Italian Fascism’s Forgotten LGBT Victims. Asylums and Internment, 1922–1943

The paper, based on Romano’s recent 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.
The book focusses on three different psychiatric hospitals in three parts of the country - Rome, Florence and the small Calabrian town of Girifalco - of different size, tradition, 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, Romano expands current knowledge of the history of Italian psychiatry, and, in doing so, she also touches several crucial issues of medical history, history of Fascism and queer history. Most importantly, this study sheds light on the lives of ordinary LGBT individuals and their families under the fascist regime, a topic that is still mostly unexplored.

Dr Gabriella M. Romano is an independent historian and a documentary film-maker, whose main areas of interest are the history of sexuality and homosexuality in Italy focussing on Fascism, and women’s history. On these two topics, she has written, produced and directed several documentaries, and published books and essays. Among her most recent publications: Italian Fascism’s Forgotten LGBT victims. Asylums and Internment, 1922–1943. London: Bloomsbury 2024; ‘Talking About Silence’, Cadmus, European University Institute, 2020, pp. 1 – 10; The Pathologisation of Homosexuality in Fascist Italy. The Case of G. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2019.

In 2022, she received a Gerda Henkel Foundation Grant to expand her research on the repression of sexuality through internment in Southern Italy. She is Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck College, University of London.