Tag Archives: homosexuality in ancient Greece

Homophobia in Ancient World Historical Fiction

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I was going to post my most favorite and least favorite movies of 2011 this week.  But I just finished reading Conn Iggulden’s GATES OF ROME, and it got me thinking, and pissed off.

What’s with all the homophobia in ancient world historical fiction and its close companion heroic fantasy?

Let me be clear about what I mean.  It’s not that having a homophobic character, or depicting a homophobic scenario, is always a bad thing.  It very well may be realistic for the character or the time period.

Contrary to romantic notions about ancient Greece or ancient Rome being a bastions of homosexual freedom, the status of homosexuals was more complex.  While society was free of the religious persecution of the Christian era, and the criminal persecution of later eras, there are records of condemning male effeminacy and sexual submissiveness in public speeches and theatre.  Sometimes they appear as light-hearted jabs questioning a man’s true manhood.  Sometimes they were more severe and scandalous.

To portray gay characters in ancient times, authors ought to take into account the nuance and paradox of the times.  It is reasonable to depict, for instance, the unique social pressures affecting a gay character, and his struggle to reconcile a masculine ideal with his sexual and emotional realities.

But, you can write about homophobia without contributing to it.

One dimension of homophobia—not limited to ancient world/heroic fantasy—is the exclusion of gay and lesbian characters.  Gay men and lesbians have existed forever, but how often are they portrayed in ancient world stories?  How often are they the hero of an epic journey?

When gay/lesbian characters do appear, too often they’re killed off as a device.  Homer may have been the first author to use the trope “bury your gays.”   Remember the death of Achilles’ lover Patroclus in THE ILIAD?

Gays also come to bitter ends in Conn Iggulden’s GATES OF ROME, Nick Drake’s NEFERTITI and Ursula Le Guin’s LAVINIA.

“Bury your gays” is really bad, but I find what’s worse is the stereotypical and negative treatment of gay characters.

In David Gemmel’s LORD OF THE SILVER BOW, the one lesbian character Andromache “grows out of” her lesbianism when she meets the hetero hero Helikaon.

In Nick Drake’s NEFERTITI, the one gay character Ay is a secretive, scheming puppetmaster.  The one lesbian character is a basket case who unknowingly and tragically abets the murder of her lover.

Conn Iggulden’s GATES OF ROME is an interesting study in homophobia. The one gay character is a dandified soldier, who is in love with the Consul and Military General Sulla.  Iggulden names the gay soldier Padacus – a conscious or unconscious play on ‘paidaika,’ a pejorative for gay in ancient Greece.  Sulla fears Padacus has become too emotionally attached, and will go into a jealous rage when he’s spurned in favor of a pair of female prostitutes.  Thus, Sulla decides his only option is to have Padacus killed.  Here we have the “gay basket case” trope and “bury you gays” all in one.

I’m not saying that every gay character should be likable and have a happy ending. But when there’s zero likability and zero happy endings, you have to wonder: why the bias from all these authors?

Even Ursula Le Guin, who has been credited with promoting good female portrayals in male-dominated fantasy/sci fi, manages to jump on the gay-hating bandwagon with her ancient Roman retold legend LAVINIA.  Her token gay character Prince Turnus is an insecure buffoon who is out to prove he isn’t gay, while everyone knows he is.  Of course he meets a violent death at the hands of Aeneas, the hetero hero of the story.

Maybe Le Guin felt her rendering of Turnus demonstrates a point about prevailing sexist and heterosexist attitudes.  But the portrayal would have worked better if there were other sympathetic gay characters in the story.   As it is, Turnus’ death comes off as a righteous fact-of-life.  He is only seen through the judgmental eyes of the heroine Lavinia, who is presented as a reliable and otherwise sympathetic storyteller.

Author/producer Perry Moore went on a crusade to change the superhero genre.  I’m feeling there’s a similar need with ancient world historical fiction.  “Ask yourself: Equal Rights?” was a slogan Moore used to insert in comics on post-it notes.  We need equal rights for gays in the ancient world.  We need more gay and lesbian heroes.

The writer as researcher

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Revising my novel has taken me through many days of re-reading what I wrote,  aftershocks of beta reader feedback, soul-searching, re-drafting an outline, and now, gently putting new words down on the page.

I’ve realized what I also need to do is to get clearer in my head (and then the pages) my portrayal of male/male relationships in the fantasy world wherein the action takes place.

Of course, I have some liberties with fantasy.  I could create a world with far-flung notions of male sexuality.  But the story is also re-told myth, with an ancient world–predominantly–pre-Hellenic sensibility. Thus, there’s some squaring to be done with what we know about the ancient Greece.

There are common misunderstandings about the attitudes and practices surrounding male sexuality in ancient Greece.  On the surface, the society tends to be associated with rampant homosexuality, portrayed in parody and snarky comments–“Oh, you know what the Greeks were like…”

Earlier in my career, I facilitated anti-homophobia workshops.  One of my most memorable experiences was when I presented in front of a group of teachers, during the segment of the workshop on cultural relativism, cross-cultural and cross-historical attitudes toward homosexuality.  A young teacher, watching me intently and nodding his head along for quite some time, raised his hand and asked, with full sincerity, “Didn’t the ancient Greeks support gay marriage?”

The answer, of course, was no, certainly not as we understand “gay marriage” today.

From a modern viewpoint, many of the artistic relics–naked men on vase paintings, the kouros (idols of male beauty), and depictions of the phallus–make it seem like a society obsessed with the male form, hence, obviously very gay.  This leads to a misinterpretation of male sexuality and gender roles of the time.   In actuality, ancient Greek society was highly patriarchal, with segregated roles for men and women.  Men ruled the public realm.  Women were the keepers of the home.  The idealized man was strong, fearless and dominant.   Effeminacy was ridiculed such that a man’s reputation could be ruined if he was called out as “acting like a woman.”

Thus the abundant visual depictions of men are better understood as a reflection of male-centrism politically and culturally.  The naked male image was not meant to arouse, generally.

Still, there were nuances.  Whereas many patriarchal societies enforce a heterosexual imperative, at least in public life, in ancient Greece, exclusive heterosexuality was not a requirement of male privilege.  Many of the most powerful, respected, celebrated men of the time engaged in sex with other men, particularly during the pre-Hellenic era when same-sex pairings were a widespread tradition, at least among the upper class.  The context of male/male relationships was what mattered.

Most of what we know about homosexuality at the time comes from artwork and literature depicting the specific practice of ‘paiderastia,’ which involved discrete roles for the older, more experienced partner, the ‘erastes,’ and his younger, typically adolescent lover, the ‘eromenos.’   Such relationships had social, educational and/or political components, vis-a-vis a tutor and his pupil or a noble man and a youth from lesser aristocratic family.  In some cases, these sort of couplings began with rituals similar to a marriage—the presentation of gifts (dowry) to the eromenos, animal sacrifices and feasts.  The eromenos could choose whether or not to accept the offer of his erastes, unlike girls who rarely had say in who they married.

I’d love to know more about peer-to-peer homosexual relationships of the time, which certainly happened, but are hard to turn up in the literature.  Likely, they were less socially sanctioned since they conferred none of the advantages that were prized at the time:  child-bearing or status advancement.