It was just over a week after a coalition of populist and right-wing parties won a majority of votes in Italy’s parliamentary election, and the former senior adviser to President Donald Trump sounded positively besotted as he gushed about the manliness and brio of Benito Mussolini. “He has all that virility,” Steve Bannon told The Spectator of London. “He also had amazing fashion sense, right, that whole thing with the uniforms.”

Given his own sartorial and hygienic proclivities—layering collared shirts and looking as though he hasn’t showered for days—it was strange to behold Bannon extolling interwar Italian couture. Social media feeds lit up with quips about the homoerotic subtext of Bannon’s Mussolini crush. This may have been an unexpected instance of a connection made between fascism and gay masculinism, but it is hardly without precedent. Gay men, closeted or otherwise, have featured prominently in fascist movements—despite the seemingly obvious contradiction between their sexual orientation and a political program that has usually been explicitly hostile to it. Ernst Röhm, for a time arguably the second most powerful Nazi leader, was gay—as were several senior figures in his paramilitary organization, the Sturmabteilung (SA).