The emergence in Italy in the 1980s of two highly successful and openly gay writers has begun to compensate in part for the spectral presence of homosexuality in Italian literature in the past. Although neither Aldo Busi (born 1948) nor Pier Vittorio Tondelli (1955-1991) can be regarded as gay activists, both have brought homosexuality firmly into the public domain.

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Busi's first novel Seminario sulla gioventù (Seminar on Youth [1984]) set the tone for his subsequent work. It is a loosely plotted adventure story set mainly in Paris in the late 1960s. The gay protagonist stumbles through a number of sexual and emotional encounters remaining completely unchanged in the process.

The writing is humorous, linguistically inventive, and focuses primarily on the confrontation of the self and a chaotic and confusing world. Homosexuality is seen as another means of overthrowing the preconceptions of a repressed society. It has little value beyond this although its presence is constantly proclaimed.

Busi's second and third novels, Vita standard di un venditore provvisorio di collant (The Standard Life of a Temporary Pantyhose Salesman [1985]) and La delfina bizantina (The Byzantine Dolphin [1986]), accentuate his iconoclastic attitude toward plot and language, involving the reader in increasingly complex narrative games.

The more recent works of this most prolific writer consist largely of autobiographical meditations on literature, travel, and numerous other aspects of contemporary life, including sex, which for Busi remains primarily an enormously enjoyable adventure, a heretical aside in a stultifying world.

Tondelli's first novel, the episodic Altri libertini (Other Libertines), caused him to be prosecuted for obscenity subsequent to its publication in 1980. The novel deals with moments from the lives of a group of loosely associated individuals who all live somehow on the margins of society. Fluidity of sexual identity is a typical characteristic.

For Tondelli, as for Busi, homosexuality is essentially a signifier of marginality, of dissidence. Linguistically, Tondelli attacks the codes of conventional writing by disrupting syntax and by using the language of those he writes about; the novel is full of slang and foreign terms.

Tondelli's later works appear less dismissive of convention and are increasingly reflective in nature. Pao pao (Guard Duty [1982]) is a largely autobiographical piece on the homoerotic possibilities offered by compulsory national service in Italy. In Rimini (1985), he moves away from an explicitly gay theme before returning to a specifically gay context in order to explore the themes of illness, loss, and isolation in Camere separate (Separate Rooms [1989]), the last novel to be published before his death.

Italian critics--in a characteristic gesture that seeks to deny the specificity and value of gay experience--tend to insist that in this text Tondelli uses the figure of the homosexual and his existential solitude to investigate the universals of human nature. This in itself is perhaps indicative of a culture that has tended to view male homosexuality as an activity rather than as an identity while refusing to recognize the desire of women for each other as a significant option. Homosexuality is always a social phenomenon.

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