Piera Zanotti (1934-1999) was a militant with a long experience and vast knowledge who actively went through different phases of Italian politics. She collaborated in the management of a political and recreational center for women only, the CDM, and was part of the Coordination of Milan's lesbians.
Piera Zanotti was a lesbian militant and a communist, and she worked as a metal worker for 38 years. According to her own words: I enter the world of work at twelve years and three months and from there my trajectory begins towards production, towards the world of being someone. I've always had it very clear that I was a lesbian, I understood it when I was seven, but when we're so young we're in the game; my first sympathies were born right in the house where I worked as a little maid, little maid, call me what you will. I fell in love with my employer's daughter, a good, conscientious, honest one. I leave the passages to your imagination: this woman made me want to escape from the world, and from the age of thirteen to eighteen, with the awareness of being different from the others, I had the dowry ready to go to the convent. I thought hiding in the convent, the cleanliness, the order. In 1954 we moved from Bergamo to Milan with my family and there I went to two different factories to learn how to work on the loom as a weaver. After a year of free apprenticeship we found a place, with other girls, fifteen kilometers from our town and every morning we made our way from seven to eight and then eight hours of work. And there I fell in love; with awareness, reciprocated, from frame to frame we warmed up. I received my first kiss in winter, behind Corriere della Sera, after eating chocolate, because in winter we made bread and chocolate for everyone. And this person, sitting on the plot boxes next to me, next to the stove to warm us, gave me a kiss. We understood each other, that we loved each other. The funniest thing was that when I got home, because I lived downtown, I passed in front of the church and the first thing I did, because I was very Catholic and had no other means of communicating the joy I had inside at finally being recognized and reciprocated, in the Platonic sense, was that I thanked God in church and went home. My relationship with this person, to be brief, lasted ten years. With the bitter conclusion that she got married, and I'll stop there. In the meantime we had changed factories, I stopped wanting to run away to the convent, I left there, but I loved and was loved back. Moral: up to the age of twenty-four I live my village lesbianism, happy, I felt beautiful. At twenty-four my mother discovered me and my girlfriend kissing between the two doors of the dining room. My mom opened the door she didn't say anything but she has been making me feel guilty ever since. The next morning with coffee in hand, my mother was very discreet, she was an honest woman, a matriarch, but a serious woman, she never wanted to belittle anyone in front of the other brothers, there were nine of us in the house. I was so happy and she said to me: “if your brothers knew”. Well, the only thing I haven't forgiven my mother is this blackmail. She couldn't tell me anything other than "if your brothers knew", because my father existed, in a symbolic sense, the matriarchy was in force in my house and it went on like this. From eighteen to twenty-eight, however, I lived happily, then this one here got engaged. I was hoping that…girls, being a lesbian in the fifties wasn't easy, it's not easy even today, but back then it really was being out of this world, and then we had to use all the masks that could camouflage us. I made Cristina laugh because on Saturday she wanted to see some photographs which I never mention because I consider them masks, disguises: the hat on, gloves, the shoes like this, the dress like this. Laugh, laugh girls, now I laugh too, but then it was not to smile. I've never accepted courting for males, but for obvious reasons I frequented them: we were seven friends, we all went dancing, by now we were financially independent, the males began to own some cars, so we went to Vigevano to dance, to the Capannina that was fashionable, like drinking white wine, etc. We had to do all these camouflages, like going to the oratory to sing with the nuns and laugh. At the age of 33 I rebelled against my mother for not going to church.
Although my mother had blackmailed me, I never obeyed, I always did the opposite of what she wanted. I don't want to dwell on it, because it hurt me a lot when my girlfriend got married in '65, but I have to take another step back and tell an important fact for my life, the one that also gave me a political identity, because I was a Christian Democrat, girls don't be surprised False flags, false crosses, all false, but we had to stay there, because only there did we have the space to be able to exist. When I arrived at the engineering factory in '61, I also met the communist party; it's not that I didn't know it existed, I knew it, but there in the factory, with 2,500 people, I found a teacher, in this case not a teacher, a teacher of communism, of Marxism, and there I brought home an enormous profit also for my private life: dignity. The beauty was communicating it at home where everyone was Christian Democrats, my mother Catholic, not bigoted but Catholic, who conditioned us all to go to mass, to say the rosary. I didn't want to do anything they didn't know, I wanted to act in the open, I've always wanted to be honest, be credible, do things in everyone's face, not secretly. I only made love with my fiancée in secret, because this was the thing that was hidden from me by others. I didn't take communion anymore, I went to confess to the priest and make conversation, because he needed me to confess other lesbians and what should I say? "But let them love" I said to him, "bless them, send them to heaven". This priest had come to terms with me because I was honest, truthful, wherever the truth was I wanted it, because I never wanted to encounter twisted or false things. At the time he trusted me, by now we had become - pseudo-friends. Then he died and I detached from everything.
When, at home, I said: “I have to talk to you” it was noon, the canonical hour, we all ate. "I have to tell you a very important choice for my life, I am a communist from today, I joined the PCI of Arconate". The answer was a michettata: my brother threw a sandwich in my face from head of table to head of table, two and a half meters. Another brother, younger than me but a serious person, who never makes mistakes, I still have a little more respect for him today, this one more calmly says to me: "remember that you have fifty people behind you". We were fifty people in the family, but he never specified what he meant by that phrase. I didn't go back from there, at the end of '64 there were the great strikes.
I would like to stop for a moment on the seventies, when we brought everything home. Economically we brought home even earlier because there were good contracts, many strikes, politically we brought home from the seventies onwards. The Piera speaking now is symbolic, the season speaks here, who knows how many women like me... Economically we were already doing well, but in terms of politics it wasn't good at all, there were repressions, they were in charge, you never were in charge. If you declare war you must be able to win it, I declare war if I win otherwise I'll queue between my legs. When the universities exploded in 1969, the students gave us something back, I've always wanted this, that is, whoever goes up must give something back to me, to me as a producing world, to the Piere Zanotti workers who produce, to the farmers who produce everything. Knowledge is the first to warn, France first, Italy, the whole world, thanks to the students they exploded and we entrusted ourselves to them. It wasn't like with the Red Brigades, when we didn't rely; the workers didn't trust the BR but they trusted the students. And thanks to them feminism also came out, women came out and the first group that formed in Milan was in Via Cherubini, there were women who still meet today, and the newspapers, readings and everything began to come. To me it seemed like a landing place, I was born. I listened eagerly to what they said. The workers are emotional, they are not intellectuals, and I waited for Saturday to listen, because they met on Saturday, from 7 to 10, then at 10.15 I had the bus; I listened without feeling yet authorized to speak, because knowledge has always crushed me. That is, me having to talk to a lawyer, a doctor, a teacher, girls, now I laugh, but I didn't laugh then, I drank their productions, their rants and I was so shy that I listened and then walked away. But thanks to them I was born, I in Via Cherubini, at Lia Cigarini, I will always say thank you to the great women of national feminism. Even if they do things today that I don't like, I will like them less tomorrow, but thanks to them Piera, the Pieras were born. Because if there wasn't feminism, I don't know if we would have had so much lesbianism. We arrive at 1971 in May, where one person from Rome, three or four from Turin, two from Milan and a few others went out to San Remo, with pseudonyms, except for someone who didn't work as an employee. These people who came out, or they were students or very large intellectuals, one with a publishing house, Pezzana, Coen, Sismondi (it was a pseudonym because he worked as a professor) and sixteen-year-old Mario Mieli. Until 1974 I stayed with Mieli, I went a long way with him. He had no problem going out with his name, with his big rings, with painted lips, with heels, with a boy's suit and tie. When he returned from San Remo he called a few people to him, we got together as best we could; we were a bit naïve, brand new. I came away from Cherubini and approached him; we found ourselves without a minimum of organization or coordination, until in 1972 there was a national pre-conference here in Bologna, at Re Nudo, but the women were few or none. We were a large company of men with a few small women, because it has always been more difficult for women than for men. Then in 1974 it was the women who broke with the men who had been allowed to publish only one issue of the newspaper FUORI, il FUORIdonna which I, in burning my archive, I've lost. I mean that gays are male anyway. Wait a moment, I don't want to discriminate against them, because the Church which remembers Sodom and Gomorrah already discriminates against them, while according to the Church, women have never transgressed.
Someone says that communism died with the Berlin Wall, someone says for the Polish Woytila, for me communism and the conquests of the working class died in Turin with the failed strike at FIAT which sent 40 thousand to the streets for the right to work against those who struck. This is what I can tell you as a woman who produced, a proletarian, a worker. Instead, as a feminist, lesbian politician, in those years she conquered a lot of things but on the economic side we gave back everything that we had managed to recover. All. There was no longer a good contract, until in 1985 the so-called reconversions, restructurings, redundancies occurred, which I underwent before they sent me into early retirement, and I was happy because life was already bad in the factory. Thus ends my productive life. someone says for the Polish Woytila, for me communism and the conquests of the working class died in Turin with the failed strike at FIAT which sent 40 thousand to the streets for the right to work against the strikers. This is what I can tell you as a woman who produced, a proletarian, a worker. Instead, as a feminist, lesbian politician, in those years she conquered a lot of things but on the economic side we gave back everything that we had managed to recover. All. There was no longer a good contract, until in 1985 the so-called reconversions, restructurings, redundancies occurred, which I underwent before they sent me into early retirement, and I was happy because life was already bad in the factory. Thus ends my productive life. someone says for the Polish Woytila, for me communism and the conquests of the working class died in Turin with the failed strike at FIAT which sent 40 thousand to the streets for the right to work against the strikers. This is what I can tell you as a woman who produced, a proletarian, a worker. Instead, as a feminist, lesbian politician, in those years she conquered a lot of things but on the economic side we gave back everything that we had managed to recover. All. There was no longer a good contract, until in 1985 the so-called reconversions, restructurings, redundancies occurred, which I underwent before they sent me into early retirement, and I was happy because life was already bad in the factory. Thus ends my productive life. for me communism and the conquests of the working class died in Turin with the failed strike at FIAT which sent 40 thousand to the streets for the right to work against those who went on strike. This is what I can tell you as a woman who produced, a proletarian, a worker. Instead, as a feminist, lesbian politician, in those years she conquered a lot of things but on the economic side we gave back everything that we had managed to recover. All. There was no longer a good contract, until in 1985 the so-called reconversions, restructurings, redundancies occurred, which I underwent before they sent me into early retirement, and I was happy because life was already bad in the factory. Thus ends my productive life. for me communism and the conquests of the working class died in Turin with the failed strike at FIAT which sent 40 thousand to the streets for the right to work against those who went on strike. This is what I can tell you as a woman who produced, a proletarian, a worker. Instead, as a feminist, lesbian politician, in those years she conquered a lot of things but on the economic side we gave back everything that we had managed to recover. All. There was no longer a good contract, until in 1985 the so-called reconversions, restructurings, redundancies occurred, which I underwent before they sent me into early retirement, and I was happy because life was already bad in the factory. Thus ends my productive life. proletarian, worker. Instead, as a feminist, lesbian politician, in those years she conquered a lot of things but on the economic side we gave back everything that we had managed to recover. All. There was no longer a good contract, until in 1985 the so-called reconversions, restructurings, redundancies occurred, which I underwent before they sent me into early retirement, and I was happy because life was already bad in the factory. Thus ends my productive life. proletarian, worker. Instead, as a feminist, lesbian politician, in those years she conquered a lot of things but on the economic side we gave back everything that we had managed to recover. All. There was no longer a good contract, until in 1985 the so-called reconversions, restructurings, redundancies occurred, which I underwent before they sent me into early retirement, and I was happy because life was already bad in the factory. Thus ends my productive life. and I was happy because life was already bad in the factory. Thus ends my productive life. and I was happy because life was already bad in the factory. Thus ends my productive life.
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