Writing Poetry Can Endanger Your Health by Dave Jaffe; Chapter 22, Third Section.

   The Poet As Gay Activist - Section Three


       Pier Paolo Pasolini started out making realistic films of Rome's underclass. Yet in the early 1970"s his subject changed. Now he made films based on classic tales of the distant past. like Bocaccio's 'Decameron', Chaucer's 'The Canterbury Tales' and 'The Flower of 1001'.
      The films were grouped together and were called 'The Trilogy of Life.' They preached open sexuality and were against all religious restrictions.
    These films triggered a wave of imitators whose films were basically pornographic. Pasolini's last film was full of sex and sadism.
     By 1975, Pasolini had made many enemies. His gay lifestyle, films, poetry and public statements outraged people on the left and the right . He remained loyal to the Italian Communist Party though people in the party often criticized him.. He attacked student protestors in the late 1960's, saying they were privileged people, unlike the police who often beat up the students. The police, Pasolini said came from an oppressed class, namely the proletariat.
     He opposed abortion and raised the anger of Italian feminists. "Pasolini wasn't on our side," a pro-choice Italian woman told this blogger in the 1980's. "He was totally against our freedom to choose."
      Others, like the conservatives and the leaders in the Catholic church as well as powerful business men and politicians on the right had no time for him either. His lifestyle and his work outraged them.
In November 1975, Pasolini was murdered supposedly by a male 17 year-old hustler called Guiseppe Pelosi. "He asked me for something I did not want," said to Pelosi who sent to prison. Later on, Pelosi changed his story and said three people murdered Pasolini. But an inquiry into his death ended with no firm conclusions being drawn.
     By the time he died, Pasolini had become a coloumnist for the well-known paper 'Il Corriere della Sera'. He also opposed the spreading tide of consumerism and the disappearance of dialects like the language of Friuli. Pasolini saw these trends as a new sort of fascism.
     His life overlapped with the left wing surge in the late 1940's and the rise and fall of the New Left in the late 1960's and early 1970's. Yet after he died, Enrico Berlinguer, "The spare tousle-haired Sardinian" as the media described him, led the Italian Communist Party to a near victory in the 1976 national election. Yet the Christian Democrats narrowly hung onto power.
    Pasolini's work is still well-known to-day. His films, novels, poetry and essays set him among the pantheon of great Italian artists in a land and country that has produced some of the great artists of the world.