Author: Franco Moretti

    Introductory Note: This essay originally appeared in Italian, as the preface to a short book by D.A. Miller comprising Italian translations of two of his essays on celebrated mainstream gay movies. The first, “On the Universality of Brokeback Mountain,” appeared in Film Quarterly in 2007. The second, “Elio’s Education,” an analysis of Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name, was published in the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2018. Together they constitute a polemic against the way the “beauty” of these films becomes a closet for gay sex and gay sexuality—an emphasis captured in the little book’s Italian title, Bellissimo.   Moretti’s introduction situates...