Drink Me, Lick Me Even

Dario Bellezza’s life was full of scandal, which the Italian poet seemed to imbibe, mull over, and spit out like a cherry stem he knotted with his tongue. Nothing he did was actually scandalous, but as a politically active leftist, a gay man whose work explored cruising, and a casualty of AIDS at the peak of the pandemic’s death toll in the mid-1990s, he rankled the conservative culturati of late 20th century Italy. His poetry and novels were unashamedly gay but delightfully melodramatic, as though every romantic slight were a betrayal of mythological proportions. Sometimes, he took aim at his critics, silencing detractors like a bullied child who preempts a joke’s punchline: “If I’m a failed poet it’s / My own fault. I forgive the critics,” he wrote in the collection Proclama sul fascino (1996), published shortly after he died. Bellezza’s mercy was an act of noblesse oblige. After all, he might have been a pariah, but he also enjoyed the flipside of being a minor celebrity: Bellezza won prestigious Italian literary prizes; his name appeared regularly in tabloids; he debated public intellectuals on talk shows. Not even the grave shielded him from disparagement. Haters sank six feet below the earth to lodge their cheap shots, delighting in his inability to fight back. Obituaries chided him, treating the nature of his demise as a foregone conclusion.

Bellezza aligned himself with the oppressed and underserved, an identity he inherited from his working-class mother, who came from a poor region in southern Italy. Yet Bellezza himself was born in Rome in 1944 and spent his entire life in the Italian metropolis, acting as though the capital contained the whole world, or at least enough longing, ecstasy, romance, and friendship for a lifetime. He launched his career in 1965 by knocking on the door of literary renaissance man Enzo Siciliano, who was impressed enough by the precocious writer’s poetry that he acquainted him with two of the three members of the unholy trinity that would ensure his place in Italian letters—the novelists Elsa Morante and Alberto Moravia. They in turn introduced him to another progressive postwar artistic giant: the filmmaker and poet Pier Paolo Pasolini. He was Bellezza’s biggest booster, a devotee of his first poetry collection Invettive e Licenze (1971) and early novels such as L'innocenza (1970) and Lettere da Sodoma (1972). Pasolini supported the younger bard by employing him as his secretary; Bellezza also appeared in Pasolini’s slyly transcendent film The Decameron (1971) as a bumbling grave robber, an experience he apparently found humiliating.

Unlike his mentor, who clung to Catholicism as he aged and condemned the student movements that cleaved western society in 1968, Bellezza practiced a progressivism that was interested in collective action and was not, like Pasolini’s reactionary zigs and zags in later life, an opportunity for performance and provocation. Yet Bellezza’s ego was just as large as his predecessor’s, and he wore it like religious garb—flamboyant and in full view. His writing, akin to Pasolini’s, speculated on his own death for decades before it happened. In “The End of the World,” a poem first published in his collection io (1983), he wrote:

… We’ll all die 
snared like rats in a trap: 
perhaps it’s my death 
that frightens me and I link 
it to the death of the World, perhaps 
it’s my death and I run away

Bellezza had just turned 31 in 1975, the year that Pasolini was tortured and murdered: an event that prompted rabidly homophobic media coverage, a corrupt trial, and increasingly credible speculation that such murky circumstances implied a political assassination. After his shock hardened to grief, Bellezza wrote Morte di Pasolini (1981), a book about his friend’s killing. Unlike similar volumes by Siciliano and Moravia, Bellezza declined to seek the truth behind what actually happened. He condemned the bigotry of the media and the judicial circus that followed the slaughter, but he didn’t care, it seemed, whether the homicide itself was motivated by politics, prejudice, desperation, opportunism, or some noxious blend. Bellezza focused instead on how Pasolini’s end was a kind of natural death, because the director subconsciously wanted to die. As he wrote in his 1971 poem “To Pier Paolo Pasolini,” inhabiting the voice of the older artist: “God! I expect nothing but death. / I ignore the course of History. I know / only the beast within who howls.” Bellezza embraced a fire-and-brimstone perspective as much as he bristled under it. When he was dying, Bellezza referred to his AIDS diagnosis as a “punizione di Dio”—God’s punishment. At other times, in other mindsets, he referred to himself as an unbeliever.

Sadly, and predictably, the poet's death was not a punishment until his fellow mortals decided that it should be. In September 1995, hardly half a year before Bellezza finally succumbed to AIDS-related bronchial pneumonia, the Carabinieri raided the home of Giuseppe Marineo, a doctor and engineer who promoted a dubious AIDS therapy that used electromagnets to stimulate white blood cells. Bellezza, who had been diagnosed in 1987 and hid his condition from the public, was lying on a bed in the back of the office receiving treatment when the police busted through the door. The right-leaning broadsheet Il Messaggero printed his name in their pages, outing Bellezza as seropositive. He was mocked and pilloried in the press, reduced from a controversial if accomplished homosexual poet to a laughingstock whose illness was a further mark of his ignominy. Even a rare English-language obituary in The Times (UK) reserved some postmortem criticism for a writer who, in their estimation, “failed to transcend his own lavishly sado-masochistic world.” (Never mind that S&M never seemed to be Bellezza’s cup of tea.) According to the journalist Barbara Alberti, Bellezza could not recover from the media pile-up that followed the revelation of his sickness to the public. The arc of his own story had found its resting place: the poet had become the scandal that he always believed himself to be.

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It’s hard to imagine Bellezza ruffling feathers on this side of the Atlantic, perhaps because of the US’s relative enlightenment about matters of sexuality (for the too-brief meantime, considering our current national descent into fascism), but moreover because of this country’s comparative ignorance of poetry’s place in civic life. Bellezza, like so many Italian poets, needed a status quo to which he could react. Yet his work transcended its national origins to speak to the global queer movement, which makes it surprising that none of his books have been translated into English. A smattering of his poems has cropped up in little magazines and on websites over the years, but the selection that Peter Covino chose and translated for What Sex is Death? (University of Wisconsin Press, 2025) marks a much-belated anglophone introduction to one of Italy’s greatest 20th century poets, a writer who tempered his theatricality with frankness and his autobiographical bent with a sumptuous and unsettling imagination.

The book’s genius stems not just from Covino’s discernment, but for how he offers Bellezza’s work an arc that maps onto the poet’s life, or at least Bellezza’s shifting sensibility, and so enlivens a rich existence for readers who aren’t familiar. Covino organizes the book chronologically, creating the semblance of narrative and change in so many aspects of Bellezza’s art: The poet responds to the suppression of queer people by the Italian government during the 1980s, begins to view himself with time’s passage as an older lover, and worries about being murdered by the trade he liked to pick up. We read as his voice loosens, as his sense of humor takes hold and then recedes, as his mood warps from resplendent hedonism to twisted worry, as his recognition of mortality casts a longer and longer shadow. Bellezza’s radical first-person insists on the primacy of lived experience as it collapses the distances between the fabricated and the real, the spectacular and the confessional. Sex, like death, appears sometimes as a dream, and at other times as a waking nightmare. As he narrated in an untitled poem from Libro d’amore (1982):

From the other room you masturbate without praise 
for your masturbation. Afterward 
the moon beams on me collapsed 
in a brothel of anguish 

That’s not your white flesh 
tanned by the sun. It’s not 
mine. Enough, pity. If only 
this transience could permeate 
me until I suffocate.

Bellezza could write into Italy’s sociopolitical present, its classical past, and the particularities of his gay perspective at once. When he seemed like a confessional poet, he generalized his confessions. As a political poet, he nested his politics in the everyday, the dramatic yet the human centric. Consider, for example, this excerpt from “The Young Fathers,” collected in Libro di Poesia (1990):

I, nocturnal hero, nightly 
beamed if I came across some young father! 

They were my tears, tonight, 
that reminded me I loved a young 
father—almost as if he were a young boy 
nervous and exhilarated because fatherhood 
rendered him free and I was his mother. 

My destiny, my diversity 
tells me I’ll never be a father. And I 

murmur his name to myself and at night 
in my empty bed I touch the sex 
of someone who has been a father or will be.

The oddity of this perspective is its specific and surprisingly realistic twist on the tale of an aging lech and his brood of Tadzios: Bellezza looks at “young fathers” as though they’re just another ordinary population to fetishize, and by doing so, positions himself as some sort of queer grandparent—an elder station tinged with pathos, considering Bellezza had already been diagnosed with HIV when this poem was published. To be a youthful patriarch in Italy is to be one of many, a position that the country’s Catholicism—like virtually all governments, whatever their national religion or disingenuous secularism—encourages with the comfort of conformity.

Later in the poem, Bellezza writes, as though he is willing to put his ideological convictions aside in order to be receptive to these young fathers, to let them into his bed: “The beating of their hearts / is the magnanimity of revolutions!” But soon he flips his sheets closed and turns his back, contrasting the young fathers with “sickly” boys who, with regard to these dads-but-not-daddies, “need / to force themselves to become like them, / to contain a future virility.” He ends with hope for a gay utopia that has already been dashed, in which the season of love has nothing to do with siring a child:

I go through and burn young fathers 
with the fire of my mind, in a planet queerer 
than this one full of Orpheuses, where the force 
of procreation counts and the sterility of spring 
is a concentration camp for traitors.

Throughout his work, Bellezza acts alternately paternal toward his partners and snubbed by them. His yearning, dissatisfied, and slightly patronizing conceit is pure Pasolini, yet the elder maestro’s poems are, in comparison, self-absorbed and more damaging in their condescension. The shunted and the marginalized never become case studies in Bellezza’s poems. They might be straw men, sure, yet Bellezza projects his grievances onto them in the service of illuminating the solitude of his gay brethren worldwide. Though “The Young Fathers” proceeds like a fantasy one might indulge on a night spent unhappily alone, Bellezza hurdles over the frustrated disillusionment of loneliness and lands in more prosocial grasses of creativity. And he never becomes maudlin, starry-eyed, or even particularly self-righteous about the battles of queer people in a straight world. In “Coliseum,” a poem that resuscitates the millennia-old ur-stadium for an era in which it had become a popular, pre-touristic destination for gay sex, he writes:

Coliseum that’s helped me grow accustomed to Lovers 
I reenter you as into the womb of a Mother; 
I leave behind the pathetic bourgeois world 
that offends me; the traffic noise eases, 
from cars that stir up the uncertain 
consciousness of self toward its own desire. 

Everything quickly changes, destiny is lost 
within your humid corridors, it returns 
to its only possible lot: the flesh that 
tortures itself to punish itself from growing, 
or from being raised by Desire and by Power.

Bellezza unveiled a queer space within one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, but more importantly he created one in his own literature. The very fact that his HIV status scandalized Italy is a testament to the gulf between the actual content of Bellezza’s poems and the glitz of his literary stardom. As Covino makes clear in his marvelous book, Bellezza had been writing about AIDS for years, mourning those who were dying around him and panicking about his own diagnosis—clearly the conservatives who condemned him weren’t reading him. As he wrote in “AIDS,” also published in 1990:

My AIDS, in French SIDA, 
as if to say, good morning!, Madame Sida, 
doesn’t exist— 
even if it persists on earth: 
it hovers above this virus that kills 
old sinners of an instant

After toying with the reader about the veracity of this affliction, he goes on to address his disease and to wish for a relationship with illness that does not involve the miserable, hardly effective, and sometimes lethal medicines—such as AZT—that existed when he wrote this poem. The so-called “AIDS cocktail” would not be introduced until just before Bellezza’s death.

let us escape then, o AIDS, 
disaffection and blindness manifest 
the languor of spent centuries 
in a healthy embrace; let’s shut 
a happy and playful boy, a carefree 
and exhibitionistic one in our hearts 
without shooting up anything if you infiltrate 
the cracks of the flesh; 
escape is futile, if you can’t 
disappear warm me confidently 
drink me, lick me even

It’s easy to read such a poem and wonder why anyone would make a scandal of what was directly in front of them: A gay man with a deadly virus who wished only for a painless finish, in lieu of a miracle cure. But as Bellezza showed, the discrimination he endured was part and parcel of others’ inability to see queer people as they actually are. His forthrightness is still revelatory today, not just because his writing reveals truths as layered as Rome itself, but because, in the most Italian way, he refuses to limit himself to the truth alone. This work is luxurious, gritty, playful, and imagistic, and it flouts the headline-obsessed, prayerful masses by insisting that the intimacies it documents are both horny and full of a rare grandeur, the kind that gossip could never approach and more conventional poems wouldn’t deign to touch.