In a June 17 Citizenlink article, Focus on the Family speaks out in support of Italian pop singer’s ex-gay song “Luca Used to be Gay.” The autobiographical song advocates that gays can become straight, which XGW predicted would bring it to the attention of ex-gay advocates elsewhere.
What is more telling, however, is Citizenlink’s statement that the song promotes “the truth that people can change their sexual orientation.” While it comes as little surprise to outside observers that Focus on the Family believes that homosexuals can (and should) become heterosexual, it does belie the assertion repeatedly made by spokespersons for FotF’s Love Won Out roadshow that they’re not actually out to change anyone’s orientation.
They are, but they aren’t. It all depends on who they think is listening.
Well, O.K., bully for him if that’s what he really wanted, but, that apart, so what?
“Io ero gay
e sono sempre gay,
e io non vorrei
non essere più gay…”
but I’m not going to make it into a song to “promote the truth” that people either can’t or don’t need to change their sexual orientation or that they’d be happier if they didn’t waste time and energy in trying to.
Who is this Luca anyway? Is he a real person or just a figment of someone’s imagination?
If you pay attention to the storyline of the song, all it took for “Luca” to figure out he wasn’t gay was a one-night-stand with a girl he met at a party. And now, it would seem, Luca is “engaged to her” and also a father, so there’s some out-of-wedlock breeding going on as well. I guess pre-marital heterosexual sex and babys born out of wedlock are ok for us gay folk as long as they’re all on the road to Straightsville.
Just a few more observations on this song.
1. As a matter of fact, I can’t find anything in the lyrics to suggest that Luca is even engaged to this nameless lady, never mind married. It just says in the refrain (which is in the third person) that “now he’s with her” (adesso sta con lei), and in the final verse “Now I’m a father and I’m in love with the only woman that I’ve ever loved” (adesso sono padre e sono innamorato dell’unica donna che io abbia mai amato).
2. In the second verse it says “then came high school graduation” (poi arrivò la maturità). The word maturità is ambiguous: it can mean simply “maturity” but all the translations of the song that I’ve seen give it the more specific meaning of “high school graduation” or “the end of high school” and that seems the most obvious interpretation here.
He then goes on to say “but I didn’t know what happiness was; a great man made my heart flutter and that’s how I discovered that I was homosexual.” But this is inconsistent with what he has said earlier in the same verse: “At that time [N.B. before high school graduation] I was looking for answers, I was ashamed, and I was looking for them in secret; there were those who told me ‘it’s natural’; I was studying Freud, and he didn’t think so.”
He then says that sooner or later they’ll get him, clearly meaning this “great man” with whom he had the affair, but that if the evidence has by then disappeared he’ll be acquitted. But he gives no indication that the sex that he had with this man after high school graduation, even if ill-advised, was other than fully consensual, and in Italy consensual gay sex between persons over the age of 16 has been legal for yonks.
3. At the end of the second verse he says that he was looking in men for who his father was and also that he was going with men so as not to betray his mother. This makes no sense to me at all; in fact it seems remarkably like claptrap. Does anyone on here buy it?
This song, it seems to me, can only make at least partial sense if it’s understood as being about a young man whose mother tried to turn him off girls – “she used to say to me, ‘don’t get married, for heaven’s sake’; she was morbidly jealous of my female friends” (first verse). (Believe it or not, I knew a woman some years ago who wouldn’t let her son go to college because there were girls there.) Thus she screwed him up, and he imagined that he was gay when he wasn’t.
I’m pretty useless as a poet, as I think I’ve already shown in my previous post, but here for what it’s worth is my little poem about the last Luca that I met – just a few weeks ago, as it happens – and who’s a really lovely guy:
“Luca then was gay
and he’s still gay today.
He’s happy being gay.
I wouldn’t want to see him
any other way.”