When the January 13, 1998, at 39 years old, the writer from Nissa Alfredo Ormando He set himself on fire in St. Peter's Square in Rome, and was already a dead man: for some time, in fact, he had considered himself a failure, as a writer and as a man.
Publishing houses had stubbornly refused to publish his novels (an autobiographical trilogy, consisting of Il Dubbio, 'Escluso, and Sotto il cielo 'Urano), his fairy tales, and his short stories.
With great financial sacrifice and only thanks to the help of his mother in her eighties, who received a social pension, Ormando had published at his own expense, in 1995, the short novel Il Fratacchione and, in 1997, five of his stories in a magazine he created entitled I Miserabili.
As recently as October 1997, failing his second written Latin exam, the last subject required for a degree in Literature—which would later be awarded posthumously to him at the Faculty of Educational Sciences in Palermo—might have jeopardized, albeit not irreparably, his achievement of a goal he considered important: a doctorate, which could have redeemed him from his many failures. This may have been one of the factors that triggered the onset of yet another depressive episode, a condition he was subject to, and from which, this time, he would never recover.
We must however have the courage to make known here, to the extent that we are allowed to do so, the conscious motivations that pushed Ormando to the tragic gesture and that the writer himself wanted to make known to us through two letters, one for posterity, the other addressed to his brother Angelo, and also sent for information to the ANSA news agency in Rome. From them it emerges that the root of this "suicide" was desperation over the lack of understanding of his homosexuality by society and a family ashamed of the faggot.
We spoke, when writing about Ormando's tragic gesture, of "suicide," but is this the right term?
In a letter to a friend, who wishes to remain anonymous, the writer asks himself: I wonder if a man who is already dead can be considered a suicide; and again: I realize that suicide is a form of rebellion against God, but I can no longer live, in truth I am already dead, suicide is the final part of a civil and psychic death.
With this last sentence we seem to understand that Ormando knew that he was, if anything, a "suicide" by society because of anti-gay prejudice: in other words, that his "suicide" would have been a social homicide.
I'm tired of feeling isolated, marginalized. What's the point of living when you're not loved and respected? I have a mother's love and that of ... (followed by the friend's name, ed.), but that doesn't cover the ostracism of people, even family members. It's too much, I can't find a valid reason to give meaning to my life, even a flimsy, banal hold... I feel like a plague victim, a leper with bells tied to my feet to warn people to stay away from me... Why do I have to live? I can't find a single reason why I should continue this torture... In the afterlife, I won't make anyone's hair stand on end or their nose curl because I'm gay... I don't understand this relentlessness against me. I don't divert anyone from the straight path of heterosexuality., Anyone who sleeps with me is a mature person, that is, a consenting adult who is homosexual or bisexual. Sometimes it takes very little to be happy, and just as little to be unhappy. For me, it's a different story: I've been living with prejudice and marginalization since I was ten; I can't accept it anymore; I've had enough.
In early January 1998, Ormando felt he had reached the final station of his painful via crucis, that he had reached the end of the line, that his life cycle was about to end, that he had entered the tunnel of death. In that freezing month of January 1998, let us remember, Ormando had just turned 39: he was born in San Cataldo, in the province of Caltanissetta, on December 15, 1958, to an illiterate father and mother, both working-class peasants, into a family of eight children in very modest, if not destitute, economic circumstances. In his youth, due to the precariousness of his meager existence as an unemployed man, desperately finding himself on the streets, he had attempted suicide three times, but without success.
In those years she had also had a mystical crisis, going to shut herself away, albeit briefly, in a convent, from which she emerged, however, with a different vision of the world.
He will talk about this convent experience in his beautiful autobiographical novel, Il Fratacchione.
During his very restless childhood and adolescence, he had never followed a regular education. He earned his middle school diploma at twenty as a private student, and his teacher training diploma in 1993 at the age of 35. Intolerant of any brutal discipline, starting with school discipline (even in the 1960s and 1970s, pedagogical methods in elementary and middle schools were highly questionable), Ormando—who, while still a minor, would be locked up in a re-education center—can be considered "an irregular" and, later, as he would define himself, "a nonconformist." He nevertheless managed to obtain qualifications, presenting himself as an outsider in an environment that would remain hostile to him for the sole reason that he possessed within himself that something extra that clashed with the narrow-mindedness, prejudice, envy, and provincialism of his own people.
The monumental diary and picaresque work constituted by his Autobiographical trilogy It therefore sheds enough light on the life of a man who, almost whipping himself to a pulp, spares us nothing, in his confessions, of his desperate marginalization and boundless solitude, which – as is stated at the end of the letter for posterity – he will never be able to come to terms with.
‘The work that Ormando left us mercilessly lays bare the heart of a man with his bleeding existential wounds: we could really title it Ecce Omo, because the writer's homosexuality, at first latent and then provocatively and scandalously manifest, is the deepest key to its interpretation, which allows us to understand step by step a dramatic life path, a systematic plan of extreme existential revolt, which could not fail to end in personal catastrophe.
They will think I'm crazy – Alfredo wrote to a friend from Reggio Emilia at Christmas 1997 – because I decided St. Peter's Square to set myself on fire, when I could have done it in Palermo. I hope they'll understand the message I want to convey: it's a form of protest against the Church that demonizes homosexuality, while simultaneously demonizing Nature, because homosexuality is its daughter.
Again to the same friend, five days before setting himself on fire, he wrote: My dear, it was predictable that it would go like this: I was predestined to end up like the "human torch." Why in St. Peter's Square? Simple. I want to teach Catholics a lesson about their intransigence when it comes to sexual matters.
The international gay movement cannot allow the dust of oblivion to cover and erase from history a figure who, with his ultimate sacrifice and martyrdom, dared to publicly denounce the anti-homosexual repression by the Vatican's high moral hierarchy, in the very place from which it is propagated. For anyone who still has any doubts, I transcribe what Ormando says in a letter to a very Catholic person, who brazenly marginalizes him:
If the Roman Catholic Apostolic religion allows you to be racist against those who are so-called different, I pity you deeply. It's clear you understand nothing about life and love for one's neighbor: yes, we monsters are not your neighbors, we belong to another religion; and again in the same letter, a few lines earlier, "true love is not racist or sexist, like you Catholics and the like.".
The international gay movement cannot therefore let slip away, along with the value of this figure, a monumental diary work left to us as a legacy which, beyond its literary merits, contains perhaps, more than the essays and novels of many gay writers, virulent pages of homosexual criticism, since the denunciation of sexual racism arises viscerally and openly from the experiences lived by a writer who, amidst many misunderstandings, lived his immature years in a country of the deep South that was extremely backward and obtuse; and this personal denunciation is grafted, to the point of making an explosive mixture, onto the denunciation of racism tout court and the domination of man over man, starting from the "patriarchal" one of man over woman and the repressive morality of the high Vatican hierarchy coercively imposed on a grassroots or bottom-up Church, which therefore remains unheard, up to the denunciation of capitalist and class domination and even of rich and opulent societies over the poor ones of the South, of every South of the world and over the "damned of the earth".
In Sotto il cielo 'Urano, Ormando confesses: my experiences are not very different from those a Third World individual might experience. No, life has not been kind to me. I have experienced firsthand what it means to climb up and down other people's stairs, to feel like a Maruchien in my own country... to live in my mother's shadow, to be humiliated, vilified, opposed, marginalized, and to end my days by suicide.
In this tragic context, the only meager consolation offered to the writer will be the consideration that it would not be the first time, if we look at the history of art, that aspiring artists committed suicide, frustrated, misunderstood, mocked, poor and rejected like me.
We are all partly responsible for the shipwreck of Ormando. gay activists First of all, they must reflect further on this death, which would not have happened if here, in our country and in our Palermo, things worked a little differently: if gays truly constituted a community in which they could recognize themselves, and if homosexual associations were more open to the real needs of gays, so that Alfredo Ormando could have integrated.
The truth of this sensational suicide of the gay writer from Nissa, a victim more than many others of social stigma and Catholic homophobia, is that despite Ormando having made several attempts to connect with the gay movement, hoping for a sort of lifeline, a rescue, he was left alone, abandoned to his existential drama as a man and a writer, still largely unpublished today.
If I had a couple of friends like you here – writes Ormando on January 2, 1998, in his boundless solitude, to his friend from Reggio Emilia, who wishes to remain anonymous – I would have willingly accepted my life.
PIERO MONTANA
