblique language. Despite this, Giovanni then declares his love for Aldo, and states that what he wants most of all is for them to form a family, and to bring up their children together, which then does happen despite his death. Here Giovanni acknowledges the challenges of a gay male relationship, but refuses to give up the man he desires because of socio-cultural taboos. However, stigma and shame demand a closeted, secretive life, veiling any kind of public queer presence. To use Butler’s terminology, the queerness of Giovanni and Aldo’s parenting and relationships, as well as Aldo and Elena’s queer desires and identities, can only emerge when it becomes clear how much of their own family history has been lost and hidden in unspoken secrecy, and how foolish and existentially damaging it would be to continue to conceal these crucial aspects of their lives and selves.

38In Sei come sei, we see active determination to become gay parents, as Christian and Giosè sell family property to pay for the services of the surrogate, they travel many times to Armenia and put their relationship to the test, but after Christian’s death, when Eva is assigned to her guardians, Giosè becomes deeply passive and seems incapable of assuming political agency. He withdraws from Eva as a result of the pressures of normative society, which has a negative impact on both of them. He insists on the importance of waiting until he is granted the legal right to be recognized as her father, rather than thinking creatively of ways in which he can assert his role, and be the father that she obviously needs, immediately. It is only in the last few pages that he finally articulates to himself the urgency of finding a way to be near Eva, and the novel concludes in a vaguely hopeful key.

39Returning to Klee’s and Benjamin’s angel, we might describe these novels as narrating the moment in which paralysis before the wreckage of history begins to cede, giving way to new and uncertain movement. Mi verrai a trovare d’inverno and Sei come sei are narratives that are just able to turn their heads far enough to see and acknowledge that there is a future. The voices of Eva and Elena emerge from the chaos of loss and pain with a renewed drive to demand what they want and to act, rather than continuing as they had previously, passively accepting emotional abuse (Elena by her former lover Viola) or accepting a forced estrangement from her one remaining parent (Eva and Giosè). Eva, Giosè, Elena, Aldo, and Mattia are damaged by grief, but also by the culture of silence provoked by queer shame, and the lack of legal rights. The specific evocation of a known historical context from a queer perspective (1970s left-wing activism in Verrai a trovarmi d’inverno), or of the contemporary legal situation as regards non-biological gay parents (Sei come sei), lends the narratives a special connection with ‘real’ life that lingers beyond the fictional worlds of the novels and demands a critical engagement with the reasons for the melancholy and unhappiness. While Alicata’s Quattro and the novels by Francini show us same-sex parenting as a phenomenon destined to burn itself out and be evoked only through a fond but toothless nostalgia, Sei come sei and Verrai a trovarmi d’inverno arguably mobilize a politics of damage that, as Snediker hoped, moves beyond “fear and trembling”, towards a more assertive, combative stance. Indeed, in different ways, both novels critique and challenge the silencing and invisibilizing of queer parenting as it impacts on parents and children. Moreover, they are narratives that suggest that same-sex parenting is much more than a simple craving for normativity, since each family engages actively in its own complex rewriting of the norms. Looking forward, we might take these novels as a sign that while queer melancholy will always be with us, critical engagement with loss and tragedy can enable the construction of a future that is includes the possibility of something like happiness.