Massimo Consoli was known as "the father of the Italian gay movement". Besides being an activist, he was also an anarchist and an historian. In Italy in the 1960s, Massimo was so eager for gay activism he subscribed to ONE and The Mattachine Review, despite having only a scant grasp of English. His own pioneering work for gay equality caught the attention of SID, the Italian version of the Cia, which interrogated his neighbors, cost him his teaching job, and impelled him to move to the Netherlands.

From that safe refuge, he published his Manifesto Gay in 1971 and as a result gay activists immediately formed FUORI! with branches in Rome, Milan, and Turin. Massimo attended the Gay May Day events of 1972 and arranged Italy's first commemoration of Stonewall on June 28, 1976, just one of the "hundreds" of political events he organized, ranging from demonstrations to conferences to book lectures.

In the early 1980s he lived in New York and became good friends with Vito Russo, but after witnessing the emerging AIDS crisis he returned to Italy to educate people about the growing pandemic and the importance of safe sex. He was the first person to meet with the Italian police about crimes against gay people; he convinced them to create an office of a liaison to the gay community; and in 1992 he initiated the demonstration at the Vatican against Cardinal Ratzinger's antigay writings which discuss homosexuality in terms of "an intrinsic moral evil."

Massimo started the magazine Gay News Rome and wrote forty books, two standouts of which are Homocaust, about the Nazi's persecution of gay men, and an autobiographical novel Andata e ritorno. He also wrote a biography of Kurt Hiller, the early gay German activist. Massimo led pilgrimages to the tomb, outside Rome, of another German gay pioneer, Karl Ulrichs, annually on his birthday August 28, and he helped get a statue of Ulrichs placed at the grave.

In 1998, the State Archive of Italy's Ministry of Culture acquired his extensive archive of Italian gay activist history. Massimo died of colon cancer.