Source: Daily Mail, Reuters
Gay rights groups and free-speech activists say Italy's state television censored Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain when it aired the Oscar-winning movie by cutting scenes of gay sex.
The version which the state broadcaster RAI TV ran on Monday night, starting at 10:45 pm, did not include scenes where the two cowboys, played by Jake Gyllenhaal and the late Heath Ledger, first make love in a tent and a later kissing scene, Reuters reports.
Brokeback Mountain, which won three Oscars in 2005, is a romance about two ranch-hand friends who start an affair when they meet on a fictional Wyoming mountain in the 1960s.
Activists blast Italian state TV for censoring 'Brokeback Mountain' [contd.]
"Don't they think an adult audience could have withstood kisses and effusive love between two men?" Auerilio Mancuso, the head of Italy's largest gay rights group, Arcigay, was quoted as saying in the daily newspaper La Repubblica, according to Reuters.
In overwhelmingly Roman Catholic Italy, skimpily dressed women are a fixture on many TV programs, while scenes of sex and violence in movies are generally left untouched, Daily Mail reports.
'It is grotesque that RAI censored scenes that have the same content as those seen in most prime-time movies,' Benedetto Della Vedova, a conservative lawmaker, was quoted as saying by the Corriere della Sera newspaper.
RAI said it had originally planned to air the cut version in an earlier time-slot, but aired it by mistake in the late-evening start time, according to London's Daily Mail.
Activists protested that the broadcaster would never have dropped similar scenes, even for early-evening broadcast, if had they involved a heterosexual couple.
'I don't believe it was an oversight, I believe it was preventive censorship,' said gay rights advocate and former lawmaker Vladimir Luxuria, according to the Daily Mail.
In an interview with La Repubblica, Luxuria said cutting the key scenes was 'like showing the Mona Lisa without its head.'
Luigi Vimercati, a center-left lawmaker, told Corriere he would take up the issue in parliament, according to Daily Mail.
Source: Italian TV station blasted by gay rights groups after cutting Brokeback Mountain sex scenes | London Daily Mail
Italy's RAI chided for cutting Brokeback Mountain | Reuters
Last modified: 17 May 09 11:11
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