Free LGBTQ+ Films at St. Bart’s Presents Visconti’s “Death in Venice”

Anthony Perrotto hosts a series, sponsored by the LBGTQ+ Community at St. Bart’s, with films having gay themes. Following the film, we'll have dinner at a local restaurant near St Bart’s.

Please enter through St. Bart's Rectory Door at 109 E 50th (between Lexington Ave & Park Ave)

Attendees must bring cash to settle their restaurant bill, as some places won’t provide individual checks for large groups. When this happens, it can be difficult to settle the bill if some people are using credit cards while others are paying with cash.

Viewed from a distinctly gay perspective, Death in Venice is a haunting portrayal of queer desire constrained by repression, shame, and the aesthetic codes of its time. Gustav von Aschenbach’s attraction to the boy Tadzio is charged not with overt sexuality, but with a deeply internalized, unspoken longing that reflects the experience of many closeted men in the early 20th century. His yearning—silent, aestheticized, and unacknowledged—is a poignant mirror of Thomas Mann’s own internal conflicts. Though Mann lived publicly as a heterosexual man, his posthumously published diaries reveal an enduring pattern of homoerotic attraction, particularly to young men, and suggest that Death in Venice was, in part, a projection of his own repressed desires.

This autobiographical undercurrent is amplified in Luchino Visconti’s 1971 film adaptation, directed by a gay filmmaker with a keen sensitivity to the nuances of coded queer expression. The film’s slow pacing, lush visual detail, and minimal dialogue underscore the silence in which queer desire often had to exist. Aschenbach’s gaze becomes the primary mode of expression, and Tadzio, a vision of impossible beauty and youthful purity, symbolizes the love and identity denied to him by both age and social convention. For gay viewers, Death in Venice resonates not merely as a story of obsession, but as a meditation on a life lived in silence—on the ache of unspoken love, the pain of repression, and the tragedy of a self never fully realized. It is a work that, beneath its classical surface, speaks intimately to the queer experience of invisibility and longing