1. The June 2002 Pride celebration in Padua included a small but vociferous group of opposition protesters crosstown at the Church of St. Anthony, famed pilgrimage destination. Thus the classical/Catholic binary continues to thrive. For a deeply personal perspective on the thorny issue of homosexuality and the Church, see Marco Politi, La confessione: Un prete gay racconta la sua storia, preface by Luigi Bettazzi (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 2000).
2. See, however, the essay by Francesco Gnerre, L’eroe negato: omosessualità e letteratura nel Novecento italiano. Milan: Baldini & Castoldi, 2000 [1981]. Franco-Italica 6 (1994) is dedicated to homosexuality in modern French and Italian literature.
3. Alan K. Smith, “Fraudomy: Reading Sexuality and Politics in Burchiello” in: Queering the Renaissance, ed. Jonathan Goldberg (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1994), pp. 84–106.
4. See, for instance, Homosexualities and French Literature: Cultural Contexts/ Critical Texts, eds. George Stambolian and Elaine Marks (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1979) or, more recently, Lawrence R. Schehr, Alcibiades at the Door: Gay Discourses in French Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995); and on Spanish and Portuguese literature, Queer Iberia: Sexualities, Cultures, and Crossings from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, eds. Josiah Blackmore and Gregory S. Hutcheson (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1999); my thanks to the editors of Queer Iberia for the title of the present volume.
5. In art history, see in particular James M. Saslow, Ganymede in the Renaissance: Homosexuality in Art and Society (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986). Saslow has also produced an edition and translation of Michelangelo’s poems that corrects earlier, bowdlerized editions that had effaced same-sex desire: The Poetry of Michelangelo: An Annotated Translation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991).