Gay director’s life story redacted to evade Russia’s anti-LGBT law

A biography of Pier Paolo Pasolini is being published with up to a fifth of the text blacked out to avoid prosecution for homosexual ‘propaganda’
Tom Parfitt
The Times
The Russian publisher AST said it was “impossible” to publish the whole work about the Italian writer and film-maker Pier Paolo Pasolini
The Russian publisher AST said it was “impossible” to publish the whole work about the Italian writer and film-maker Pier Paolo Pasolini
Tom Parfitt
The Times

A biography of an Italian film director is being published in Russia with up to a fifth of the text blacked out in order to avoid prosecution under laws against homosexual “propaganda”.

The book, by the Italian academic Roberto Carnero, tells the life story of Pier Paolo Pasolini, a gay writer and film-maker who was one of Italy’s most famous 20th-century public intellectuals. He was beaten to death at the age of 53 in 1975.

AST, the Russian publisher, said it had decided to redact the text in an unusual fashion because it was “impossible” to publish the whole work in the light of the anti-gay legislation.

Pasolini on the set of his 1974 film Arabian Nights
Pasolini on the set of his 1974 film Arabian Nights
ANGELO PENNONI/PEA/ARTISTES ASSOCIES/KOBAL/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK

“Blacking out fragments of the text was a more honest decision than just cutting passages as if they