Queer ancient civilisations

The Ancient Romans and Greeks had very broad and fascinating norms around gender and sexuality, expressed in the bevy of art, monuments and historical texts surviving from that time. To learn more about queer histories of Rome, follow 'Queering Rome' on Instagram.

Julius Caesar

Homosexuality and bisexuality are complex to define in Ancient Rome. It had nothing to do with physical attraction but with who performed which role during sex: active or passive. Being the passive partner was generally perceived as degrading because it was associated with effeminacy. Passive partners were often ostracised, losing their citizen's rights.

Julius Caesar was repeatedly targeted by attacks that today would be called homophobic by his political adversaries - especially Cicero - who politically destroyed him by speaking of his attraction to men and women and his libertine behaviour. Although it was common for aristocratic men to have male lovers, Cicero positioned himself as a censor of traditional Roman morality.

Hadrian

Hadrian and Antinous are one of the most famous couples in LGBTQIA+ history. Hadrian’s sexual orientation does not seem to be definable as bisexual, as one might say for most aristocratic men of Greco-Roman background, but perhaps exclusively homosexual. There is no evidence that he felt attraction beyond the male gender, and his marriage to his female cousin was notoriously unhappy and a façade.

Antinous's premature death at the age of 19 devastated Hadrian, who did not hide his despair. Hadrian's sister and the rest of Greek society considered Hadrian's grief inappropriate. Overwhelmed by grief, Hadrian deified his lover following the well-known Hellenistic model of Alexander the Great and his companion Hephaestion. Antinous thus becomes the oldest Western gay icon.

Oscar Wilde made Antinous an unmistakable reference for every homosexual who read The Picture of Dorian Gray, in which he describes the protagonist as an ‘Antinous’, referring to his homo/bisexuality.

The 18th Century Hellenist archaeologist and art historian Johan Joachim Winckelmann said that all works of art, regardless of the gender they represented, were supposed to have an erotic charge. During the era of Enlightenment, homoeroticism was still frowned upon, and Winckelmann took a risk in speaking of the male body as ‘beautiful’, a category reserved to the feminine, unlike the ‘sublime’.

Apollo Belvedere

The Apollo Belvedere is considered beautiful and therefore sexually available to male erotics, as was applied to statues of female deities, thus also unmasking his homosexual tendencies. Unlike other descriptions of Apollo as the ideal beauty to which men should aspire and women should submit, Winkelmann explicitly says that men should also submit to it, a comment that risked making his position socially vulnerable.

Diana

Artemis/Diana has often been considered, in the processes of reappropriation that emerged within second-wave feminism in the 1970s and 1980s, as a symbol of lesbian women. This is because, according to myth, Diana is one of the few deities in the Greco-Roman pantheon who does not engage in sexual relationships with men.

In truth, however, she does not engage in them at all, and for this reason, she has been further re-appropriated by the asexual community. However, one must be careful not to use too many mythological figures in the reconstruction of queer identities, as there is a risk of conveying the message to people outside the LGBTQIA+ community that if these stories are only found in legend or religion, they do not truly exist.

Alexander the Great

The relationship between Alexander the Great and Hephaestion is well-known. In the context of Ancient Greek society, it was normal for aristocratic pupils to be assigned to an older man so that they would learn from him. This mentoring relationship would often involve the mentee becoming, in some ways, a lover for the older man. This was called pederasty and was supposed to strengthen the relationships between powerful male individuals in Greek aristocracy and often evolved into long-lasting closeness between the two.

Alexander and Hephaestion are not the only two examples that went down in history: the same is true for Achilles and Patroclus in the Iliad, and for other mythical warriors such as Nisus and Euryalus in the Aeneid. However, the Greek concept of pederasty was never fully understood in Ancient Roman culture. In Latin literature, pederasty often appears to be used simply as a literary motif implying sexual intercourse between men.

Trajan's Column

On the reliefs depicting the conquest of Dacia sculpted on Trajan's Column, a ‘gay kiss’ - or a very tight embrace between two men, certainly not Roman as they wear pants - seems to be depicted. There is no certainty about who they are, perhaps they're natives fleeing the Roman invasion of Dacia. While we know nothing about the customs and traditions of the conquered Dacians, we know that Trajan was an emperor who had male lovers and who perhaps, like his successor Hadrian, had no interest in women.

The Farnese Hercules

The Farnese Hercules is another statue described by Winckelmann as a fusion of beauty and the sublime. Technically, no male nude could be considered beautiful, as it represented 'masculine brute force' and not the passivity implied by beauty. The beauty of the Farnese Hercules would be reappropriated only later, in the 1800s, with the decline of the aristocracy of the Ancien Régime and all claims of the existence of a delicate and beautiful masculinity. Its affirmation as a model of total and dominant masculinity is intrinsically linked to the pervasiveness of the bourgeois mentality that emerged after the French Revolution.

Wilhelm Von Gloeden

The echoes of LGBTQ+ art and society in Ancient Greece and Rome reverberate through history for centuries. German photographer Wilhelm Von Gloeden is perhaps the clearest and most documented example of the intentions with which many wealthy travellers from Central and Northern Europe, where there were laws punishing homosexuality, approached Italy, particularly the South. Living in Taormina, Von Gloeden used local boys as models for photos that were supposed to replicate an idyllic Greco-Roman imaginary tableau populated by semi-nude boys, with bodies similar enough to those of ephesian statues.

Von Gloeden's homosexuality was no secret, but his case is similar to that of other aristocrats and upper-middle-class people who travelled to southern Italy, Greece, or North Africa. This travelling was, in fact, sexual tourism, with wealthy foreigners using their privilege and enjoying the absence of homophobic laws in the places they visited.