Giò Stajano - La mia vita scandalosa

1992, Georges Burou, Giò Stajano, Italian,

Original title: "La mia vita scandalosa" (My Scandalous Life).

"You are usually born only once. At least in the course of the same existence... I, on the other hand, was born twice." Thus Giò Stajano begins the story of her first exceptional sixty years, during which she passed from a life certainly not common to another almost unbelievable.

Gioacchino Starace, who was given the name of his paternal grandfather, was born in Sannicola, Puglia, in December 1931. On his mother's side, he is the nephew of Achille Starace, who has just been appointed secretary of the Fascist Party. Childhood is happy and privileged, adolescence is marked by war and the first signs of its "diversity".

At the beginning of the 50s, Giò moved to Rome and was introduced to the most exclusive circles of the capital, where actors, playboys, and artists met: the protagonists of that unrepeatable season that Fellini will call "la dolce vita".

In '59 he published the novel Roma Capovolta, in which he describes his erotic initiation: kidnapped and condemned, the book makes the author famous as the first - and perhaps only, at that time - openly homosexual and openly recognized author. At fifty years old, Giò has experience of all genres behind him: actor, painter, journalist assault on the pages of MEN, singer in the Roman and Parisian cabarets, and provocative character.

He has had many flirtations and unhappy passions, and he has experienced the impossibility of fully living the love for men she falls in love with. And then he decides to close with that male body that continues to betray his sensitivity. Countess Gioacchina Stajano Starace, Giò for friends, author of this book, was born in November 1982 in Casablanca at the clinic of Dr. Georges Burou where she undergoes gender reassignment surgery. She frequents the world she had known as a man and she feels even better than before, now that she is courted with gallantry due to being a lady, moreover provided with a few quarters of nobility.

She still enjoys spicy situations, she creates them continuously and tells them with light-hearted irony. To those who mocked her fate as grandchildren of the Regime, a traitor of the "male youth" desired by her grandfather, he responded mockingly by messing up the cards on the table: the ambiguous, dissolute individual has become a very regular "she", female in appearance and at the registry office. Unscrupulousness and impertinence remain those of the past and it shows in this worldly portrait of our society, in which it does not hide scandals, embarrassing memories, or licentious habits. A portrait, one can say, drawn without any "veils".

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 the 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.

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Photo via giostajano.com