[R]Road Trip: Day 2 in the "Don't Say Gay" State

Now available on Una Vita Vagabonda's new site!

[R]The Feast (sic) of Little Italy in Jupiter, Florida

Now available on Una Vita Vagabonda's new site!

[R]Tiziano Ferro - "Sono Omosessuale" (Shock of the Century)

Leggilo in italiano.

-----------------------

Mostly what I want to say is, "Thanks, Tiziano."

I wish you hadn't taken so long. I wish you hadn't felt the need to try to throw people off with stories of tormented heterosexual love that didn't work out. I wish you'd been a little braver a little sooner.

I wish, too, that the editor of the book in which you come out -- Trent’anni e una chiacchierata con papà (At Thirty, A Talk with Dad) -- the Milan-based Kowalski Editore, hadn't decided to avoid all mention of the words "gay" or "homosexual" in its online fluff. (See, e.g., (http://www.kowalski.it/news/tiziano-ferro-dal-20-ottobre-in-libreria-trentanni-e-una-chiacchierata-con-papa/).

But still. Thanks. Coming out isn't easy. Not for an ex fat kid from Latina, in the wilds of the Lazio Region in Italy (think Grants Pass, Oregon, or Lawrenceburg, Kentucky); not for actor Sean Hayes (who still has his knickers in a wad because "people" actually made him say it); not for anyone. Once you've done it, though, you wonder what took you so long.

This week, when gaznqueers across the U.S. are reeling from the recent suicides of four kids who were apparently tormented to desperation by their peers and largely abandoned by their teachers, their schools, and their communities, visibility like yours means even more.

If you find a way to turn your new visibility into a means to give hope to queer and transgender kids in Italy, where the Gay-Basher-in-Chief lurks in Prada and ermine, that would be nothing short of miraculous.

So thanks, Tiziano. And welcome. We've been here waiting for you all along.

---------------------------------
Ferro: "I'm gay and I have the freedom to be able to say so."
by Gino Castaldo
English translation by Wendell Ricketts

ROME – It took years, but after endless torments, existential crises, and doubts of every kind, Tiziano Ferro has published his personal journals—fifteen years of reflections now collected in a volume entitled Trent’anni e una chiacchierata con papà (At Thirty, A Talk with Dad), published by Kowalski Editore and available in bookstores beginning October 20. In the book, Ferro tells the story of his entire life, from his struggles with bulimia to his difficulty in coming to terms with his homosexuality, from his paranoid isolation to his failure to find love as a result of inability to accept himself for who he was. The journal contains passages of disarming honesty.



Tiziano Ferro is here on every page as he puts an end once and for all to the endless speculation regarding his homosexuality—and, more generally, to the ironclad reserve with which he has surrounded himself in recent years. His coming out would seem to be an immensely liberating act—one born, as he himself recounts, in a conversation with his father and in the decision to enter therapy and to progressively expand the desire for honesty to his closest friends and, finally, to the public. "I’m happy,” Ferro says, “and I have the freedom to be able to say so.”

As Ferro tells it, his self-negation cost him many a difficult year, his international success notwithstanding and notwithstanding the dedication he experiences, as passionately as ever, for his craft. And now he seems to be on the brink of an entirely new life. Being gay is no crime, and Ferro’s rebirth begins with this reflection—an obvious one perhaps, but not so obvious that we can take it for granted.


---------------------------------

SU "REPUBBLICA"
Ferro: "Sono omosessuale e ho la libertà di poterlo dire"

Esce il libro-diario della popstar. Dopo il successo, ma anche dopo crisi esistenziali e dubbi di ogni genere, racconta la sua vita, dalla bulimia alla difficoltà di accettare la sua omosessualità. "Ma ora vivo meglio"
di GINO CASTALDO

ROMA - Ci ha messo anni, ma dopo tanti tormenti, dopo crisi esistenziali e dubbi di ogni genere, Tiziano Ferro ha deciso di pubblicare i suoi diari, quindici anni di appunti personali riuniti in un libro intitolato Trent’anni e una chiacchierata con papà (ed. Kowalski nelle librerie dal 20 ottobre) nel quale racconta tutta la sua vita, dalla bulimia alla difficoltà di accettare la sua omosessualità, dall’isolamento paranoico all’incapacità di amare dovuta alla non accettazione di se stesso per quello che era, con passaggi di una disarmante sincerità.

C’è tutto Tiziano Ferro in queste pagine, mettendo fine una volte per tutte alle voci ricorrenti sulla sua omosessualità, e più in generale al riserbo assoluto di cui si era circondato in questi anni. Il gesto sembra essere un atto fortemente liberatorio, nato, come racconta lui stesso, da una chiacchierata col padre, dalla decisione di iniziare un percorso terapeutico e progressivamente di allargare questa voglia di sincerità prima agli amici più intimi, e poi al pubblico. "Sono felice, è la mia libertà di poterlo dire".

A causa di questa negazione, racconta Ferro, ha vissuto anni molto difficili, malgrado il successo internazionale di cui ha goduto e malgrado la passione ancora oggi inalterata per il suo mestiere. Ora, sembra, gli si pone davanti una vita completamente nuova. Essere gay non è un crimine, e la sua rinascita parte da questa ovvia, ma a volte non scontata, considerazione.

(05 ottobre 2010)

[R]Italia II: The Disdetta

Those who have been paying assiduous attention to VitaVagabonda will recall the Rants of 2007 (Trasloco and Promesse di Marinaio), in which bitter complaints were lodged against the entire heinous, sanity-extruding process of moving house in Italy, with special opprobrium reserved for the Italian phone company, Telecom, and its staff of mental defectives, penis-heads, and chronic underachievers.

(In Italy, they don’t even have the excuse that their call centers have been farmed out to 14-year-old foundlings in Bangladesh; Telecom’s representatives are rigorosamente Italian and have all been pledged to the Fraternity of the Sisyphean Triumvirate—Incompetence, Indolence, and Indifference!)

Since it was so much fun last time, you might well wonder why we’re moving again. Well, because it’s called Vita VAGABONDA, that’s why.

Today’s subject, Possums, is the disdetta—the cancellation of services. Of course, as everyone knows, when you move you have to turn off the phone and the electricity and cable, and that’s no less true in Italy that it is in civilized countries.

What makes Italy different is that every service provider has a different way to go about it, and to learn the very special procedure that the gas company, the electric company, the cable television provider, and your phone/internet provider has prepared for you, you must call each of them individually to find out.

No, this information is not written on their internet sites. Their internet sites, instead, are almost entirely given over to a) advertising the additional services that they would very much like you to acquire and/or b) bragging about how environmentally conscious/helpful/experienced/efficient they are.

Each of these calls requires an average of 20-30 minutes, most of which is taken up in listening to the incessant repetition of neuron-sapping music, interrupted every minute or so by a recorded voice warning you that the implications of hanging up would indeed be dire. Still, there are only so many times you can listen to the chorus of “Waka Waka” before you can no longer resist the urge to search the internet, as long as you’re just sitting around waiting, for a site that tells you how to construct car bombs.

(The Italian post office, PosteItaliane, on the other hand, plays you “Spring” from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, which we heard on a permanent loop for 56 minutes during a recent call. It’s better than “Waka Waka,” but only just.)

In any case, here is a transcript of an actual call to ENEL, the company that so kindly provides us not only with electricity but with the most incomprehensible bill ever conceived by the depravity of the human mind:

-- Hello? I’m calling because we’re about to move and need to turn off our electricity.
-- What is your customer number?
-- [Customer number provided.]
-- Can you confirm your name and address?
-- [Name and address confirmed.]
-- One moment, please.
-- [Four minutes of silence.]
-- Are you still there?
-- Yes.
-- [Four more minutes of silence.]
-- Are you still there?
-- Yes.
-- Um, by the way, we’re moving on the 25th, but if it’s easier, we could just close out our service at the end of the month.
-- No, no. If you cancel service now, your electricity will be shut off when you hang up from this call.
-- Oh, I didn’t understand that. So we can’t schedule service to be shut off as of the date of our move?
-- No, you have to call on the day when you want service to end.
-- Ah, OK. In the meantime, I didn’t want to forget to give you the forwarding address for the final bill.
-- You want your final bill to go to a different address?
-- Well … yes. As I said, we’re moving.
-- You should have told me that earlier.
-- Isn’t it sort of normal, though? I mean, if people move, they don’t keep receiving mail at the old address….
-- I’ll note it in your file, but there’s no guarantee they’ll send the final bill there.
-- But how …
-- When you call back to cancel your service, you should remind them.

The Scorecard

ENEL (electricity): We have to call on moving day, hoping they manage to get the final bill to us (which one might suppose would serve their own interests, but whatever). There was, by the way, the option of blocking the meter as of the day of our move, but that would cost us the equivalent of about $50 (and would then cost the next person another $50 to unblock). Much better if we get our landlord to transfer the account directly into his name, a process that’s called the voltura. I won’t even go into what’s required to conjure the arcane magic of the voltura.

HERA (gas and water): Ditto—we must call on moving day to cancel. Since, however, the water is still in the name of our landlord’s mother, who died shortly after we moved in, and since HERA demanded a copy of her death certificate in order to transfer the water bill into our names, a document we obviously weren’t in a position to provide, the water bill remained in her name and thus it will remain. Why they transferred the gas to us but not the water, I shall never understand.

SKY (cable TV): We must send a fax, followed by a certified letter, followed by the delivery of the decoder box and remote to an as-yet-undisclosed location, at which point we will be relieved of our contractual obligations. If they feel like it.

TELECOM (telephone/internet): And here was the surprise of the century. Telecom was the only utility willing to take our word for it—they noted the date of cancellation and said they’d send the final bill to a forwarding address. Maybe they decided they’d screwed with us enough up front. On the other hand, we’ve paid the equivalent of about $3.75 per month for more than three years for a service called “4Star” that we never ordered and have never used and yet have never, despite six different attempts, succeeded in getting Telecom to remove from our bill. So, for the $135 we’ve spent needlessly, I’d say we deserved a gentle good-bye from the phone company that Lilly Tomlin must surely have had in mind when she invented Ernestine. [“The next time you complain about your phone service, why don’t you try using two Dixie cups with a string? We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the Phone Company.”]

The Upshot

Keep in mind, through all this, that utility bills in Italy come only every two months and that there are rate changes for gas, water, and electricity during virtually every billing cycle that make it impossible to understand what you’ve been charged for or whether the bill is accurate. In addition, at the cessation of a utility contract there is frequently what’s called a conguaglio, Italian for “we’ve just realized we’ve under-billed you for the last eleventeen months and would now like you to pay us the difference, which amounts to approximately half your annual salary.”

One of the outcomes of all of this is that renters continue to have a relationship with their ex-landlords long, long after they’ve moved, because bills continue to arrive that Alexander Grothendieck would have a hard time deciphering. When we left Bologna in Fall of 2007, for example, our landlord didn’t return our deposit for six months, after he had managed to assuage his fears that a new bill or an unanticipated conguaglio would not suddenly appear.

A Pause to Reflect

Once one has finished the last of the phone calls and the tremors have abated, there always comes a calm moment in which one can pose the question that ought to be embroidered onto Italy’s flag: “Why does no one change this dreadful system?”

The answer, by my lights, is three-fold. First, because Italians would do anything rather than rise up, call their lawyers, refuse to pay their bills, and just plain go on strike. Second, because Italian consumer-protection organizations are toothless and ineffective (indeed, the concept of consumer protection in Italy is so deeply primitive that it’s considered a big triumph if you don’t find pig shit in your sausage).

And finally because utilities are monopolies and Italian consumers have, literally, no choice but to buy services from them, accepting dreadful treatment, outrageous rates, and generally poor service in the bargain. No private entity exercises any tangible power as a watchdog (on the analogy, e.g., of CALPIRG, the California Public Interest Research Group, whose motto is “Standing up to Powerful Interests”), though many federations and associations and groups (and federated groups of associations) exist.

At a governmental level, the office of the Ministero dello Sviluppo Economico (the Minister for Economic Development) should theoretically be occupying itself with consumer issues; as a practical matter, however, not so much. (The ministry, meanwhile, has been without a leader since its former head, Claudio Scajola, resigned in May 2010 in the wake of an only-in-Italy scandal: Scajola claimed that his fabulous, million-dollar apartment in Rome, complete with view of the Colosseum, had been paid for by a developer, allegedly in exchange for favors in the assignment of building contracts, entirely without his knowledge. In yesterday's SKY TV news poll, 75% of respondents opined that naming a new Minister for Economic Development should be a top government priority, though I'd be willing to bet that not one in 100 has the slightest idea what the Ministry actually does.)

If you sense an especially bitter tone in this post, it's only because it's there.

Bring on the brickbats and the flame-throwers, but I'm going to say it: Some things really are better in America. If Italy imported a little more consumer awareness and customer service, and a little less mindless pop music, third-rate television, fast food, and Reagan-style economics from the States, the Bel Paese might actually start deserving its adjective.

[R]The Wordless Angel - for Patricia Clark Smith

Now available on Una Vita Vagabonda's new site!

[R]Beware the Prophets of Doom: The Translation Borg

Now available on Una Vita Vagabonda's new site!

[R]Wacosky Road: The Italian Political Situation in Less than 90 Words

Now available on Una Vita Vagabonda's new site!