Italian Fascism’s Forgotten LGBT Victims: Asylums and Internment, 1922 - 1943

This book examines the question of the repression of LGBT people through psychiatry during the fascist regime in Italy, a subject that has not been investigated until now. It draws together the substantial archival record of patients, doctors and fascist authorities to reconstruct intricate behind-the-scenes dialogue, and to document one of the ways in which the regime repressed LGBT lives in this period.

Italian Fascism’s Forgotten LGBT Victims focusses on three different psychiatric hospitals in three parts of the country - Rome, Florence and the small Calabrian town of Girifalco, which had different attitudes and therapeutic approaches. Archive research results are contextualised within the psychiatric theory of the time, highlighting the existing discrepancies between theory and daily routine practice of mental health institutions in Italy during the regime.

Using a variety of sources, Gabriella Romano expands current knowledge of the history of Italian psychiatry, and, in doing so, she also touches a number of crucial issues of medical history, history of Fascism and queer history. Most importantly, this original and well-documented study sheds light on the life stories of ordinary LGBT individuals and their families under the fascist regime, a topic that is still mostly unexplored.

Gabriella Romano is Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck College, University of London, and an independent documentary filmmaker. Her main area of interest is the history of homosexuality, with a specific focus on the fascist regime years. She is the author of The Pathologisation of Homosexuality in Fascist Italy. The Case of G. (2019), which was also published the same year in Italian, and of Il Mio Nome è Lucy. Il XX secolo nei ricordi di una transessuale (2009), based on the first interview released by Lucy Salani, MtoF who survived Fascism and deportation to Dachau.