Aldo Mieli, Italian Historian of Sciences and Gay Rights Activist

The Will and Desire to Knowledge

Abstract

The Italian historian of science Aldo Mieli is one of the key figures in the new “sexual science”, which emerged in several European countries at the beginning of the twentieth century. Founder and editor-in-chief of the journal Rassegna di studi sessuali (1921-1928), his role in Italy can be compared to that of Magnus Hirschfeld in Weimar Germany. This paper has three aims, two historical and one philosophical. First, we present the complex life of Mieli, drawing on published and unpublished sources. Second, we present the attempt to create in Italy also a community of young researchers who would reflect on sexuality and homosexuality without prejudice – interrupted by an early arrival of fascism. Finally, we claim that for many of those who do not recognize themselves in the dominant heterosexual norms, the new “sexual science” brought a hope one of suppressing arbitrary prejudices and of bringing a richer and more diverse knowledge of human sexuality, and thus of human condition.