With their tight jeans and tighter T-shirts, their crisply tailored suits and blissful ignorance of pleated pants - “What is this, how do you say, khaki?” - not to mention their gelled hair and eyebrows waxed to razor-sharp perfection, all the guys tended to look at least a little like they might like men.
There wasn’t even anywhere to get brunch, all-you-can-drink or otherwise. We saw signs of the Mafia everywhere we looked, but the Gay Mafia? Not so much. Yet during the time we lived there, just walking around the city and going about our lives, Brian and I were always surprised by how few openly gay people we seemed to gaze upon. There’s even a gay stretch of sea and sand a bit outside of the city, in Ostia, at one of the furthest beach entrances from the train station there, where boys tanned, muscled, and oiled sit side by side wearing the skimpiest of Speedos, or showily walk along the shore on their way to dune-shielded assignations, taking a break only to eat the cold leftover pasta their mothers packed for them in Ikea Tupperware. But with their early-morning-to-late-night hours and their location on the recently christened “Gay Street,” next to the Colosseum, several seem to function as tourist snack shacks as much as local gay bars, doing as brisk a business in panini and gelato as they do in cocktails and cock-teasing.Īnd then there’s the requisite Friday gay club night, called Muccassassina (“Cow Assassin” in Italian … don’t ask, we never quite figured out how it came by that title) and another on Saturdays at an otherwise-straight place called Alpheus. Rome has its gay bars, of course, by our count just under ten, which is to say roughly the same number you’ll find within a quick quarter mile sashay of our current apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. (“Which he acquired for the obvious reasons,” a prominent Italian aristocrat once told me, her arched eyebrow audible even over the phone.)īut for a city long associated with Heralded Homosexuals of History, both purported (Michelangelo) and confirmed ( Valentino), my boyfriend and I found very few visible signs of gay life during the two years we called Rome home. (Hadrian’s much-suffering wife, Sabina, can be seen scowling down in centuries-old sculptures throughout Italy, looking decidedly unsatisfied.) And in the 16th century, Tuscan-born artist Giovanni Antonio Bazzi made a name for himself while working in Baroque Rome under the nom de fresco Il Sodoma. Sure, the ancients were known for a little man-on-man canoodling: One of their most celebrated emperors, Hadrian - a notorious daddy-bear type - created an entire cult around his famously beautiful companion, Antinous, who died at the tender age of 19. There’s something about Rome that can push you back into the closet.