One day one of us. Journey into the discovery of gay love

Dialogue by Katya Parente With Giancarlo Pastore.

Torinese, born in '67, our guest today is Giancarlo Pastore. Author of several books (including "jellyfish" and "queen") is here to talk to us, in particular, of "One day one of us"(Marsilio, 2020), the story of a journey, real and metaphorical, to two.

Who are Graziano and Edoardo, the main characters of the book?

Graziano and Edoardo are the protagonists of a journey that winds between one coast and the other of the United States and at the same time in the depths of his soul. Graziano, the youngest of the two, is on the run from the past. A past of shadows, violence and abuses that have been indelibly written in his emotional memory and in that of his body, and who imprisoned him in a shell to defend from the outside world.

Edoardo, on the other hand, seems to move around the world without any effort, with the light heart of those who have lived in the middle of beauty and love, is part of a world in which the inhabitants are entitled to exist from this sort of light that take inside. In reality, he too is on the run from what he fears most: the future. During the journey, the two learn to get to know each other, and above all they begin to understand that the first step towards love consists in stopping to defend itself.

What part has homosexuality in the book plot?

It has a central part. On the one hand I am happy when I tell me that in my stories anyone can recognize, but I think it is not my task to reassure readers: there is still the fact that Graziano and Edoardo are two men, who love each other as two men in a world in which this type of love remains for many an aberration. The mechanisms of hetero relative are not the same as homosexual ones: no hetero passes, for example, for the dutiful, sometimes still quite painful, self -acceptance and the fear of being refused, when it is good, for what is feeling.

Is it right to talk about the book as a Bildungsoman?

There are some elements of the training novel, but the story only lets the inner growth and evolution of the protagonist only glimpse. Graziano learns, albeit with difficulty, to trust the other, the meeting with Edoardo transforms him, the enormous fortune of being 'seen' becomes an opportunity for rebirth. What will happen to him after the shell has broken, however, is not told. The last page of the book is closed to the reader, imagine Graziano's new life.

Can the story be inserted in the vein of travel literature (I think of "blue roads" or "on the road")?

The journey is the skeleton of the book, with all its metaphors and literary references that takes place. The United States are for Graziano first of all the land of the authors on which it was formed by studying American literature and then, a little naively, the land of possibilities, a place where the past does not count, also counts the present and what you want to become. During the journey to the final destination, the two protagonists meet landscapes of an almost inexpressible beauty, natural parks, deserts, large metropolises such as Chicago and Los Angeles, but are also faced with a hostile, disturbing America, in which it seems to reign a violence ready to explode at any time.

They will pass under the Trump skyscraper under construction whose long black shade seems to stretch anywhere (the story is set in 2008, on the eve of the first election of Obama). Traveling, however, especially for Graziano, also means finding themselves crossing the immense voids of deserts, or prairies, and guiding in these landscapes that are always repeated the same, in this infinite chasing a flat horizon in which the gaze has no holds, it means for him to get lost in his memories, in his past. They are precisely certain lunar, desert, primitive scenarios that awaken and bring everything from which he tries to escape from.

Homosexuality is the common thread of many of your works ...

There are gay writers or representing gay reality that do not want to highlight this characteristic for fear, perhaps, that their books lose the character of universality proper to any art form; They argue that 'gay literature' does not mean anything (is the novel that is gay? Its author?) And that it is an anachronistic definition with which the LGBTQ+ world does nothing but self-help. It is a complex question, and I don't have a precise opinion. I know I'm gay and whatever you write it cannot and will not be able to ignore this reality. I began to understand that I was homosexual in an era in which the word to define me did not exist: 'homosexual' sounded like a medical term, a disease, fennel, rich, reversed etc. was said. Homosexuality was a deviance, a disease, a vice, a shame, a shame to keep hidden. During my adolescence, then, AIDS arrived, and then we became plague, unitor. I have made several decades ago, and it was tough, but it does not start only once, you do it every time you change work, that you change the city, that new friends are known.

I have been insulted for years as a boy because they were effective and then as an adult on the street, and I felt in danger more than once. For better or worse all these things have helped to make me become the person they are. Why should I forget and deny where I come from when I write? Is similar removal required to heterosexual writers? This does not mean that it should only write about the gay world, but that it is from there that I start because it is from my experience that I draw when I invent any other world.

Are you working on a new project?

I recently delivered a new novel that will be released in the first months of next year. It is a book that I really care about, the most important I have ever written. A queer story, in which passion, music, dance will move the protagonists.

We look forward to the new release. In the meantime, we thank Giancarlo Pastore for his kindness and put on the road with Graziano and Edoardo.