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Italian.Queer.Dangerous
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Bring on the
demonic posession!


satan

by Tommi Avicolli Mecca


originally published
at beyondchron.org
August 19, 2008


For more of my writings,
go to beyondchron.org.




























Did you hear the latest theory about what causes homosexuality? Forget dominant mothers and absent fathers. It’s a “contagious demonic factor.” Freud can rest in peace at last. Demons, those devilish critters no one has ever seen and who exist to wreck absolute havoc on Earth, not to mention steal our immortal souls, actually make people queer.

At least according to Father Jeremy Davies, the exorcist (as in the old Hollywood flick of the same name) of Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor who heads up the Catholic Church in Wales and England. Davies has a vested interest in demons. He has done literally thousands of exorcisms in London. In 1993, he created the International Association of Exorcists. He’s even written a book on the subject of every fundie’s favorite evildoers (not George Bush and Dick Cheney).

Davies, a 73-year-old Catholic priest who doesn’t seem to want to retire quietly into an old priests home, sees these evil spirits at work everywhere, and I do mean everywhere. Not only in homosexuality, gay marriage, abortion, contraception, human cloning, pornography and promiscuity, all of which are tools of these demons (who are obviously working overtime, hope they have a good benefits package), but also in yoga and Eastern practices, such as acupuncture. And you thought that New Age stuff was harmless.

Then there’s magic, fortune telling and seances, which just invite the devil to come pay you a visit and lure you away with his version of “Want some candy, little girl?” Watch out for those seemingly harmless daily horoscopes in the morning paper. They, too, can give the devil an opening to seize your soul and condemn you to an eternity in hell fire.

And don’t forget that old-fashioned “demonic music,” which is “destroying millions of young people in our time.” Elvis was bad enough with his gyrating hips. Imagine how much easier it is to lure young people into those near occasions of sin with popular music these days.

You’re probably rolling on the floor with laughter by this point, but here’s the clincher: “Even heterosexual promiscuity is a perversion,” Davies writes in his (hopefully not bestselling) book, Exorcism in Scripture and Practice, “and intercourse, which belongs in the sanctuary of married love, can become a pathway not only for disease but also for evil spirits.” Isn’t any thing safe?

And guess who’s ultimately to blame for all the increased activity of demons in the world today? Why militant atheists, of course, such as myself.

I’ll take my bow now.

Question everything

young me


by Tommi Avicolli Mecca
c 2008

photo from 1970





















































family pic

by Tommi
Avicolli Mecca
c 2007



photo of Mecca family from early 1900s



























singing






promo of video














statue of liberty










"Question everything." I have that posted above my desk in my room.

It’s a principle I live by. Always has been. At least since I was 16 and announced at Thanksgiving dinner that I didn’t believe in god anymore. My Roman Catholic family didn’t blink. They kept on eating Mama’s homemade lasagna. They were used to me saying outrageous things.

Mama had decided early on that I was well-named. “Doubting Tommaso,” she called me. She had a habit of mixing English and Italian. The nickname was a reference to the apostle who didn’t believe that Jesus had risen from the dead. 

The priest in religion class wasn’t as understanding. He had me stay after school for the rest of the year, to sweep floors and scrape gum off of the bottom of desk tops. As if that was going to make me stop wondering how Catholics could believe in three gods, yet still be monotheistic. “It’s a mystery of the faith, you’ll understand it when you die,” just didn’t cut it for me.

Writing was my salvation. Mama had an old Underwood typewriter in her bedroom. I’d stand on a small stool to reach the top of the bureau it sat on. She wouldn’t let me take it into my room, even though she never used it. For hours, I’d tap away on that keyboard, churning out pages that I hid under my tee-shirts or carried with me in my back pack.

I could put anything I wanted down on paper. Even my most secrets feelings. Like how I lusted after the Sicilian boy with the black hair and olive skin who lived two blocks away. If anyone ever found it, I’d say I was writing from the perspective of a woman. Writers did things like that. They were expected to be weird.

My father didn’t react well to my pronouncement that I was going to be a writer. “You’re gonna waste your life!” he yelled before he stormed out of the room. Eventually he came to accept what I wanted to be. Sort of. “Do whatever you want. Just don’t write nothing about this family or I’ll beat the crap outa ya.” 

My brother helped me understand that rebelliousness was a time-honored tradition among writers. He gave me a copy of a play he had just read. “No Exit” changed my life. I read everything by Jean-Paul Sartre I could find in the underground bookstore in Center City Philadelphia. It was a dingy hole in the wall. I spent many hours in those narrow aisles soaking up some of the greatest thinking of the 20th century. Not to mention breathing in dust that Walt Whitman had probably dragged in a century before.

As my hair grew longer and my feet carried me to antiwar marches and eventually gay liberation meetings, I carried Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” in my back pack along with the “Communist Manifesto.” I quoted Jean Genet and James Baldwin to guys who picked me up when I hitch-hiked to and from college, even though some of them were more interested in something other than literary matters.

The first public reading of my work came after I won the Temple University “Young Poets” contest (1971). I had just come out of the closet. I walked to the mic and introduced the first poem, mentioning that it was written for a guy I had been romantically involved with.

No one breathed until I finished.



la famiglia e' tutta



staring at papa
from a chair by the window
of that warm hospital room in south philly

two strokes and he is
shrunken
caved in
not at all the goliath who could
anesthetize me with a word
slay me with a glance

motionless is the hand
that kept me in line
mute the voice that reminded me
time and again
how much I disappointed him

the queer activist son
who put his passion for social justice
ahead of his duty not to shame la famiglia

now like the prodigal son
I have returned
answering the call of genes and chromosomes
voices echoing from a place I can't define
"la famiglia e' tutta"
family is everything

I ask my aunt if there's anything I can get him
she's sitting in her quiet vigil by his bed
her fingers caressing the large brown beads
of an old rosary
"what he can't have back," she says
"his son"

published in Philadelphia Poets, 3/08


the peaceniks

music with a social conscience

featuring:

Tommi Avicolli Mecca:  Guitar, vocals
Diana Hartman:              Vocals
John Radogno:               Guitar


to listen to the peaceniks:

click here or on the picture


the videos




"Silent Night, Homeless Night"

featuring the peaceniks
and Renee Saucedo as the homeless woman

(click on picture to see it)








"America loves immigrants:
Part One: The Italians"

opening video from
Italian.Queer.Dangerous

(click on picture to see)

 email: tommi@avicollimecca.com
peaches the cat              

                                    






cat running



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