News Slant	News Slant Archive

One the 20th century's greatest homosexual writers and filmmakers wasn't killed by a teenage hustler, as for 30 years the official account and tongue-clucking cocktail-party chatter has had it. Pier Paulo Pasolini was, rather, almost certainly assassinated.

That's the upshot of new revelations from Pino Pelosi, the man who served seven years in jail for the crime.

The official story had been that Pasolini picked up then 17-year-old Pelosi on a beach on November 2nd 1975, and when the ensuing sex veered into sadomasochism, the youth flew into a rage, beating to death one of postwar Italy's most famous artists and political commentators.

View our poll archive

Pasolini's badly battered body was found on the beach the next day.

The standard account of the writer's death had the ring of plausibility, even Greek tragedy. Pasolini had directed the wrenchingly sadomasochistic Salo, meant as an indictment of Italy's fascists. And his poems and political engagement were inseparable from his love of the slum youths whose fathers had been Italy's last peasants.

Mysterious plotters

Over the years, some insisted Pasolini's death was political assassination-- of which there were plenty in Italy's violent 1970s "years of lead"-- committed by the neofascist right, the revolutionary left, and the Mafia. Though an Italian appeals court ruled Pelosi acted alone, the extent of Pasolini's injuries seemed inconsistent with a fight with the slight 17-year-old, who didn't have any blood on him when police found him, and who seemed oddly eager to confess. But the account of his murder stuck.

Now it has come unstuck. Pelosi came forward in an interview in May on Italy's RAI television, 23 years after he was released from prison, to retract his confession. Pelosi now contends the killers were three men in their 40s, who shouted "dirty communist" and fag-baiting Sicilian epithets as they beat Pasolini to death. Pelosi says he kept silent since he's been out of prison because of threats against his family, but that with his mother and father now dead, he could speak. But the real actors behind the murder-- the far-right? the mafia?-- remains murky.

"In America, you mostly know him for his films, but in Italy Pasolini was very well known for what he wrote," Italian gay activist Giovanni Dall'Orto tells The Guide. "Every week, his articles sparked a furious debate everywhere."

In his newspaper columns, writes journalist Doug Ireland in his blog www.direland.com, "Pasolini engaged in dialogue with his readers, and the moving letters to him from working-class people and trade unionists-- with Pasolini's responses to them-- are testimony to [his] influence... well beyond intellectual circles. And they also suggest why it was considered important for the Italian right, then in power, to get rid of him."

In his writings, Pasolini "actually foretold in a way and analyzed in advance what's happened now-- that media becomes so important, that television dictates everything," says Marco Tullio Giordana, director of the 1995 film Pasolini, an Italian Crime, in an interview appearing on World Socialist Web Site (www.wsws.org). "The new fascism has taken the form of an aspiration to a total consumer society with no other values."

But a generation after his death, the director remains a contested figure. "Pasolini was in fact a man of the past," argues Dall'Orto, who contributed to an Italian anthology titled Contro Pasolini. "He was against gay lib, against the sexual revolution, against abortion, against family planning, against everything the gay movement believes in. He embraced our enemy's ideas."

But if Pasolini was conservative in some ways, he was simultaneously radical. A week before his death, Pasolini said the entire Italian ruling class deserved to face trial for it "unworthiness, contempt for their fellow citizens, misappropriation of public funds, price-fixing for oil companies, industries, banking cartels, collaboration with the CIA, illegal use of intelligence agencies, responsibility for [right-wing] terrorism in Milan, Brescia, and Bologna, destruction, anthropological degradation, the disgraceful condition of schools, hospitals and every other basic public institution, the neglect of the countryside, the wildcat explosion of popular culture and of mass media, and the criminal stupidity of television."

Thirty years later, with Silvio Berlusconi-- Italy's richest man and owner of its largest media empire-- in power, Pasolini's predictions about telegenic fascism seem prescient, even without looking across the Atlantic. As with William Burroughs and Gore Vidal, Pasolini's instinctive, aristocratic homosexuality put him simultaneously deeply inside and outside his culture-- and at-odds with what became the gay movement's thrust toward middle-class assimilation. In Pasolini's case, being a thorn stuck deep in the flesh of Italian powers-that-be, it now seems, led to his very political murder.