Denis Bosnic

Cioccolatina On Her Street
San Berillo Vecchio, 2015
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Cioccolatina, Antonella, Antonio was the first girl of San Berillo to let me approach her, talk to her, photograph her. She arrived here, to Catania’s red light district, in the early 90’s when the AIDS scare washed over the overwhelmingly conservative Sicily, stigmatizing gender non-conforming people and forcing them to leave the few employment options available to them.

After losing her job as a risqué waiter and cabaret performer in one of Catania’s variety bars, the only place left to take refuge in was San Berillo, a safe haven for people unwilling to renounce living a version of their true selves, as well as one of the last remaining viable sources of income for gender non-conforming persons in the area.

The Viewing Angle
San Berillo Vecchio, 2015
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The bright light shooting sharply onto the pavement in front of a door kept ajar is an unmistakable sign that the house — mostly occupied illegally — is open and welcoming the men wandering by. At an angle that’s just right, one can catch a glimpse of Cioccolatina striking a pose, often enticing with “Amore, entra, passiamo un momento di goia insieme.” (“Enter, love, we’ll share a moment of joy”)

The Negotiation
San Berillo Vecchio, 2015
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Men, usually middle-aged or older, often make a few passes around the five or six streets of this self-contained neighborhood before approaching one of the open doors in earnest. Most of them are looking for something quick and discreet; yearning to touch male form, to allow themselves a moment of freely experiencing what they deny themselves in the world at large.

Her Room
San Berillo Vecchio, 2015
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To reach the room, one climbs an improbably narrow set of winding stairs, delving deeper and ever higher into pitch black darkness. The feeling is one of walking through a passageway devoid of any sense of space and time — the only grounding to this world the guiding hand of Cioccolatina, gentle yet reassuring.

Coming out the other end, a hidden inner sanctum reveals itself: a room with curtains drawn, in a perpetual illusion of night; a private chamber of an aristocratic woman of yore where blush and perfume is applied in front of a mirrored vanity table; and, ultimately, the implied comforts of an old-world bed.

Decadence and dilapidation, the makeshift nature of its furnishings, the random and seemingly out of place objects all magnify the semblance of a place forgotten and lost by others, willed into sight for only a scarce few.

The Breath Between
San Berillo Vecchio, 2015
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Feminine illusions the girls put on for their clients act both as a a shield of plausible deniability for the men’s consciences, as well as play into ancient tropes of control and domination over weaker, submissive female bodies: controllable, abusable, owned by others rather than inhabited by a feeling human being. Cioccolatina lets it slip that most men, after playing coy initially, relinquish the pretense of power and longingly surrender themselves to being dominated.

The Three Faces
San Berillo Vecchio, 2015
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Cioccolatina’s face, to her dismay as she’s told me repeatedly, has always been very rugged. And yet — witnessing her code-switch between Antonella, her feminine self; Antonio, her born-into gender and name; and Cioccolatina, the persona she effortlessly slips into when working in San Berillo — one realizes that binaries, gender or otherwise, are but a crude and insufficient caricature of our world to go on by.

Time and time again I would witness all three — Antonio, Antonella, and Cioccolatina — standing simultaneously in front of me. Here, in the foreground of the photograph, her face is indistinguishable from that of an archetypal image of a woman. And yet, the profile seen in the lower mirror is that of any random longshoreman unloading crates in Catania’s nearby docks. Finally, on top: a man, a woman, both and neither, an illusion manifest real.

Shoes, Chairs
San Berillo Vecchio, 2015
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Letting one’s gaze glide over the counters and into the open vanity drawers, a few things become apparent: a plethora of objects both personal and meant for facilitating the clients’ fantasies dot every available space. Some betray the haphazard way one’s life unfolds in San Berillo, some reveal impermanence, some endurance.

Bread Handle
San Berillo Vecchio, 2015
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Over time, I realized that most girls in San Berillo are superstitious, ferociously spiritual, and often believe in magic, a kind of a jumble between Catholicism and Sicilian voodoo. I came to understand this as a necessity one turns to for comfort and hope, especially when one’s life is relegated to perpetual precarity and powerlessness of social exclusion in the deeply conservative Italian south.

This piece of bread on the door handle, I suspect, had something to do with a curse placed on Cioccolatina by her landlord who unofficially rents out the squat building she’s working from. Or, more likely — and alarmingly — an object on a door handle acts as a visual cue forewarning her of someone trying to enter the room — seeing how break-ins and the resulting physical and sexual violence are an occurrence the girls have to contend with regularly.

The Role Models
San Berillo Vecchio, 2015
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Cioccolatina peruses a porn magazine with her friend and another Berillo girl, Ornella. She shares with me that the pages served as the only source of information on who she might be, as well as of inspiration on what to wear, on how to pose, on how to act with men.

My thoughts immediately turn to the current culture wars and I wonder what she might’ve been inspired by were she born a few decades later with more plentiful if arguably still insufficient representation and role models reflecting her life in today’s mainstream culture.

First Mention of St. Agata
San Berillo Vecchio, 2015
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Cioccolatina was the first girl I heard mention St. Agata, the saint protector of Catania. I found out later that most girls in the neighborhood venerate her — and for good reason: her story runs in a surprising parallel with their own and it’s worth recounting it in brief.

St. Agata was a young woman born in ancient Roman times with the great misfortune of being the object of desire of a Roman prefect Quintianus, steadfast in his belief that he could dissuade Agata from her vow of chastity, her Christian faith, and ultimately have her marry him. -> continued under the next photograph

Defiant Duality
San Berillo Vecchio, 2015
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[–> continued] Agata was imprisoned multiple times and, as a punishment for not submitting — attested to by many particularly disturbing religious paintings in the city’s churches — her breasts were clipped off with a set of iron tongs. In a defiant act of divine intervention, they were restored to their “true form” after a healing touch from St. Peter appearing to Agata in her cell.

Every girl I talked to mentioned St. Agata at one time or another, always remarking on how, from an early age, they admired the many gruesome yet oddly reassuring painterly depictions of her story in the churches of Catania.It’s clear why her figure, both the historical and the bodily one, occupies such a special place for people born into a discordant duality of spirit and form.

While many in their early teenage years would wish to be miraculously healed from this split, most of the ones I talked with come to terms with the body they were given while cherishing their mind’s image of their true self. For all that, there are those looking for ways of aligning the two more closely, mostly through the miraculous touch of modern medicine.

Lulú’s Alley
San Berillo Vecchio, 2015
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Taking a few steps from Cioccolatina’s door and swinging around the corner, one enters a short alley whose most prominent occupant is without doubt Lulú. Light from scooters, now and then taking a turn at a nearby cul-de-sac, floods the otherwise drab, run-down passageway and illuminates her face in the most spectacular ways — her figure and face as if drawn out from behind the arched stone doorway out of the night into an ephemeral explosion of exuberant color.

Lulú’s Eyes
San Berillo Vecchio, 2015
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The first thing anyone notices about Lulú, rightly so, are her eyes — their gaze intense and magnetic, yet fragile, avoidant, alarmed. While there’s a deep history authentically ciphered in them, at times one spots an undeniable rehearsed quality to the agitated stares she offers to the foot travelers passing by.

Chiaroscuro At Her Door
San Berillo Vecchio, 2015
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Meeting her.

Lulú’s Room
San Berillo Vecchio, 2015
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Proprietor of one of the classier rooms in the neighborhood, Lulu’s is considered in many ways royalty of the neighborhood — with everything that comes with it. More reserved, more sought after, in my estimation generally envied and often talked badly about.

The Melancholy of Bling
San Berillo Vecchio, 2015
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I’d never seen anyone walk in high heels in such an elegant, seductive, fragile way before.

Brigida’s Street
San Berillo Vecchio, 2015
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One of the larger streets of San Berillo with a crossroad ahead acting as a delineation of where the girls from where the women, usually from Latin America, work. The two groups usually alert each other if troublemakers — rowdy men, or police — is spotted in either part of the neighborhood, though I haven’t seenthem interact much beyong small talk.

Ramona’s Peeking Window
San Berillo Vecchio, 2015
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Ramona’s room was