Hill, S. (2024), ‘Straighwashed or Hiding in Plain Sight? The Secret History of Italo’ in Music , Subcultures and Migration Ed. M Worley Routledge: London. 

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Laurence Grossberg suggested that the only authenticity in pop ‘is to know and even admit that you're not being authentic’, to ‘fake it without faking the fact you're faking it’.1 He may as well have been writing the brief for Italo disco, which combines the DIY aesthetic of punk, with Andy Warhol's mass production Factory process. This plastic aesthetic inevitably invokes Baudrillardian notions of the simulacrum and the characteristic depthlessness of postmodern cultural practice.2 Jacques Derrida’s use of the term Aporia is also apposite: ‘the paradox of the impossible’ is a good way of thinking about Italo.3 Indeed, the genre elides traditional notions of authorship and authenticity as well as geographic markers and biography. As Ross Harley notes, Italo embodies what Foucault defined as a ‘culture where discourse would circulate without any need for an author’.4 Far from being a dead-end, however, this no man’s land provides insight into how we think about musical transformation. As music migrates, meanings mutate, both according to context and over time.

The work for this chapter began in 2020 with an article for the music title Far Out, with an emphasis on the Italo discography. However, its true genesis lies in an encounter with Kai Fikentscher at an International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) conference in Rome back in 2005. As the project progressed, I shifted my focus onto some of the recent oral histories that document the period. These included Pietro Anton’s superlative Italo Disco Legacy (2018) and Easton West and Bill Brewster’s Dirty Talk: A Journey Into Italo Disco (2016). Other significant works included: J Sutak Dons of Disco (2019); Cataldo Verrina’s The History of Italo Disco (2015) and R Todesco Italo Disco: History of Dance Music in Italy from 1975 to 1988 (2020). Most interesting of all was Josh Blaaberg’s Distant Planet: The Six Chapters of Simona (2018). Emerging from this, patterns of migration began to triangulate in the appropriation of North American disco by Italian producers and the success of the genre as an export product in Northern Europe, Latin America, and Eastern Bloc countries. Absent, however, was any sense of where the camp aesthetic of Italo sat in the cultural context of LGBTQ history. Was Italo being ‘straightwashed’? This is a term defined by Dragos Manea as ‘the practice of erasing LGBTQ characters, characteristics and/or events’.5 And so a series of fresh conversations began with some key figures. These included original Italo artist Fred Ventura; filmmaker Josh Blaaberg; Italove vocalist Martin Blix; archivist and DJ Flemming Dalum; Uncut editor Piers Martin; as well getting back in touch with ethnomusicologist and popular music scholar Kai Fikentscher.