Steve Galluccio – Nice Italian boys DO write about gay life!

Funkytown had just reached the million dollar mark when I met with its happy screenwriter, Steve Galluccio, at a café off Boulevard Saint-Laurent this week. “For a film to make a million in just two weeks, especially one that’s not a comedy – it’s a drama and it’s a bit dark; it reaches a certain demographic – yeah, that’s a big deal.” By a certain demographic, that could mean me: a gay boy who danced and cruised from the mid-70s to the mid-80s on Stanley Street. In fact, my very first time in a “mixed” (gay and straight) bar, at age 18, was the Lime Light, the disco after which the film’s The Starlight was based.

One novel and daring aspect of the film is that it’s bilingual, just like the city it reflects. Subtitles help you out when French is spoken – even during gay gossip columnist’s fabulous Franglais, a switching back and forth between français and anglais (French and English) that Montrealers speak and love. C’est un fabulous way to carry on, n’est-ce pas?

But the film isn’t just about dancing gay boys. Little did I know or care at the time, non-gays were also into disco in a big way; together the two groups made Montréal the number-two city for disco, after NYC of course. Steve’s script expertly wove main and sub-plots of fame, greed, drugs and yes – an Italian boy in denial about his homosexuality – that started, climaxed and resolved to leave me perfectly satisfied. Perhaps that sort of plot perfection comes from Steve’s roots in theatre, which he’ll revisit at this spring’s Montreal Fringe® festival as Master of Ceremonies. He helped get the Fringe Festival started “Twenty years ago! It seems surreal that it happened that long ago.”

His Mambo Italiano – which also was made into a hit film – was the longest-running show at Montréal’s Centaur Theatre to date. “There were over 200 shows in Montréal,” he said. “And Mambo’s been playing somewhere in the world ever since it started ten years ago. Right now it’s playing in Brazil, and soon in Kelowna and Vancouver.” It was translated into French by one of Canada’s most prominent – and also gay – playwrights, Michel Tremblay. Based on Steve’s own Italian upbringing, Mambo is a comedy about a young man and his equally Italian boyfriend and how they and their families cope – or don’t cope – with it all.

Something that Steve had in common with one of his characters was that he didn’t really come out until his mid-twenties. “There was a period when I was very lonely. I had no gay friends, I was Italian, not really meeting any gays.” So he was touched by the feedback he got from Italian gay boys about Mambo Italiano. “I get a lot of emails about Mambo – especially now on Facebook: ‘Thank you so much.’ ‘You helped me come out.’ ‘You changed my life.’ The movie brought [the subject] to the forefront that it was possible to be gay and Italian. No one ever talked about it before.”

Steve’s other works include the play In Piazza San Domenico, soon to be mounted in Germany, scripts for French-language TV comedy shows, and he created the comedy Ciao Bella – shot in French and then in English, also for TV.

His next project is a guide book to his favourite hangouts in Montréal, expected to come out later this year. But what’s Steve’s favourite hangout of all? At home with his partner of two years in western Saint-Laurent. “We’re building an extension. For my clothes,” he jokes. “Really, because I’m moving into his house, I wanted to have something that’s my own. But this is the first time in my life that I have a serious relationship. At fifty!”