Mario Mieli

Mario Mieli (21 May 1952, Milan – 12 March 1983) was an Italian activist, writer, playwright, and gender studies theorist.

He is considered one of the founders of the Italian homosexual movement, and one of the leading theoreticians in Italian homosexual activism.

He is best known for his essay Elementi di critica omosessuale (Homosexuality and liberation: elements of a gay critique) published in its first edition in 1977, and was one of the founders of FUORI! (Fronte Unitario Omosessuale Rivoluzionario Italiano, United Italian Homosexual Revolutionary Front).

He died by suicide at the age of 30.

Mario Mieli's thinking consists of the belief that every person is potentially transsexual if he or she were not conditioned from childhood by a certain type of society which, through what Mieli called "educastration," forces one to consider heterosexuality as "normality" and everything else as perversion.

By transsexuality Mieli does not mean what is understood today in the common understanding of the term, but the innate polymorphous and "perverse" tendency of man, characterized by a plurality of Eros tendencies and the original and deep hermaphroditism of every individual.

Mieli went so far as to apologia for pedophilia, referring to some of Sigmund Freud's remarks at the time still at the center of psychological studies, particularly those related to the Oedipus complex.

To be truly understood, his statements must be included in the broad debate at the time that existed on child sexuality at a time when homosexuality was still seen as a mental illness and confused with pedophilia.

It was not until the late 1980s that child sexual abuse became part of international law and unanimously regarded as crimes of special gravity, and a distinction began to be made between pedophilia and homosexuality.

Children, according to Mieli's thought, could "free themselves" from social prejudices and find the realization of their "polyform perversity" through adults who were aware of the above assertion:

"We revolutionary queers can see in the child not so much the Oedipus, or the future Oedipus, but the potentially free human being. We, yes, can love children. We can desire them erotically by responding to their craving for Eros, we can grasp with open face and open arms the intoxicating sensuality they lavish, we can make love to them. This is why pederasty is so harshly condemned: it addresses amorous messages to the child that society instead, through the family, traumatizes, educates, denies, lowering the Oedipal grid on its eroticism. The repressive heterosexual society forces the child into the latency period; but the latency period is but the deathly introduction to the lifespan of a latent "life." Pederasty, on the other hand, 'is an arrow of lust shot toward the fetus' (Francesco Ascoli)"

(Elements of Homosexual Criticism, p. 62, 2002)

Footnote 88 reads:

"By pederasty I mean the erotic desire of adults for children (of either sex) and sexual relations between adults and children. Pederasty (in the proper sense) and pedophilia are commonly used as synonyms."

(Elements of Homosexual Criticism, p. 62, 2002)