The myth of Greek sex

The following is an excerpt from The Queer Thing About Sin: Why The West Came To Hate Queer Love by Harry Tanner, available now from Bloomsbury Continuum.

In the early days of ancient Greece, queer love was celebrated. The most famous warrior in antiquity loved another man, the poet whose lyrics were memorised by philosophers and kings sang of her desire for women. Men could swear oaths of undying love and live out the rest of their lives together in peace. What fragments survive of this ancient world all tell us one thing: it was not a sin to be queer.

In this extraordinary book, Harry Tanner sets out on a journey to discover the origins of homophobia in the West. He follows the traces of this sinister idea as it swept across the ancient Mediterranean. Wherever he discovers the roots of homophobia taking hold, Tanner finds a confluence of crises mirrored across the centuries. Inequality, fear and an obsession with self-control–this is how societies turn on their queer citizens, time and time again, since the dawn of history.

This is a powerful story that draws on the rich world of the ancients to reveal how homophobia infected Western religion and ideology–the consequences of which we are still living with today–and to that end how we can move forward and resist homophobia in the future.

“Happy is the man in love who works out at the gym and comes home and sleeps all day with a beautiful boy.” — Theognis of Megara, ElEgiEs 1335–6

A MODERN MYTH ABOUT ANCIENT SEX

In 1895, Oscar Wilde was on trial. Standing at the witness box, his long, dark hair neatly arranged about his face, Wilde couldn’t completely disguise his skin’s wan, waxy quality – the outward sign of the months of mental torture he had endured. A man admired by all, the audacious and eccentric darling of the London stage, had fallen. Charged with gross indecency, his private love life aired for all to see, Wilde’s trial had caused a sensation the likes of which had never been seen before. His new audience – a courtroom – listened, glued to their wooden benches, as the prosecuting QC, Charles Gill, put his question: ‘What is “the Love that Dare not Speak its Name”?’ There was a collective intake of breath. Wilde paused. Then he began to speak:

The love that dare not speak its name in this century is such great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare.

On hearing this panegyric to same-sex love, the court burst into applause, drowning out the boos and hisses of Wilde’s enemies. What is so surprising about this scene from the late 1800s is not just that an audience of Victorians should applaud this speech. It is that Wilde imagined same-sex desire had always been a pairing between an older and a younger man. Wilde was talking about a popular myth about queer love in ancient Greece: that gay love only existed between an older man and a teenager.

Wilde’s claims have more to do with his legal predicament than historical fact. So the testimony of one Antonio Migge – the Savoy Hotel’s masseur – would suggest. After a brief knock on a hotel room door, in March of 1893, he entered. The sight that met Migge’s stunned eyes was none other than Oscar Wilde in bed with a young man who could only have been ‘between sixteen and eighteen’, as the masseur later testified in court.

Wilde was 38 at the time, over twice the age of his lover. But his interest in younger men did not end at the revolving door of the Savoy Hotel. Wilde’s most famous boyfriend, Lord Alfred Douglas, was 20 when they met. The men whom his pimp – Alfred Taylor – was accused of procuring for Wilde rarely exceeded their twenties. Many of the men procured by Taylor were from vulnerable socioeconomic backgrounds, including the valet Charles Parker and his brother William, a groom, both out of work. According to the trial, Wilde had sex with some of them in his family home on Tite Street, which he shared with his wife and children.

When put on trial with his life at stake, Wilde used the example of the ancient Greek philosopher Plato to defend himself. If he could show that the elder philosophers, poets and states-men of ancient Greece – who were celebrated by the Victorians as the founders of Western civilization – found sex with young men perfectly acceptable, it could provide him with an excuse to do the same. But this involved a certain level of mythologizing, of massaging the facts, about Greek love. Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough to save him. Wilde lost. He was imprisoned in Reading and Britain’s appetite for convicting homosexual men was renewed. Queer men – among them the art critic More Adey, the journalist Robert Ross and the author Reggie Turner – fled for Paris following Wilde’s arrest.

One of Wilde’s contemporaries, a man he possibly visited when in Italy, was the pioneering photographer Wilhelm von Gloeden. Von Gloeden lived much of his life in exile from his native Germany on the island of Sicily in the hilltop citadel Taormina. Kaiser Wilhelm II’s cabinet had recently been embroiled in a series of high-profile sex scandals between men, and the combination of his ill-health and a less tolerant political climate compelled him to flee.

Taormina is a small city set into the coastline against the backdrop of the deep-blue waters of the Ionian Sea, dotted with palm trees and ancient ruins. It was the perfect getaway from inclement Germany, and gave him the freedom he needed to pursue his passions. At his villa, von Gloeden paid young Sicilian men and, disturbingly, even boys to strip naked and paint their skin with milk and glycerin before taking their photographs. They often posed with imagery from the ancient landscape they had grown up in. The works became a commercial success in von Gloeden’s own time. As in the case of Wilde’s speech, evoking classical themes shielded von Gloeden from accusations that his work was mere smut.

Between Oscar Wilde, von Gloeden and their contemporaries, the ancient world became a means to legitimize taboo desires, but a myth entered the public consciousness that somehow ancient Greece and Rome were remarkable for sexual relationships between elder mentors and their younger mentees. We assume when looking at ancient Greece and Rome that same-sex desire was culturally different there: rather than some gay men being interested in other men, all males were interested in boys.

There is very little in the way of reliable, primary evidence to support the existence of ritualized, same-sex sex acts between an older and a younger man. There is certainly visual evidence for equal-age attraction between men in Greece before the year 450 BCE, and there is certainly some visual evidence of sex between older and younger men, but there is not enough to support the claim that such a practice was widespread.

This ritualized account of ancient same-sex desire was only accentuated with the publication of a landmark study by one of British academia’s more eccentric figureheads. The Oxford classicist Sir Kenneth Dover, sporting an impressive moustache, liked to tell his students (and readers of his autobiography) the story of the time when he was standing on the edge of a cliff, so overcome by the sight of the sea and the stirring poetry of the Roman writer Horace that he unzipped his flies and began to masturbate into the waters below. Professor Kenneth Dover could never be accused of inattention to detail.

While Dover was clearly no prude, he did, like many of his generation, find it hard to imagine adult men in serious and reciprocal homosexual relationships. His autobiography also includes a vivid recollection of the first time he experienced mutual masturbation with another boy, which makes it clear he felt such horseplay was a natural curiosity that you were meant to grow out of. It was this highly biased view which coloured his interpretation of the facts in his most famous work, Greek Homosexuality (published in 1978), one of the most influential works of classical scholarship ever written.

One of the stranger claims advanced by classicists in the wake of this book was that these relationships existed to strengthen the young man’s virility. The older man’s semen – so they said – was a source of strength which flowed into the young man. The basis of these claims had nothing to do with ancient Greece, but was inspired by a practice commonplace among the Simbari people of Papua New Guinea. Even if the Simbari did perform a similar ceremony, and even if certain prurient elements have not been inferred by Western anthropologists ever on the hunt for the exotic, the example offered by one single tribe cannot be enough to support its existence in ancient Greece unless the ancient Greeks tell us this themselves.

The only material that seems to discuss such a relationship is highly biased, coming from court cases against men accused of homosexuality in Athens and from ancient comedies. If it is true that the ancient Greeks all practised ritualized homosexuality, involving ejaculating into the mouths of younger boys to strengthen their virility, we would expect to hear a great deal more about it from serious sources like historians and tragic playwrights. Given ancient writers, as we will see, were far from shy about recording lurid gay love affairs between powerful men, their reticence in describing this ritualized sexual relationship between an older and a younger man is curious to say the least.

There were gay relationships in ancient Greece, some of equal age and some between men of different ages, we know that without a doubt. We also know that abusers took advantage of the power dynamics in a heavily hierarchical society to prey on young boys. It is probable that the sanctioned mentor-mentee systems were used as cover by some men to exercise their desires. At certain times, these may have been the only avail-able structure through which homosexuality could express itself. But such exceptions do not tell us that all ancient Greek men had a bisexual predilection for younger boys. Distracted by an overly prurient interest in ritualized homosexuality, scholars have sometimes neglected the clear evidence for age-equal relationships, as well as relationships between a consenting younger adult and his older boyfriend. In other words, love.

Excerpt from The Queer Thing About Sin: Why The West Came To Hate Queer Love by Harry Tanner. Reprinted with permission.

Source: https://www.queerty.com/the-myth-of-greek-how-oscar-wilde-some-steamy-classics-a-century-of-bias-rewrote-ancient-queer-love-20260210/