Hosted by the University of Toronto’s St Michael’s College and mounted in its Father Madden Hall, September 8-14, 2025, Unveiling the Queer Italian-Canadian Experience: A Photographic & Literary Exhibition, showcased the camerawork of Vincenzo Pietropaolo and the poetry of Liana Cusmano. The pairing of the photog’s eye, and the bard’s, accomplished precisely what the exhibition brochure pledged: The collaboration between “a younger, queer poet and spoken word artist and a straight, older social documentary photographer.”
Noted for his social-realist depictions of migrant farmworkers, Italian immigrants, and Italian-Canadian workers, Pietropaolo (recent recipient of the Order of Canada) now daubs with lightening a community once shaded by the larger Italian-Canadian culture. For their part, the gifted, trilingual wordsmith Cusmano – aka Luca and BiCurious George – explores the linguistic, cultural, and inter-generational tensions that can turn self-assertion into self-muting. Says the exhibition brochure, the duo want to create “a legacy book revealing how queerness is the new social frontier of a community that until now has concerned itself mostly with issues of identity and self-preservation within the mantle of multiculturalism, at the cost of marginalization of those who belong to gender and sexual minorities.”
Poetry should tease the mind and photographs please the eye; and I did experience such pleasures in scoping out the eye-framed subjects and the I-centred vers libre (and prose). Naturally, the poetry teased out intimate conundrums of selfhood, while the oversized photographs pleased me by making nuance explicit. Though always poised adjacent to each other, the verses and the pix are separate monologues; even so, dynamic was the interplay between the illuminating portrayal of queer faces and physiques, while reading – in the hidden space of the mind – about the real difficulty of living openly a queer identity.
The exhibit pictures “unveil” Italian Canadians who are queer; they are identified, and posed in specific cities (Montreal, Toronto – principally, Winnipeg, Calgary, Lethbridge, Edmonton, Vancouver), and in particular years (2022-2025, but 2024, principally). In contrast, the memoir-like writings reveal a queer self that only seldom can verbalize – articulate – their being: Either English distorts Italian; or the Italian (or dialect) tongue has no vocabulary to limn sexual or gender fluidity.
Though Pietropaolo’s shots are not usually bipolar black-and-white, neither is Cusmano’s lyric voice, despite the dark ink “socked” against a light background. Yep, what colours this project inescapably is the irresolvable interrogative: What is identity, anyway? A body can be seen, a voice heard, languages expressed (with accents even) or written (no accent or intonation audible); but mere appearance (shorn of coded garments) cannot disclose cultural, gender, or sexual identity; nor can speech situate one within a solitary, linguistic commune. Sure, Race is a physical marker of “difference,” but there are as many ways to be a person possessing melanin as there are ways of speaking, and to insist otherwise is to impose stereotypes. Maybe identity is realized best in the choices that a body – a person – makes in terms of expressing their personality – their being – though time (lived experience)?
Bemusement – or indefinition – does not trouble the photos: That we observe – ogle – queer persons is a perspective disclosed in the exhibition’s title.
Cusmano has to tackle, however, the quandaries of a queer Italian-Canadian self in their poetry – and through three lenses (to mix metaphors deliberately): The trilingual, but “Anglo”-presenting Canuck strives to voice (or not voice) their gender/sex difference to first-generation, Italian(dialect)-speaking immigrants to Canada; the queer person struggles to self-identify in a language – Italian – that is even more sex/gender binary-coded than is English; the younger and/or secularized (worldly) person attempts to communicate with an older, Catholic churchgoer. Identity conflicts that drive the poetry can only be guessed at in the photographs…
Photo: courtesy of Elio Iannacci.
See, for instance, the shot of Maria and Norina Marinaro holding a portrait of Maria’s son, the suave Toni Mauro (1959-2004), a snap taken of the sisters standing before the Casey House AIDS Hospice, in Toronto, in 2024. Was there ever “good trouble” between mother and son regarding his probable sexual orientation (or hers)? Assuredly, there seems to have been love for the deceased – and that love remains, surely.
A different family unit appears in the photos of “Cynthia Spring, academic, and partner Anna Procopio, urban planner, with their newborn Baby, Romy.” In the first pic, one woman is in a state of advanced pregnancy; but both women stand in a living room. In the next pic, the pair are standing, united by Romy, outside a house, but in front of a saucer magnolia (in the spring). Did the parents bicker – ever – due to different (presumably) cultural/linguistic backgrounds? What about the decision to bear a child? Did all of their relatives accept the couple and the new nuclear family? Then again, aren’t such questions impertinent when the ability to love – despite difference – is the life-enhancing choice?
To sideline philosophy and just see the photos is to glimpse Italian-Canadian scenes of flowers, greenery, colour, fashion, and art. Pietropaolo tends to place his subjects in gardens, parks, and, once, a greenhouse. Writer and visual artist Ariana Magliocco is photographed, in Maple, Ontario, in 2024, before a stained-glass mural portraying colonial settlement effected by soldiers and clergy, while one disempowered Indigenous woman studies the interlopers. Clearly, we see that the intersection of Church and Crown presents a fount of oppression. Another striking photo is that of Raffeal Briatico, a fashion designer and AIDS activist, at the Toronto AIDS Candlelight Vigil, 2025 in Barbara Hall Park. Myriad attendees, each holding a lit candle, illuminate the dead, but also enlighten the living. Serpentine – mercurially fluid – is the physique of choreographer Emilio Colalillo, pictured at a studio rehearsal in Toronto in 2024. His limber form? Geometry melting into algebra. Monica Menenghetti – a writer – stands, in 2024, before a Vancouver mural that is a rainbow run rampant, rioting across a wall. The title of the artwork – All Our Relations – applies the rainbow flag to all of our loves, all native to Nature.
I end with a comment on Cusmano’s poetry. Like many poetic rhetoricians, their style is journalistic, plain-spoken, accessible. The poems spurn ostentation, ornament, or odd, outlandish imagery. Instead, each piece stages chivalry and courtesy: To uphold respect and love for the Old Country, the old tongue, the old customs, even the old people, while still embracing queerness, cosmo multiculturalism, and the joy of making poetry anew by challenging gendered – and thus outmoded – lingo, whether (dialect) Italian or English or French. Yet, no matter how shorn of artifice their poems are, their actual power, their disorienting magic, is always manifest:
“What is the word / for a Venn diagram where / the two circles do not meet?”
“Each of us chooses love in our own way, every time, always.”
“Other people’s glances /other you.”
“There is only us, this totality. / Now and forever.”
“We all carry with us / in our skin and bones / a ghost language / that we can see in one another / and name / but not speak.”
They are the “masteresses’ (to coin a word) of spine-shivering phrases and conclusions. Indeed, Cusmano’s writing reminds us that the performance of “gender” has many acts and scenes – each perilous, each thrilling – before any audience. What we also learn? Language is born from desire.
Really? The proof is in Pietropaolo’s pix.
George Elliott Clarke is a poet and a pioneering scholar of African-Canadian literature at the University of Toronto. His latest books are an essay collection, Whiteout: How Canada Cancels Blackness (Véhicule Press), and Canticles III (MMXXIII) (Guernica Editions), the concluding tome of his six-volume verse-epic, Canticles.
