✨ Gio's Dust
The story of Giò Stajano, the first transgender woman in Italy: a glimpse of us from the 1930s to today.
🗓️ May 10, 2024 – 8:30 PM
📍 Flavio Theater – Via Giovanni Mario Crescimbeni, 19 – Rome
➡️ Free entry by reservation by clicking here
with Sebastian Gimelli Morosini
conceived and directed by Francesca Stajano Sasson
with the consultancy of Willy Vaira
and with Giuseppe Amelio, Roberta Bobbi, Antonio Corazza, Isabella Deiana, Nino Mallia, Francesca Stajano Sasson
Synopsis of the show
The show retraces the fundamental stages of the life of Giò Stajano who was born as a man, Gioacchino, in 1931 in Gallipoli (Lecce), to Fanny Starace, daughter of the fascist hierarch Achille Starace, and Count Riccardo Stajano Briganti di Panico.
He's the only kid who can say he peed on the Duce!
He spent his childhood between Sannicola and Gallipoli and then attended the Jesuit College in Frascati, demonstrating great intellectual gifts.
He moved to Rome, where he pursued a career as a painter, journalist, actor and writer.
Here he frequented Roman high society and became friends with the artist Novella Parigini, in whose renowned salon he met exponents of the culture of the time such as Moravia, Pasolini, Guttuso, Dalì, Rock Hudson, Tyrone Power, Linda Christian and Errol Flynn and many others.
He was cast in a part in Federico Fellini's film La Dolce Vita, which was followed by other roles with important directors.
In 1983, Giò decided to become a woman, undergoing an operation in Casablanca.
As Maria Gioacchina, she took part in a pornographic photo novel with Gabriel Pontello and for several years frequented the world of prostitution.
In the last part of her life, she decided to approach the Catholic religion: she became a lay nun, taking vows in Vische (TO) in the Convent of the Nuns of Betania del Sacro Cuore.
In 2011, following problems caused by the still experimental gender reassignment operation, he will leave this earth.
A glimpse of us: Gay Center's commentary
Giò's life is a coming-of-age novel built on the values of queerness: freedom, self-determination, and ironic deconstruction.
Giò is everything and all of us: the normative cages of gender, the distrust of sexual prejudice, the forms of homophobic and transphobic violence are his history and our history, of a "different" community yesterday as today.
Homosexuality in the virile Italy of the 1920s… too little masculine even for the “upside-down” elite of men in power.
Woman, prima donna…whatever that means. Even being incorrectly self-determined in managing her own body when the feminine ends up costing her any remaining social recognition.
Ultimately, devout, with scandalous exhibitionism and extreme seriousness. Wanting to demonstrate that the rules of power, even divine, are our own creation. Hypocritical and fragile when faced with the authentic exercise of our own free humanity.
