Steve Galluccio
He/Him
Steve Galluccio started his career in the Montreal underground theatre scene in 1990. He burst into the mainstream with Mambo Italiano, one of the most successful plays in Canadian theatre history. The play was turned into a movie which became an international hit, sold in more than fifty-three countries. Galluccio followed Mambo with the Gemini Award-winning TV series Ciao Bella. Galluccio’s second feature film Surviving My Mother won the audience favourite award at the Montreal Film Festival and was featured in many prestigious film festivals all over the world. In 2023, he premiered his newest play At The Beginning Of Time, his most personal work since Mambo Italiano, at the Centaur Theatre in Montreal where it all began and was awarded Best New Montreal Play by Broadway World.
Excerpt from "You're Never Going to Make it" (2021)
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In my view, Italian culture is different from Italian-immigrant culture, or Italian-Canadian culture. Italian culture seems to be more open towards queer modes of life and queer artistic careers than Italian-immigrant culture...
The first time I went to Italy in 1976, when I was fifteen, I discovered a whole other culture. It was not my culture. I met people who were very involved in arts and culture. And it was in Italy that I first saw a gay couple walking down the street, in Cassino. They were just out in the open.
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My cousins in Italy thought it was great that I wanted to become a writer back then. But it was not well received by my Italian relatives in Canada. Even my Italian-Canadian friends in Montreal thought I would never make it. The same was true of my extended family. They believed that writing was “not for us”: we were not supposed to be doing this as immigrants. The thinking was, “you do immigrant jobs, or you become a doctor. We sent you to school for a reason, right?” It is understandable because Italian immigrants came here with almost nothing, and as children of immigrants we are the full circle of what they originally came here to accomplish.