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BUILDING A GAY COUPLE IN THE 60S OF THE LAST CENTURY (first part)
#1
In July 2021 I received a long email from an elderly gentleman (a little older than me) that contained his high school story between 14 and 19 years of age. The email also contains the first elements of the author's relationship with the boy who will become his partner for life. This email was published by me in Italian on the Progetto Gay forum. I also added my comment to the email in the Italian forum. A user (Lao) asked the author of the email to also tell what happened after the end of school, and the author of the first email sent a second one, also of considerable size as a response to Lao's request. Since these are important documents that also have historical relevance because they allow us to understand how gay life was in the 60s of the last century, I have taken steps to translate the texts in English to insert them on the sites of Gay Project in English.
To make the content exactly understandable to English-speaking readers, some preliminary clarification is needed.
1) In Italy, high school usually begins at 14 and ends at 19 with the Maturity exam.
2) There are many types of high school, the "Liceo Classico" represents the school traditionally attended by the social and economic elite of the country, today the prestige of the Liceo Classico tends to remain more than anything else a legacy of the past and the organization of this school address has been made much more homogeneous with that of the other addresses. In the 60s of the last century, the 5 years of the Liceo Classico were divided into a first two years (4th and 5th Ginnasio, a denomination inherited from still nineteenth-century regulations) and a final three-year period, the Liceo proper. In Italian schools of any order and grade, grades were and are assigned in tenths.
3) In the university faculties the marks were and are assigned out of thirty.
Let us now turn to the texts.
________
 
It was the year 1962 when, after finishing middle school, I was sent to high school in a prestigious religious institute not too much far from Milan. At the time I was 14, I had always lived in Milan and had attended the Middle School in Milan in another religious institute, of which today I only remember the large corridors with shiny floors, the teachers almost all priests and the very muffled climate, in to which nothing of the outside world penetrated.

We were visually controlled from time of entry to time of exit. My parents knew the parents of the other children, because the school occasionally organized meetings even between parents on the occasion of religious holidays. In the eighth grade I began to reflect on the fact that on those occasions they received communion in the school chapel, besides us boys, who had to do it by force, several mothers, but almost no fathers, as if religion were something for women and children, but then I didn't ask myself too many questions about it.

At that time I knew nothing about sex, except that it is used to make babies. I was very naive and believed everything the teachers told me, who, as well as almost all priests, were also all old. Gymnastics was a marginal subject, which was done, because it had to be done by force, in the gym and only with individual exercises to be carried out strictly in tracksuits, obviously excluding any group sport. To avoid any possible risk that the presence in the gym could be pleasant, the gym was not heated and it was freezing cold. On the day in which gymnastics lessons were taken, boys went to school directly in tracksuit. It goes without saying that changing rooms and showers were absolutely unthinkable there.

My parents didn't take much care of me, I was entrusted to the nanny who cooked for me different things from what the grown-ups ate. My mother bought my clothes according to her taste and I could only say yes lady. Even logistically I was part of a separate world, I had a room just before that of the nanny and this shows how they considered me. My parents went on vacation on their own with their friends and I went to the sea in a small town in Liguria with my nanny. I must say that I got along well with my nanny, apart from the fact that she was the only person I could talk to, she was a good woman and she loved me, she had no children and was a widow and cuddled me within the limits of social detachment which in any case divided us.

My parents, on the rare occasions when they talked to me, presented high school to me as something very serious and very difficult that I would have to face with the utmost seriousness because a failure (and then it happened) could definitively ruin my social role. The nanny, on the other hand, spoke to me of high school as a much freer place where there are guys who are starting to have their autonomy and to have their experiences, but at the time I didn't even understand what it could be referring to. The last week of September the nanny takes me to the new school, I go with her to the station, we take the train and it takes more than two hours to get there, then the journey by taxi begins. I looked around bewildered, then the taxi stops and I find myself in front of a sumptuous building that was intimidating just to look at it. The nanny tries to cheer me up.

We go up the stately staircase and arrive at the offices, they make us wait about ten minutes, then a priest shows up. My nanny says my name, and then it's all very informal. The priest dismisses the nanny and takes me to the tailor's laboratory where the seamstress takes the measurements for my uniform, then takes me to a huge dormitory with a double row of beds and tells me that mine is number 18. He Shows me my closet to store my things and I notice that there is no key, then he tells me to put my things in the closet and gives me a printed booklet with the rules of the boarding school, he tells me that I can go to the recreation room "of the gymnasium" to read the rules and that at 13.00 I will have to go to the refectory for lunch. He recommends me to read the rules very carefully and he goes away.

The dormitory was totally empty, there were no other boys and no priests. I stowed my things in the closet and then went down to the recreation room which I found via a floor plan of the building annexed to the book of the rules. There was no one there either. I sat in a chair and started reading, but then I was unable to decode the meanings of those messages. There was a great deal of insistence on the fact that it was a Catholic school and that as such it required students to adhere to the principles of Catholicism, which I knew as a 14-year-old boy might know them. There was the hierarchy of the school, in which everything was in the hands of the professors and the principal, obviously all priests, and there was the hierarchy of the college, in which everything was in the hands of the educators, the spiritual father and the rector, of course they too are all priests, but the rector was superior to the principal because the rector was also responsible for the "spiritual formation" of the students. All these things then seemed obvious to me.

There was also a part that dealt with the punishments for poor scholastic commitment and unregulated moral conduct, which I then interpreted at the level of my 14 years. It was also said that each guy who had committed a fault would have to accuse himself in front of the superiors who would have assessed it on a case-by-case basis and, if a sanction had been applied, that would be noted in the behavioral notes that would be sent monthly to the family. The regulation was very detailed but at the same time very generic, everything, in practice, was left to the interpretation of the superiors.

Terrified by the idea of being late for lunch, at 12.45 I was in front of the "refectory of the Gymnasium". There were two refectories, one for the Gymnasium and one for the Lyceum, to keep guys of different ages separate, and in that of the Gymnasium there was no one. The door was locked. At 12.55 a waitress opened the door and I entered. The hall was huge, I sat at the first table I saw but the waitress told me that that was the table of the superiors and then I went to put myself in the last place, but she told me that I had to put myself at number 18 (the same as my bed) and so I did, because in front of each seat there was a number. The atmosphere was very solemn. On the tables there was a white tablecloth, all the plates and cutlery were marked with the insignia of the institute and so did the napkin, which was numbered. Mine, obviously, was the number 18.

The waitress had stopped and was silent and I didn't understand why. I looked at her puzzled and she said to me: "The prayer!", Then seeing that I did not understand, she told me that before lunch the most important person present had to recite the prayer for everyone and since I was there alone I had to say it myself and had to add the intention. I didn't know what to say and she suggested: "Sign of the cross", then she put the words right in my mouth: "Lord, we thank you for this food, let it strengthen us on the path of faith and your service." (this was the standard formula, for normal days), then she told me to add the intention and I said: “We pray for this school year that is about to begin”.

Then lunch was finally served. The cuisine was of a good standard, the work of professional chefs. An abundant well-seasoned first course, a second course of meat with vegetables and fruit. The waitress advised me that at 1.30pm I had to leave anyway because she had to close the refectory. At 1.30pm I didn't know where to go. The institute was practically empty. I went back to the recreation room of the Gymnasium and began to read some magazines that were on the tables, obviously all Catholic and missionary magazines.

In the afternoon, around 3.30 pm another boy arrived. We introduced ourselves, he was as scared as me and I think even more than me. First of all we tried to understand how we should behave at dinner time then we talked about what we expected from the school. At 7pm we went to the refectory for dinner, I went to where I sat at lunchtime and my college mate sat next to me, but the waitress told him that he was number 26 and that his seat was at the other table, I recited the prayer and the intention and so we dined in two, sitting at two separate tables in a huge room where there was only us.

After dinner we went back to the recreation room because we didn't know where to go. A priest passed there and told us that we must never stand without doing anything and that we could go to the chapel to pray and we obviously went there, frankly I didn't understand what to do, but we obeyed as if everything was absolutely obvious . At 8.45 pm the chapel closed and we were sent to our dormitory, where our educator (a priest, of course) gave us a nightgown of the appropriate size, made by the tailor, obviously with the insignia of the institute and a metallic container  with the essentials for a minimum of personal hygiene: soap, toothpaste and toothbrush. He told us that the next day we would have 10 minutes to shower, between 6.10 and 6.20, before going to the chapel for religious education. He told us that we had to be in bed at 9pm and that he would come by to check before turning off the light. At 21.00 we were in bed, the educator came by and turned off the light but I didn't understand where, because there were no switches, then he said "holy night" not "goodnight" and left.

I was used to going to sleep at midnight and I didn't like at all having to stay in bed from 9pm, but those were the rules. The next day at six o'clock a bell rang, which was the signal for getting up. We went into the bathroom, where there were 10 boxes with toilet and sink and 10 shower boxes. The boxes had a lockable door but the door did not reach the ground, I realized only after that the doors were made like this to check that in each box there was only one boy, but at the beginning I didn't pay attention to these things.

At 6.30 we were in the chapel for religious education, in all there were eight boys, all from the Gymnasium, 14-15 years old. The benches in the chapel were numbered like the seats at the table. The chapel was not the large church of the institute, but a chapel used only by a group of classes, in my case the Gymnasium classes (about 80 boys) in which one of the educators said mass in turn. I learned that there was not an educator per class but that in the Gymnasium there were two educators who rotated on the two classes, so that they exchanged classes every month, at the time I did not understand the meaning of all this and I only understood several years later.

Mass begins, then, at the moment of the homily, religious instruction begins, centered on the idea of "fleeing bad company" in which, however, it was taken for granted what bad company was and it was insisted that "to love a mate" means "to worry about him" and for this reason when a mate "does not behave well" it is your specific moral duty to report it to superiors. In practice, it is a moral duty to be a spy.

Many of my new fellow students arrived that day. We were about forty in my class. They came in dribs and drabs. There was not even a chance to remember their names because they were too many. I looked around to see if there was any guy more beautiful than the others and it was thus that I saw Joseph G., a guy who seemed older than his age and who by now had very little childishness. I did not understand then why he had such a powerful and magnetic fascination with me, because I had never heard of homosexuality and I did not even know what masturbation was.

Joseph was the n. 32, his bed was very far from mine, in the mess hall he sat at another table, I could have talked to him only in the recreation room, but at the time I felt like an unborn child and compared to Joseph I felt a state of awe like in front of an adult. I continued to speak with n. 26, whom I had met the day before, with numbers 17 and 19, sitting next to me in the mess hall, I felt I had nothing in common and everything was limited to a quick and formal hello.

The following day's religious instruction was on "fraternal correction" that is, in practice once again on the duty to spy. I saw Joseph only from a distance but the more I looked at him the more I liked him. The following day religious instruction was about two distinct things: "fleeing temptation" and "attending the sacraments". We were told and repeated that a Christian boy communicates himself every day and has a spiritual father who can guide him in the search for holiness. Not attending the sacraments daily was viewed very badly as a kind of mark of Satan, a form of Luciferian rebellion. Many guys were starting to turn up their noses in front of these speeches which seemed right and obvious to me, quite simply because I had nothing special to confess.

When I went to confession, without a confessional, with one of the educators, I was insistently asked: "Don't you have to accuse yourself of anything else?" and at my "no" the confessor was somehow perplexed. Like it or not, all the boys ended up accepting the imposition of confession. The first day of school began with a mass officiated by a bishop and the rector, whom I saw for the first time and from afar. We, for the first time, were dressed in the uniform of the institute and polished up to the incredible. Our places in the church were all assigned a priori. The bishop's homily was very short, then the rector spoke but I was distracted because in the big church Joseph had happened right between me and the celebrant, a kind of "man of the screen". Joseph was serious during mass and behaved like any other obedient collegiate.

After mass we went to the classrooms and the lessons began. Before each hour of class the professor would pray and invoke a saint and we had to answer: “Ora pro nobis”. We were loaded with homework from day one: both Latin (which we knew a little from middle school) and Greek, an absolute novelty. The first day we should have learned to read the pater noster in Greek, something that at the time seemed to me very important and monstrously difficult.

I didn't know how the school day would be organized, I thought that everyone could study on their own but it wasn't like that. At 1.30 pm lunch, then recreation until 2.30 pm and then again in the classrooms in the morning until 6.00 pm, when we went to the chapel for religious instruction. I could only see Joseph from afar and the possibility of exchanging a few words with him was reduced to half an hour of recreation between 14 and 14.30.

There were many guys in the classroom, most of us were dominated by the professors and educators who assisted us (in practice they also taught in the afternoon). Joseph was the only one who had a personality of his own, he was respectful and obedient, because it could not be done otherwise but sometimes he added some considerations that generally professors and educators did not like at all. They repeated to us that answering a question means keeping within the limits of the demand. Joseph was not only handsome, but he was also intelligent, I don't mean studious but really intelligent, he was also 14 years old but he was extraordinarily smart.

From the first day of school we had been told that the best students would be given special awards, basically badges to pin on their jackets, such as military campaigns. The best student of each class in the trimestral scrutiny could wear a golden star, the second a silver star, those who had never been punished could wear a blue ribbon in their buttonhole. These things were highly coveted. I certainly could not think of being the first of the class and not even the second but I was proud of my blue ribbon. Joseph also had his blue ribbon because he had never been punished, but one day he took off the ribbon even though we, his class mates, knew very well that he had the right to wear it. Nobody, except us, noticed that the ribbon had been removed, if the educators had noticed it, they would have taken it as a gesture of rebellion, but no one noticed.

The time of the Christmas holidays came and I went home, I was very happy to see my nanny again, I can't say the same for my father and my mother who were now like strangers to me. The return to school after the Christmas holidays was a very important moment for me. On the train from Milan I met Joseph who was traveling alone and was not even 15 years old, I was with my nanny, who however left me the compartment free so I could talk to Joseph. Joseph treated me like an adult and I felt comfortable and I can't deny that I liked his very respectful way of treating my nanny right from the start. A contact with Joseph had been created and I would have done everything not to lose him.

At the end of the fourth year of the Gymnasium  we were both promoted with marks just a little more than the minimum and this did not sadden me at all because I saw Joseph's absolutely indifferent way of reacting. During the holidays between the fourth and fifth class of the Gymnasium I got to know Joseph more closely and I also went to his house and I realized that he was much freer than me, that he also had a bit of serious dialogue with his parents and then, also if I didn't understand it then, I fell in love with him. We were always together, at least as far as possible, with the excuse of the holiday homework that still had to be done and were many.

On October 1st we were back in school, but I now had a special friend. Religious education took a particular turn and practically became an indoctrination on family and marriage according to the Catholic Church. We spoke very often of Our Lady as a mother and as a model of woman, and I did not understand why we should insist so much on these things. The virginity of the most pure Mater had to be taken as an example, for me all these speeches made no sense, but for my mates they were not at all indifferent. I did not understand the emphasis that the priests put on the subject of girls but then slowly I realized the embarrassment with which many guys approached that subject, which to me was neither hot nor cold and I noticed that Joseph laughed at it making fun of the other mates, he didn't react like the other guys. But for me Joseph was an absolutely platonic love and so he remained until the end of the Gymnasium.

We passed the Gymnasium license exams for the broken cap but we passed them and then we spent the summer together. My parents had known Joseph and trusted him, and that was how I went on vacation with Joseph's family. I liked his parents but spending the whole summer with Joseph was like being in heaven for me. We went to the Island of Elba to a house belonging to Joseph's family. The house was small and I was in the room with Joseph. One evening his parents stayed at a friend's house and I was left alone with Joseph. It was the first time I saw a tremendous embarrassment on Joseph's face, similar to what our companions had when they talked about girls. He wasn't the bad company for me but I was the bad company for him.

I didn't know how to behave but I followed my instinct, took his hand and squeezed it. He didn't know what to do and I said to him: “What are you afraid of? We are not doing anything wrong." It started like this, we had both just turned 16. Afterwards, Joseph was terrified and it was my turn to make him understand that he hadn't done anything wrong, however he was really upset and kept away from me as if he had done something terrible against me and so I caressed his face and ran a hand through his hair and he flashed me a beautiful smile. The next day he asked me if I was upset but I told him that I was very happy and that I loved him.

When the time to go back to school approached, he asked me how we would go about confession and we concluded that we would have to feign ideological reasons (loss of faith) if we wanted to avoid desecrating the sacraments and we agreed that we would do so, and then we could have talked about girls and it would have been almost normal.

October 1st  of the following year, now sixteen, Joseph and I entered the Lyceum. We expected that something could change, but absolutely nothing changed, now in the refectory (the Lyceum refectory) there were almost 120 guys and the large refectory (the one of the Lyceum) looked almost like a cathedral. Occasionally the rector and the spiritual father were also seen for lunch. The order was of a military type, we did not sit at the table before the prayer which, even in the Lyceum, was accompanied every day by different intentions. The rector welcomed us and prayed for our commitment to studies and Christian life.

During the masses in the chapel with the other high school students I noticed that not everyone received communion and this made me think why, because neither I nor Joseph did, but the others let themselves be convinced by the educators and the next time they went to confession and communicated, I and Joseph, on the other hand, did not allow ourselves to be convinced. It was obvious from the very first days that our way of doing things had been noticed and was not welcome at all. I was called by the spiritual father, whom I had only seen in the dining room, and I suspected that the reason was precisely the fact that I did not approach the sacraments.

He was a relatively young priest, between 40 and 45 years old, he had the manner of a career priest who aimed to become rector in the time of a few years. I had asked the older mates if they had ever talked to the spiritual father and they told me that they didn't really know him but that he only dealt with the "big problems". I went to the interview expecting what would happen. The spiritual father told me that he often spoke to the boys who asked him for advice: first lie! Then he started taking things very far, he asked me how I was with the professors, but on this point the answer was obvious, then he asked me about my classmates, if there was anyone with whom I was better off and I named a couple of those who seemed born to be an altar boy for life and obviously I didn't even mention Joseph, then the inquisitorial examination began: "How is your Christian life?" and I told him that I wanted so much to have a Christian life but that I had lost my faith and I was beginning to feel distant from those things. He put on his stole, assuming that I wanted to confess but I replied that the idea of approaching the sacraments in a non-spontaneous way would have seemed to me a lack of respect for those who truly believe. The spiritual father was very perplexed and dismissed me, adding that he would pray for me.

By now I knew I was a special supervised, and I couldn't stand that condition, if it had been for me, I would have left immediately, at the cost of facing my parents in a bad way, because they would have taken it very badly, and I would have gone to a public high school which I thought would be a completely different world, but I could not abandon Joseph. We could have both been expelled, but it was impossible to understand the consequences. We had to go on with an absurd play to escape what we felt was a form of total violence. There would be another three years of actual torture but we were ready to face them.

No contact with Joseph was possible, not even the slightest one, exchanging notes would have exposed us to dangerous situations. I learned later that Joseph had used a different strategy from mine and this had misled the investigations of the spiritual father. He had stolen the drawing of a naked woman made by another guy and had deliberately hidden it between the pages of his own Latin vocabulary, the sheet was irregular and was leaning against the binding in only two places, but he, then, had found that same sheet put in a different way, a sign that someone had browsed through his dictionary and, having found the sheet, had not taken it but had left it there. Since the lockers for school books and notebooks were in the classroom where lessons were taught, the likelihood that the nosy individual was a schoolmate was practically nil. I had noticed that the spiritual father, when he met Joseph, said to him: "Say three Hail Mary to Our Lady ..." I learned only lather that Joseph had ended up giving in to the pressure of the spiritual father, who imagined him as Adam tempted by Eve, and had told the priest exactly what he expected. 

Eventually Joseph was forced to make fun of the sacraments and suffered a lot because of this. I tried to tell him many times that only “free” decisions that harm others are true faults, but he was not secular enough to accept this point of view. The real moments of contact with Joseph were in the holidays. During the Christmas and Easter holidays we could go out together and they were exciting and overwhelming days, sometimes we got to touch each other or masturbate together. At that time there was no AIDS and for two boys of our age, venereal diseases were a completely unknown and unthinkable reality. Neither my parents nor Joseph's have ever suspected anything, evidently the Catholic school had been a good training ground, had given us a good education and had taught us how to "protect ourselves from the dangers that surrounded us".

In the summer holidays between first and second year of the Lyceum, all our doubts were dispelled, we were 17, but we knew what we wanted, by now we were thinking with our heads. Joseph got along well with his parents but he didn't even dream of talking openly with them about sexuality, I practically had only a formal relationship with my parents, they were fine with it and I understood day after day that only with Joseph I could live my life and that reconciling what I felt for Joseph with other things would have been impossible. Both he and I had been very lucky because, without internet and without mobile phones and with the fear of coming out that there was at that time, the probability of finding another serious gay guy was almost zero.

The last year, by now, we were no longer afraid of anything or anyone. We had to study because at that time the baccalaureate exam was terrible but we also had fun, after Christmas holidays we introduced Boccaccio's short stories in full edition "to deepen our studies!" And the book was confiscated from us but we didn't get a disciplinary report so as not to raise dust. But the most beautiful thing was when we put two copies of Marx's Capital in the locker of our two mates "who were always spying". There it was really seen that from one day to the next the hunt for the rotten apple began, or it would be better to say the witch hunt, but the priests did not come to understand who had introduced those books and the matter was covered up.

Taken with difficulty (very laboriously) the baccalaureate we had to face the problem of the choice of the faculty, a choice that our parents considered fundamental, while for us the only fundamental choice was to stay together. My father would have wanted me to be a doctor, Joseph's father would have wanted him to be a lawyer, like him, in the end we both decided to study engineering and it was a free and very timely choice. Now we are both old, over 70, health is a bit uncertain but still holds up passably. We have a well-established engineering company where no one knows about us. We were both only children. Our parents have always been in the dark about everything. We live in two single houses in an area not really central of the city, we have opened a door in the fence that divides us, obviously we have been living together for a many years, basically since we were both parentless 14 years ago.

We have in common a caregiver (a lady doing everything), a bit of a kind of nanny for old people. I think she understood how things are but she’s very prudent and not at all nosy and we never got into trouble. We have a dog, "pof", which is basically our dog and mate, not just his or mine. Now we are free, 60 years ago we would never have imagined such a future. I am grateful to the Catholic school because, paradoxical as it may seem, it has led us to think using our brains only. Believe me, Project, in our time and in our conditions it was very difficult. If you think it appropriate you can put this mail in the forum.

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