My name is Marco but people know me with my artist name Magió.
I am 32 years old and I was born in a small village near Catania, Sicily (Italy). Growing up in Sicily hasn’t been easy. It is a very catholic and conservative village. There was a time when I really hated it and felt out of place. Everything was about family, religion and “what could the neighbor think?”. Sicily is full of social conventions and it is always important to check how to behave or speak to avoid to piss of anybody. I always felt out of place and I never knew why. I was trying to be somebody else to make everybody happy. The best is that at the end nobody was happy, including myself.
But as a Sicilian I am really good in complaining, but don´t misunderstand me, I still had a great childhood. My parents were pretty open for Sicilian standard; they gave me anything i needed and maybe even more. They liked to spoil me and my sister, who always stands by my side until today. She was the only one who always understood me and with whom I was able to be myself.
At school all the boys never understood or liked me. I was pretty feminine, loud and eccentric so I wasn’t fitting in at all. I was confused most of the time and i was trying to copy the other boys to avoid problems. Of course it never worked and between 10 and 14 years I was bullied pretty often.
Luckily I always had a love for art and drawing, so my big imagination and the drawing itself always made me happy. When I was 14 I went to study in an Art School, where I was finally finding a bit my place and people with same interests. Most important: The bullying stopped.
I always liked boys since I was a child, but at the beginning it was difficult for me to understand these feelings, especially admitting it. At that time I was praying every night. So for me being gay was a sin that I couldn’t accept. I thought i was born wrong. It was 2006 when for me being gay in Sicily wasn’t just bad- it was also unimaginable. At that time I thought that as a gay guy I couldn’t find love- only sex. Thank god I was wrong, but it took me a while to learn about that.
After losing my virginity in a car with a 42 year old married man, I finally admitted to myself that I was gay. From that moment I started to explore my homosexuality. It was a long journey with a lot of bad experiences.
One of the biggest companions of this journey was gay porn. My love for porn started when I was really young. Before to meet gay people and discover gay bars, my only place to learn about homosexuality was porn. Probably because of that I thought that being gay meant being beautiful, muscular, masculine and blonde. I was too feminine with an “ugly” voice and according of the standard of that time, I wasn´t pretty at all, at least I didn’t feel like it. For this reasons I always felt that I wasn’t good enough. In the gay community I felt judged and left aside, because I was too feminine. Is probably for this reasons that in the past I never felt part of it. I hung out in the Catania gay scene of Catania for a while, I had some boyfriends and many gay friends. But none of those relations were long or real. I also wasn’t having a lot of sex neither. Because of my catholic background, after having one night stands, i always felt wrong and empty. So I was mostly going from one short relationship to another.
Catania still is a small city, so the gay scene it´s not so big. After a while I realized that everyone knew and has fucked each other. I felt rejected from my own community.
Also most of sicilian gay guys at that time where still in their closet, had just gay friends and were going just in gay bar. And I was really tired to live like a minority. The fact that I was gay didn´t mean that I had to hide myself. So I stopped to go to gay bar and started to come out to all my friends and trying to be myself as much as possible. My straight friends were the one who taught me to love myself the way I was. I started to love being gay.
I came out to my parents a bit later, and I am really happy about that. I decided to tell them about my homosexuality just when I was 22 and I was sure about myself and my “choices”. I actually thought they always knew but they were pretty surprised when I did it. I never had an amazing relation with my father but I don´t know why one day I felt so comfortable with him that i just told him. I think he always knew but was too scared to admit it. He wasn’t too surprised and wasn’t too happy neither. He was mostly worried about what the people of the village would have think. I never officially came out to my mother because he told her even if I asked him not too. One day when we were on the car she told me she knew and she started to make questions. She was angry and devastated so she told me a lot of mean things. It was my fault because I waited too long to tell her, but the truth is that I was scared from her, and I was right. She tried to convince me that was just a phase, that was a bad idea for my future and she even asked me if my penis was broke. Even though I am still hurt from that situation I still have to think that it didn´t go too bad; they didn’t kick me out from the house and they never stopped to loved me. But I am happy that I came out when I was sure about it because no matter what they said to me I wouldn’t have changed my mind. As I said, they were pretty open for Sicilian standard, but not enough for being gay. I can understand that it had to be difficult for them, and I think that it still is. I know they were worried about me and wanted me to have “normal life”. I had a long and serious relationship at that time, so even though my parents never accepted the fact that I was gay they liked my boyfriend so they started to deal with it. But they asked me to not tell anything to the rest of the family. I wasn’t´t happy about this request but I understood it.
It took me a while to find my voice, but when I discovered design, I found my way.
I always wanted to leave Catania, but not because I didn’t liked it. I love my city, our culture, our language and our amazing food. But I never felt part of it and it wasn’t only because of my homosexuality. I always have been loud with a huge personality and I always felt blocked there. I needed to discover myself far away from my family. Most of Italians nowadays move from their country to search a better job. But when I left Italy it was more because I needed to try something new. So 5 years ago i decided to come to Germany. I was 27 and everything was new and exciting for me. I fell in love with Bremen from the moment I arrived. Even though I wasn’t able to speak German, everybody was really nice and excited to get to know me. I met a lot of people and amazing friends which made me feel home since the beginning. Far away from all the rules and the family, I finally found my happiness here in Germany. Of course it was difficult to get fully included. Learning the language and finding a job took a lot of energy and time. But it was totally worth it.
I found really good friends and for the first time in my life they were mostly straight men. I always felt treated differently from the other guys in Italy, I was always the gay guy. But in Bremen I felt like a men who happened to be gay, I wasn’t´t feeling so different anymore and this was a huge achievement.
After a year I was in Bremen I met the love of my life,Thimo. It was love at first sight, we fell in love and moved together really quickly. Since the beginning he was an amazing supporter and helped me a lot to create my life here in Bremen. We are really different from each other and thats actually what i love from our relation. He introduced me to modern Gay culture and independent pop music. Thanks to him I made peace with the gay part of me that I always repressed, and started to embrace my feminine side. Most important we created our life together here, and Bremen became officially our home.
In the 5 year I lived here I changed different job as graphic designer till I found the right place were i still work and which i really love. And in all this time wherever i went a sketchbook was always there with me. I liked to draw my friends and whatever i saw on the street. I collected several sketchbooks and in the years I changed several styles till I finally found the style I love. As I said porn and sexuality where always an important part of my life but I have always been too scared to be too vocal about it. When I started to add some porn element to my collages I realized that I was going In the right direction. But was when I draw my first cute naked boy that I felt like I was finally doing what I always wanted to do. I think that my drawings represent me completely and also say a lot of my story. I draw erotic, because it´s my past and my desire, but I do it in a funny and cute way that give a smile to everybody.
After so many years in Hiding i finally feel completely myself, I feel loved and appreciated, but most of all for the first time I like myself as I am.