Rosario Crocetta

OK – pay attention. Let’s go back to October, 2012. Let’s say you’re a politician running for governor of Sicily, Italy – on an anti-Mafia platform. Let’s say you’re one of ten official candidates. Let’s say you’re not only anti-Mafia, but openly gay, to boot. You don’t need to be reminded that Sicily is traditionally Italy’s most homophobic region. People think you must have a death wish. But let’s say you won the election, with more than 30% of the vote, more than five percentage points ahead of the next closest rival.

Let’s say I’m not making this up. Rosario Crocetta, age 62, accomplished the near-impossible. His election was the first time a leftist candidate won the regional governorship in Sicily since 1947, the first time an anti-Mafia candidate won, and certainly the first time an openly gay candidate emerged victorious.

In 2003, as a member of the Italian Communist Party, Crocetta had won election to become mayor of Gela, a city on Sicily’s southern coast that is his home town. He made history by becoming the first openly gay mayor in all of Italy. A year before he left office in 2009, he switched party alliances and became a Democrat. However, his anti-Mafia platform resulted in numerous death threats, requiring 24-hour-a-day police protection. Assassination plots were waged against him in 2003, 2008 and 2010. Undeterred, he went on to serve two terms as mayor of Gela, then moved on to become an Italian representative to the European Parliament before running for governor of Sicily.

When Crocetta assumed office as governor, Sicily was close to default on its debts, thanks to reckless profligacy in the regional administration, and its last governor had resigned amid claims of corruption and links to the Mafia. Crocetta was able to cope with the nearly insurmountable odds against him, until his mother got wind of an assassination plot against her son. She quit eating and died forty days later. Crocetta went into therapy.

A smoker with a penchant for blue framed glasses, Crocetta says today, “I’m homosexual, which I call a gift from God, and no, I don’t hide it one bit!”. Talking about his successful campaign for governor, he said, “the fact that I’m here is almost inconceivable. Even I’m surprised.”

James Henry Hammond

On the 150th anniversary of the U.S. Civil War, I am reminded of James Henry Hammond (1807-1864), author of the famous “King Cotton” speech made on March 4, 1859:

“You dare not make war on cotton – no power on earth dares make war upon it. Cotton is King.”

Hammond, an aristocratic Southern gentleman politician, served as a U.S. Congressman, as Governor of South Carolina and was elected to the U.S. Senate, where he served until the outbreak of the Civil War, upon South Carolina’s secessation from the Union. A Democrat, Hammond practiced law early in his career in Columbia, South Carolina. He was also a slave-holding planter who was a staunch defender of slavery and states’ rights. 

"I firmly believe," said Governor Hammond, "that American slavery is not only not a sin, but especially commanded by God through Moses, and approved by Christ through his apostles.” Additionally, he wrote that, “I repudiate, as ridiculously absurd, that much lauded but nowhere accredited dogma of Mr. Jefferson that ‘all men are born equal’.”

Hammond was also a voracious sexual rogue, and his political career suffered because of it. Hammond engaged in a passionate affair with Thomas Jefferson Withers, and two damning letters between the two provide explicit details of their sexual proclivities. Published by researcher Martin Duberman in 1981, the letters are remarkable for being rare documentary evidence of same-sex relationships in the antebellum United States. Writing to Hammond on May 15, 1826, Withers provides this example: “I feel some inclination to learn whether you yet sleep in your shirt-tail and whether you yet have the extravagant delight of poking and punching a writhing bedfellow with your long fleshen pole – the exquisite touches of which I have often had the honor of feeling.” The letter was signed, “With great respect I am the old stud, Jeff.”

Well, there you have it.

But his sexual appetites did not end there. In his diaries he described, without embarrassment or apology, his dalliances with four teenage nieces, all the daughters of Wade Hampton II. Blaming the seductiveness of the “extremely affectionate” young women, Hammond saw his political career  crushed for a decade to come, and the girls with their tarnished social reputations never married.

Nevertheless, the Hammond School in Columbia, SC, is named after him. Originally called the James H. Hammond Academy, the school was founded in 1966 as a segregation preparatory day school. Hammond's name was chosen because his grandson contributed significant money to the school's founding, and Confederate big-wigs were favored as names for white-flight private schools started as part of the backlash to racial desegregation of public schools.

Completed in 1859, Hammond’s Beech Island SC home, Redcliffe Plantation (above), is open daily for public tours. Three generations of his descendants and numerous enslaved families lived and worked at the site, which symbolizes the ambition, wealth and power of James Henry Hammond as a successful planter and politician who spent his life defending the southern plantation system and his status within it. Hammond died at Redcliffe Plantation on November 13, 1864, just two days before his 57th birthday. He thus managed to die before the Union army arrived in the area a few weeks later. General Lee surrendered the following April.