Cannelloni, closets & shame: Looking back at the 2003 gay rom-com Mambo Italiano

Welcome back to Y2GAY, where we look back at some of the wild, wacky forgotten LGBTQ+ stories of the early 2000s. This week, a pizza-flavored romcom that’s heavy on the maternal guilt.

Italians: we’re crazy, right? So loud, so obsessed with food, and so many smells! And don’t get us started on the family stuff!

Someone definitely got Canadian writer Steve Galliano started, and the result was 2003’s Mambo Italiano, a sweet, if stereotype-ridden, comedy of Italian manners. Which, to be clear, are no manners at all.

Galliano’s stand-in Angelo Barberini (an adorably young Luke Kirby) has to deal with the classic tropes of Italian heritage. Everyone is way too interested in everyone else’s lives, there are zero boundaries, and there’s way too much cannelloni. Worst of all, Barberini, at the start of the film, hasn’t come out to his family. When he does, his worst fears are confirmed. “No son of mine is a homosexual!” thunders a late-career Paul Sorvino as Angelo’s father, Gino.

How about we take this to the next level?

Subscribe to our newsletter for a refreshing cocktail (or mocktail) of LGBTQ+ entertainment and pop culture, served up with a side of eye-candy.
Subscribe to our Newsletter today

In the early 2000s, coming out as gay to your ethnic Italian family wasn’t easy, apparently. But let’s face it: it wasn’t easy to come out as straight, either. Remember 2013’s Don Jon, about a modern-day, p*rn-addicted Casanova also dealing with a repressive Italian Catholic family? It seems that gay or straight, 2003 or 2013 (or 1953 for that matter) the script hasn’t changed for this kind of story. Italians hate it when their kids start having sex with the “wrong” people, or even the right people.

It was only with The Sopranos that the culture started becoming interested in telling Italian immigrant stories that did more than skim the gabagool-packed surface. Technically, that series co-existed with Galliano’s one-man show and resultant film adaptation, but you wouldn’t know it. For Angelo Barberini, a gay, Italian take on Woody Allen’s neurotic 70s protagonists, the problem is trickier. He wants to live an openly gay life without hurting his parents. At least, that’s what he tells us. Soon enough, we see that Angelo is lying to everyone, including himself. What he really wants is to be rid of his self-loathing. And that takes more than coming out. For some, it’s a lifelong pursuit.

“Stop shitting on Italians,” Angelo’s hunky cop boyfriend Nino says, calling him a “classic self-hating Italian.” Angelo is also a classic self-hating gay man. “I have nothing in common with the gays,” he says several times. He’s tried to go to the gay village in Montreal—he hates it. In fact, apart from Nino, Angelo doesn’t have even a single gay friend.

To correct this, he ends up joining the same gay crisis hotline he called at the start. “Being gay and Italian is a fate worse than—actually there is no fate worse than being gay and Italian,” he says, reaching a crisis point. Nino is the love of Angelo’s life, the “best thing” that’s ever happened to him.

But the fact that Nino, a childhood friend, abandoned Angelo in middle school the very second his gayness started showing, somehow doesn’t raise alarm bells in Angelo’s mind. Nino sees nothing wrong with being in the closet, and after he’s outed by Angelo’s parents, he quickly slides right back into that closet and marries a woman. The broken-hearted Angelo is left to pick up the pieces. But it’s not so easy when the community you’re a part of hasn’t yet become a part of you.

This was the part that gave me some serious Y2GAY-ja vu. I remember too well when the only gay stories you’d see onscreen were all about hating yourself or trying to come out to your family, your job, your straight friends. I found myself judging Angelo with a 2026 mentality. I knew it wasn’t fair, but I wanted to yell at him, “what’s wrong with you? Don’t you know your family can’t be your entire social world?”

Angelo eventually gets on the right track, but there’s so much self-hatred standing in his way. He confesses to being disgusted by femmes, hating promiscuous gay men who party and drink, and wanting, essentially, to be an out gay man without giving up any of his straight man privileges. He gets his wish, and in 2003, maybe that was enough to feel like a happy ending. In 2026, it just feels sad. We know Angelo has such a long way to go toward accepting himself and his community. Maybe someday he’ll find a way to be a part of it, but we don’t see that happening anytime soon.

The thing I kept telling myself to remember was that coming out in 2003 was, for most people of any ethnicity, a scary and painful thing. It can’t be overstated how much has changed in the more than two decades that have passed since then. Enough to make that initial homophobic self-loathing feel like an insulting relic of the past, rather than a very real response to the broader homophobia of the world many of us had to grow up in. It’s not right to judge characters for hating themselves in response to this social stigma. But it does make things a little more flat, a little sadder than we’d like in a light comedy. And this is meant to be a light comedy, despite its lasagna-heavy themes.

Overall, I couldn’t blame Angelo too much. As a child, he was abandoned by his best friend, his fun-loving, free-spirited, tragically prematurely dead aunt, and the world around him. He had to fight to feel like coming out was something he could do, and he fight he did. I’m just glad that we’re beyond these kinds of stories now. But I also keep worrying that any day now, self-hatred is going to make a grand cultural return, and these kinds of stories will become relevant all over again.

Mambo Italiano is available to stream on Tubi.

Related

Chris Colfer weighs in on Glee reboot, Trixie’s Halloween treat & all the best LGBTQ+ releases this week
Stay in-the-know with Queerty’s midweek pop culture catch-up.

Sign up for the Queerty newsletter to stay on top of the hottest stories in LGBTQ+ entertainment, politics, and culture.