The changing sexual life course of gay men and lesbians in contemporary Italy

ABSTRACT

This paper compares data on gay men and lesbians’ sexual life courses in Italy from repeated cross-sectional surveys in 1995–1996 and 2012–2013. Gay men and lesbians increasingly experience sexual developmental milestones at similar ages and rates across the gender divide. They decreasingly experience their first coming out and first same-sex sexual contact in conventionally gendered situations. The number of lesbians’ sexual partners rises towards that of gay men’s. Sexual exclusivity spreads in gay and lesbian couples and the places were gay men and lesbians meet sexual partners consistently differ, but gendered trends point to common underlying norms. Growing similarities in gay and lesbian sexual experience across the gender divide suggest that, in line with on-going transformations in the meanings of sexuality in contemporary Italy, norms centred on relational preoccupations and sexual pleasure spread at the expense of the once hegemonic procreational and naturalised perspective on sexuality.

KEYWORDS:

• Sexuality
• gender
• Italy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Note on contributor

Luigi La Fauci has been doing research in the sociologies of sexuality, migration, and death at the University of Bologna and independently. He earned his PhD in 2016 at the University of Trento with a dissertation on gay and lesbian sexual and relational cultures in Italy.

ORCID

Luigi La Fauci http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6742-3647

Notes

1 Similar trends were observed in USA (Laumann et al. 1994: 522), the Scandinavian countries (Haavio-Manila et al. 1996), France (Bajos et al. 2008), UK (Mercer et al. 2013), and with different speeds and bumps in many Euro-American societies (Billari et al. 2007).

2 The ‘Essere Gay Essere Lesbica Oggi in Italia’ research project was designed as a companion study to a social research project on the impact of AIDS on gay lives, relationships, and communities funded by the Italian National Health Institute. It was directed by the Carlo Cattaneo Research Institute and conducted in collaboration with Italian LGBT* associations throughout Italy (Barbagli and Colombo 2007: 317–318). I refer to this study as ‘LGB 1995–96’ throughout the text. I designed and directed The ‘LGB 2012–13’ research project as part of my doctoral thesis, and conducted it in collaboration with the Carlo Cattaneo Research Institute, Arcigay-National Italian LGBTI Association, and other LGBT* associations throughout Italy. ‘1995’ and ‘2012’ are used throughout the analyses as shorthand to refer to the 1995–1996 and 2012–2013 samples.

3 In this and the next sections, all analysed cases are respondents who identified as male or female and as homosexuals, referred to as gay men and lesbians. Questions on age, place of residence, place of birth, own educational title and parents’ educational titles were the last to be presented to the respondent in self-administered questionnaires, and cases with missing information on these dimensions were dropped from all analyses. All analyses retain cases with valid information on the analysed dimensions. In order to control the influence of age on sexual behaviours and to have satisfactorily high sample sizes, analyses in this section and subsequent analyses on sexual developmental trajectories consider respondents aged 16–30. Analyses on sexual partners and encounters in gay men and lesbians’ life courses consider respondents in three age groups: 16–24, 25–34, and 35–54.

4 Darkrooms, saunas and cruising spots are different venues tended by the LGBT* community and open to the public, either indoors or outdoors, were gay men, and sometimes lesbians, have met occasional sexual partners across decades and countries (Bullock 2004; Frankis and Flowers 2009).

5 The one exception of 35–54 year-olds in 1995 sees lesbians being likelier than gay men to have had one extra-couple fling. In the same age group almost half of gay men had been serially non-monogamous, exceeding those who had been sexually exclusive.