The Catholic Church in Bologna has decided to keep mum this year over a controversial multimedia festival in the city that celebrates gender identity and sexual orientation through film, literature and extreme performance art.
Now in its fifth year, this weekend's GenderBender Festival has become both a key event on the Italian gay calendar and a thorn in the side of the local curia, who object to the fact that it is funded by the city council and the Emilia Romagna regional government.
Ahead of last year's festival the church launched an attack in Bologna Sette, the diocese's weekly newspaper, describing the festival as a "barbaric invasion that offends faith and reason" and demanding to know how local authorities could justify spending public money to finance "shows by porn stars masquerading as artists".
However, the Church's onslaught generated a storm of publicity and boosted ticket sales to around 10,000.
"This time I'm not going to say anything so as not to give them any visibility," the auxiliary bishop of Bologna, Ernesto Vecchi, told local newspaper Corriere di Bologna.
Among the highlights of this year's festival is notorious New York performance artist, Ann Liv Young, with a loud, furious retelling of Snow White in which she dances hip hop, takes her clothes on and off compulsively, sings chart hits by Beyonce and Whitney Houston and performs scenes of a graphic sexual nature.
The Bologna performance marks the Italian debut of Young's adults-only interpretation of the Grimm fairytale, which she has already taken to Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, Brussels and Vienna.
Another section of the festival is dedicated to new talent, for which organisers chose works from over 300 entries sent to them from around the world.
On the programme is the American-made Trannymals Go To Court, described by organisers as "a delightful animated short film where the genitals of transsexual people are the main characters", and Into My Eyes, an audio collage of electronic sounds and real-life voice samples from American gay chat website Dudesnude.
Some of the biggest names in contemporary British lesbian fiction are taking part in the festival's literature section.
Among the speakers are Man Booker Prize nominee Sarah Waters, best known for Victorian England lesbian love story Tipping The Velvet; Stella Duffy, famous for her thrillers starring lesbian detective Saz Martin; and author and short story writer Ali Smith, who has been nominated for the Man Booker Prize twice with Hotel World and The Accidental.
The festival's film section includes a survey of underground avant-garde cinema from 1964 to 1983 as well as the national premiere of Lagerfeld Confidential, French director Rodolphe Marconi's portrait of the flamboyant German fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld.
Bologna city council's liberal outlook has resulted in two other clashes with the Church since last year s GenderBender.
Catholic politicians got hot under the collar after a naked statuette of porn star Moana Pozzi was included among 172 figurines in the city hall's nativity scene last December, and in June this year an art exhibit at the Vicolo Bolognetti venue entitled 'The Madonna Cries Sperm' provoked national outrage and had to be cancelled at the last minute.
