This book examines the question of the repression of LGBT people through psychiatry during the fascist regime in Italy, a subject that has not been investigated until now. It draws together the substantial archival record of patients, doctors and fascist authorities to reconstruct intricate behind-the-scenes dialogue, and to document one of the ways in which the regime repressed LGBT lives in this period. Italian Fascism’s Forgotten LGBT Victims focusses on three different institutions in three parts of the country - Rome, Florence and Girifalco, areas with different attitudes and therapeutic approaches. Archive research results are contextualised within the psychiatric theory of the time, highlighting the existing discrepancies between theory and daily routine practice of mental health institutions in Italy during the regime. Until now, scholars of psychiatry have mainly engaged with the late-19th and early-20th century, or the 1970s and 1980s, when asylums were abolished in Italy after the so-called ‘Basaglia Law’. Gabriella Romano expands current knowledge of the history of Italian psychiatry and - by analysing the relationship between central government, local authorities and asylum directors - gives new insights into the power relationship between central government and localities. Furthermore, she sheds light on historiography on homosexuality in Italy, a subject that has been largely ignored with regard to the fascist period and more generally.

This open access book investigates the pathologisation of homosexuality during the fascist regime in Italy through an analysis of the case of G., a man with "homosexual tendencies" interned in the Collegno mental health hospital in 1928. No systematic study exists on the possibility that Fascism used internment in an asylum as a tool of repression for LGBT people, as an alternative to confinement on an island, prison or home arrests. This research offers evidence that in some cases it did. The book highlights how the dictatorship operated in a low-key, shadowy and undetectable manner, bending pre-existing legislation. Its brutality was - and still is - difficult to prove. It also emphasises the ways in which existing stereotypes on homosexuality were reinforced by the regime propaganda in support of its so-called moralising campaign and how families, the police and the medical professionals joined forces in implementing this form of repression.