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in those days? What did you find?
bit different. So I said, “Well, why was he different? Was he mean? What was he?” I didn’t even think about his sexual orientation. She said, “Well, we just thought something was different about him. At the time, I didn’t really understand, I just had this feeling that he was different than other guys. But then when I got older and I read the newspaper and became an adult, I think that he probably was gay.” So then I asked my mom about him. She said, “I was the same way.” She was born in 1940, and she said, “I didn’t really understand what gay was. People didn’t even talk about those things.” She said she just thought that he was a little bit odd. That’s all anybody would ever tell me, that he was odd. I think they thought he was unusual because he didn’t want to get married. In those days every man is supposed to get married and have kids, follow the typical storyline.
I didn’t really learn much from [Evelina], other than the way she described it, which was that people just felt uncomfortable around him. So when I read about it, I read that they would have been outright bullied and beat up and that other men would be very homophobic and try to get them out of the community or out of the work place. I got that from the research that I read and different situations that those things happened. She wouldn’t tell me that.
Did that inspire you to go further into researching how gay people were treated
How has that reluctance to speak on the subject changed over the years and generations, in your eyes? I think that the Italian people in general — much like Latin people — are very much into the machismo thing. The man is the boss and his word goes and everything has to be very masculine and very tough, and I think that’s changed considerably. Even in my family it used to be that you couldn’t marry out of the Italian nationality, you couldn’t
marry out of the Catholic religion. And my mother and all of her cousins, none of them even married Italians, most of them didn’t marry Catholics, either. I think, for the most part, the people I know, and I think it’s because most of the Italians I know are in the city, they’re very accepting. Much more accepting than they would have been in the past. I would say that they’ve improved greatly. I don’t hear anybody in my family speak poorly of people who are gay, and I never have. So to me it seems that it has improved, because I know in the past, gay people would have a very hard time. How much did Luigi’s infidelity as a young man affect the family after they arrived in America? One interview that I did the guy was like, “C’mon, give him a break, he was in his late twenties and went all the way to 40 here by himself.” I said, “Oh yeah, I think people understand it, but even if you understand it, it still has repercussions.” Down the road, people can’t help but
be jealous even if the circumstances don’t necessarily warrant it. So in the long run, [Evelina] told me that [Appolonia] never really got over that. They stayed together, but once she knew … She would talk like, “We need to do everything for your dad. Be good to your dad,” but she could see the undercurrent of bitterness, because [Appolonia] hadn’t turned to that and [Luigi] had. Do you aim to continue the story, as Evelina suggested you do, or is it your hope that this book brings closure to the story and the history that’s been passed down orally, whether concerning Bernandino’s secret lifestyle or Luigi’s infidelity? I would say it does bring some closure to the whispered-about family secrets, but I also want to continue the story to show how the lives of the daughters turned out — one with a bad marriage and one lost a daughter at a young age to leukemia — and how their immigration from Italy affected their children and grandchildren.
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