Il gay felice. Storia di un omo senza fobia

“From the day he discovered he was gay, he also understood that
being gay was a huge burden. Not something big and serious,
like his classmate Gianluca’s asthma, who couldn’t
even run. Let’s just say it was an inconvenience.”

Michelangelo is twenty-six years old, lives in Rome, and is an aspiring actor. His life, full of dreams and setbacks, might seem relatively normal if it weren’t for what he considers a curse: his homosexuality. The mere fact of being gay seems to be an obstacle, both at work, where he’s offered only stereotypical roles, and in his private life, marked by an impossible love for his straight friend Filippo. Crushed by the weight of clichés and a profound sense of shame, Michelangelo ends up convincing himself that every failure stems from that cumbersome identity. Everything changes when a serious car accident gives him selective amnesia: Michelangelo forgets the very existence of homophobia. Finally free from the judgmental gaze of others, he begins to live by his own rules, allowing an authentic, spontaneous, and radiant version of himself to emerge. This unbridled freedom transforms him into a viral phenomenon: Michelangelo becomes the symbol of “happy gays,” winning both audiences and success. But while the world seems to reward him, those closest to him begin to worry: is that sudden happiness real or just a fragile illusion? Gabriele Piazza, a performer and activist beloved on social media, here attempts for the first time a funny, compelling, yet profound novel, in which he questions how much our happiness depends on the outside world and how much on how we see it. He does so, as always, through that irresistibly ironic and deliberately naive reversal of stereotypes that made him famous on Instagram with the character of the “happy gay.” An irreverent story that explores the conflict between acceptance and denial of one’s identity, reminding us that true victory lies not in erasing evil, but in no longer allowing it to define who we are.