Giò Stajano and Willy Vaira - Pubblici scandali e private virtù

2007, 2021, Georges Burou, Giò Stajano, Italian, Willy Vaira,

Full title: "Pubblici scandali e private virtù. Dalla Dolce Vita al convento. Dialogo con Willy Vaira" (Public scandals and private virtues. From Dolce Vita to the convent. Dialogue with Willy Vaira). The book was published in 2007 and 2021.

Giò Stajano (1931-2011) was the most famous transgender woman in Italy, first publicly declared as gay, then a reserved lady dedicated to painting who, at an aperitif time, never gave up her Martini Dry. 

She was famous for scandals. Her aspiration was success and not rebellion, and her motivation was personal and not political. But certainly, scandals contributed greatly to the birth of the LGBT movement in Italy.

In this book, Giò tells Willy Vaira about the golden childhood marked by the personality of her grandfather, Achille Starace, Secretary of the National Fascist Party. Her life was colorful, first in Paris with its risqué cabarets, then the gender reassignment surgery in 1982 in Casablanca, prostitution, pornography, but also frequent encounters with the world of politics, culture, and entertainment, and in the end, the long retreat in the monastery of Vische, where she went in disguise to prepare a journalistic scoop and then found the faith and became almost a nun. 

When in 2007, the first edition of "Public scandals and private virtues" arrived in bookstores, Giò Stajano had long since retired to live in a twenty-five square meter house in the depths of Salento and disappeared from the public scrutiny, but she continued to be an iconic figure for the LGBTQ movement in Italy.

According to Wikipedia, Countess Maria Gioacchina Stajano Starace Briganti di Panico, known simply as Giò Stajano (1931-2011), was an Italian nobleman, writer, journalist, actress, and transgender painter. In the 60s, before her mtf transition in 1983, she was the center of public attention as one of the first homosexual men publicly declared in Italy. She is remembered for a night swim in the Fontana della Barcaccia. She was said to have been inspired by Federico Fellini's scene of Anita Ekberg's bath in the Trevi Fountain in La dolce vita (1960). 

With the birth of the gay movement, to which Giò Stajano never joined, and with the social changes of the late sixties, she became the symbol of transgender revolution in Italy. In 1982 in Italy it became legal for people with gender dysphoria to change their gender, however still after operation and modification of external sexual characteristics. So, in 1983, Giò Stajano decided to undergo bottom surgery in Casablanca (Morocco) at the hands of Professor Bourou, taking the name of Maria Gioacchina Stajano Starace Briganti di Panico (always abbreviated as Giò Stajano). 

Then she returned to the limelight and gave her first interview to the journalist Francesco D. Caridi of Il Borghese, a weekly for which Giò Stajano had written articles of worldliness signed with the pseudonym "Pink Panther", where she targeted above all the Roman aristocracy. She died in a retirement home in Alezio, on July 26, 2011, at the age of 79.

Available via ibs.it

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Wikipedia

Photo via giostajano.com