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This essay engages with current debates in the anthropology of ethics regarding the relationship between freedom and moral codes. By describing a particular understanding of the Italian concept of doppia morale (double morality) amongst LGBTQ activists in Bologna, and applying it to a number of examples, I show how it is possible to relate to moral codes or injunctions in such a way as to allow for their betrayal in certain circumstances. This claim -that one may subscribe to a code in a manner that allows for it to be broken -supports another that is foundational to some variants of the anthropology of ethics: that freedom does not lie merely in the absence of rules.

This article examines two paradoxes. The first is ethnographic: queer activists in Bologna, Italy are concerned with defining themselves in opposition to fixed categories of identity and forms of politics based on them. In so doing however, they must engage with the risk that this endeavor of differencemaking itself becomes as fixed and uniform as the identities to which it is opposed. The second paradox is theoretical: a range of anthropologists have recently argued that the relationship between theoretical and ethnographic material should be one of identity or correspondence. Yet such arguments, though highly conceptually stimulating, often reproduce in form what they refute in content: abstraction and metaphysical speculation, thus re-inscribing the difference between our concepts and our data. This article simultaneously connects these respectively ethnographic and theoretical questions, whilst also deliberately holding them apart. The beginnings of an answer to both, it suggests, lie in an explicit attention to the boundaries and differences, rather than simply the isomorphisms, between theory and ethnography. Saying globalization is your theoretical interest is a little like an astronomer saying "my theory is Mars". (Robbins 2014:70) Lines had been drawn, and though there was to be no battle, there was a tank. It was made of pink velour, and on it hung a sign reading "surrender to love". There were also uniforms. Some of the uniforms did what uniforms usually do, and clearly designated their wearers as alike in some respect. There were police uniforms, blue with white holsters for their pistols, some firemen milling around in red polo shirts, and the white and red together of the emergency medical services. Wearers of these uniforms tended to remain on the periphery, or outside of