Sunlit Lavender

Aldo Mieli (1879-1950) was an Italian historian of science and LGBT activist. Born into a wealthy family of jewish origins in Livorno (Tuscany), he studied mathematical sciences and chemistry in Pisa, Leipzig and later Rome, where he became a researcher and professor, putting particular focus on the relevance of the Islamic world in the history of science. He was involved with the PSI (Italian Socialist Party) during his twenties, but left politics altogether after the Great War.  In 1916 he published Il libro dell’amore (’The Book of Love’), animated by a drive to scientifically understand human sexuality, but also to eradicate discrimination against homosexuals – in fact, while most scientists of the time still referred to homosexuality as ‘deviance’ or ‘mental illness’, he simply described it as ‘homosexual love’ (notably in L’amore omosessuale, ‘Homosexual Love’, 1926).  In 1921 he founded the Rassegna di studi sessuali (’Review of Sexuality Studies’), a publication which helped spread the word of many LGBT activists of the time (e.g. Magnus Hirschfeld, founder of WHK, i.e. Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee - ‘Scientific-Humanitarian Committee’ -, the first LGBT rights organization in history) and also often dealt with many critical topics such as divorce, abortion rights, the need for sexual education and the shutting of ‘case chiuse’ or ‘case di tolleranza’ (’closed houses’/’houses of tolerance’, i.e. licensed brothels). Although Mieli did agree with Hirschfeld on many a point (notably the acknowledgement of bisexuality), he disagreed with the German physician on his belief that homosexuality depended on the presence of anomalous sexual characteristics (e.g. in the testicles or in the ova): Mieli always refused to refer to homosexuality as ‘something caused by anomaly’, an ‘illness’ or a ‘pathology’. His ideas, his homosexuality and his jewish origins surely made him an outcast and a possible target of violence in 1920s Italy. Soon after Mussolini and his fascist party seized power with the Marcia su Roma (’March on Rome’, October 1922), Mieli was classified as a ‘pericoloso socialista e pederasta passivo’ (’dangerous socialist and passive pederast’) and was forced to flee to France in 1928 where he kept working on and publishing his other magazine, Archeion, Archivio di storia della scienza (’Archeion, History of Science Archive’). With the nazi invasion of France becoming more and more impending in 1939, he was forced to move again, this time to Argentina, where he worked with Desiderius Papp and José Babini on the twelve volumes of Panorama general de historia de la ciencia (’Overall Picture of History of Science’) and where he died in 1950. A lot of his works were published posthumously and were only recently acknowledged as pioneering.

Jan Gardner