“Speaking of bulimia, until yesterday a child was taken to the dietician just because he was five kilos heavier than expected. That is a cruel mechanism that has branded me because I will feel fat forever and nothing will ever change my mind. I will walk down the street feeling fat even though I’m not. And I will perpetually feel inadequate. Parents are key in this. And so are educators. And the managers. And here yes, I am referring to Mara Maionchi”. In an interview given to Vanity Fair, Tiziano Ferro returns to talk about the controversy with his former record company, accused, in a roundabout way, of having convinced him to hide his homosexuality and to lose weight drastically in order to be able to sign a contract.
“I love her and I’m sure that twenty years ago these discussions weren’t so clear. But today a radical change of pace must be made, because mental health is a practical thing that must be practiced. It is a moral obligation to tell people, to artists, that the body is not a negative constraint for their art. I believe that Mara and many other people have not realized enough how traumatic and painful that attitude is, which is imprinted forever in the unconscious and in the existence of still fragile children. Today I lose their good faith. But we need to make a mea culpa and no longer take this topic lightly.”
Not only his weight, but also homosexuality could have been a problem at the beginning of his career:
“Does Barbara Alberti maintain that the word ‘faggot’ should be used freely? I trust their good faith and understand their reasoning which requires the freedom to say or write ‘faggot’ whenever they want. I want to believe him and I also envy a little those who have the possibility of choosing a term without ever having experienced the violence of receiving it as an insult. Certain words were the executioners of your mental peace, they repeated them to you as a child, in kindergarten, in elementary school, in middle school and every time you changed city, region and state. Certain words are a source of trauma and can be a vehicle of civility or incivility. Maybe we need to learn to evolve together with language.”
That unhappiness, also built following the dictates of the record company, would have pushed Tiziano Ferro towards alcoholism:
“In Los Angeles I found an entire elective family of people who became friends. I found many of these at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. The fact is that no one there asks you, as happens in everyday life, how much you earn and what work you do. Knowledge starts from the damage you have done, from the fragilities. And everything becomes more authentic, without filters. But there are also special friends like Elisabetta Canalis and Bianca Balti, women who stop playing their characters to become mothers again. Bianca is cheerful, playful, she takes everything head on. Elisabetta gives me hope, she is creative, spiritual. The feeling of friendship is absolutist: friends are always there no matter what. And that’s that. And you understand how important they are when things don’t go as you expected, like for example with the divorce from my husband Victor”
The story with Victor is over and he is not yet ready to start a new one:
“With two young children the last thing you want is to start a new relationship. At this moment I don’t have the slightest intention of entering into that meeting mechanism. If it happens, it will be like the rest of my life, where things happened by chance, like by chance I found myself living in Los Angeles.”
His children are his priority:
“It hurts me that my children’s rights are denied, because we are all equal and with equal rights: why should they have less? Why does Victor need a power of attorney to take them to school or take them to the hospital when I’m not there? I think that politicians and people who foment hatred and homophobia are people who fail to put a human face on love. They prefer to put a label where there are faces, where there is love, where there are people”
