30	FORCED OUT

I hit forty in 1976. It was the year Heidegger died (I had just edited and translated a collection of his essays and speeches). It was the year Gianpiero and I decided to abandon beautiful but inconvenient Valsalice and come back into town to live, so I was looking for an apartment. And it was the year of the national elections.

Not just any elections. The eighteen-year-olds were voting for the first time, and after the clamorous defeat of the moderates in the divorce referendum of 1974 and the debacle of the Christian Democrats in the local elections of 1975, many expected the Italian Communist Party to overtake them (which actually happened, like a will-o-the-wisp, eight years later in the European elections of 1984, when Enrico Berlinguer died at Padua).

In 1976, the Radical Party campaigned in an election for the first time. Women headed all their slates—I don’t remember this, but Angelo Pezzana, who is Turinese, records it in his autobiography—and every slate had at least one homosexual candidate, because “Fuori” (the acronym is the Italian word for “out”), which Pezzana founded, took part under the Radical Party umbrella.

One morning I walk into the faculty council and I see everyone with their heads buried in a newspaper. Then they look at me. So I look at the paper and see this headline: “Vattimo running for Fuori.” Uh-oh. Panic.

They hadn’t even asked me beforehand. They hadn’t even told me afterward. I found out I was a candidate in the elections, and a homosexual candidate at that, from the papers. Perhaps if they had asked me first I wouldn’t have accepted, but by now it was done. There it was in writing. It was official.

My first concern was to hide the newspaper from my mother, whom I had never told I was gay. It was my sister who made sure she didn’t see it.

The rest I had to deal with myself. I thought: Pareyson will never look me in the eye again, no one will ever invite me to lecture again, I’ll always be a homosexual philosopher and not a philosopher. Instead, I actually became faculty president not long after. Partly by chance (the designated candidate suddenly withdrew the evening before), but the fact is, they did elect me.

I got some anonymous letters, it’s true; one was even in verse, and I knew immediately who had sent it. It came from a young colleague. The typescript had exactly the same typing mistakes I had always observed in the articles this colleague sent me for the Rivista di estetica. I never said anything to him, but I told others, who must certainly have let him know I knew.

Apart from that, none of my fears were realized. On the contrary.

Gianpiero was more shaken than me. There is a scene that still moves me in memory. Virtually a scene of tears. We were walking in Via Pietro Micca. Gianpiero wouldn’t stop repeating, “How you’ve exposed yourself!” He was so emotional, so full of anger and regret, that there must have been all kinds of factors involved. His rapport with his family, certainly. His parents knew me well, esteemed me, often invited me to lunch. Years later it was I who was at the bedside of his dying mother. But at that moment it was his father who was ill with cancer. He was in anguish and vented his feelings to his oncologist: “I’m worried about my son. He lives with this gentleman older than he is.”

At the same period I had almost wrapped up the negotiation for the apartment in Via Mazzini. But after this piece of publicity the landlord rang me up and said, “Professor, is what I read in the papers true?” “Yes it is.” “Then you can forget about the apartment.” Me: “If you like, we could talk it over.”

So this old gentleman, who had lived in Africa for many years, received me. We talked, and he not only gave me the apartment, but he also voted for me.