Band of Thebes

Coming Out in Anicent Greece: 18 Year-Olds Run Nude Torchlit Race

 

Next time the conversation rolls around to bemoaning the world we've lost and your friends are stuck on the old oxymorons -- Manhattan apartment, living wage, political civility -- try quoting James Davidson in his breathtaking book The Greeks and Greek Love. Discussing how society announced the transition from off-limits boyhood to expected dating at age eighteen, he writes:

"In fact they seem to have 'come out' in a rather spectacular fashion in Athens, running a nude torch race during the night before the great summer festival of Athena's birthday, the Panathenaea, from the altar of Love in the gymnasium of the Academy outside the city walls to an altar in the city. Of course the spectacle attracted an audience. Comic authors describe people waiting at the city gate in Ceramic parish to welcome these new graduates with "slaps of Ceramicus" ... and for those men who didn't yet have boyfriends it must have been like a bit like an express cattle market."

That's not such a surprise when you remember athletes in the original Olympics competed naked. But dry your tears because it turns out nude races are thriving throughout the US, Canada, England, and Spain (home of the legendary Patxi Ros nudist run each September, far below). Last weekend was the Running Bare 5K in Pelion, South Carolina and the Bare Buns Run in McDade, Texas AND the Bare Burro 5K in Colton, California. This coming weekend is the Fig Leaf 5K in Dawsonville, Georgia and the Skinnydipper Sun Run in Decatur, Texas. The following weekend is the Hidden River Trail Streak in St. George, Georgia and the Dare To Go Bare 5K in Lutz, Florida. The list goes on and on. If you're going to suggest that Depew, Oklahoma is a long way from Athens, wait till May 16, when a sizable contingent of Bay to Breakers run naked as Bare to Breakers, covering 12K of San Francisco and nothing else. They encourage "the enjoyment of photographing bare runners."

The Panathenaea it is not, but each Halloween season at least five American cities host Naked Pumpkin Runs. Thank you, Boulder, Seattle [below], Portland, Arcata, and Sebastopol. This will allow certain types many centuries hence to say, Oh, look what we missed! Why couldn't we live in 2010? They used to put carved pumpkins over their heads and run naked through the streets.

October 24: The Festival of Antinous

Exactly 1,878 years ago today, Hadrian's nineteen year old boyfriend Antinous drowned in the Nile. They had known each other for five or six years, and possibly they were growing apart. That day was the Festival of Osiris, the god of the Afterlife, and because he also had drowned in the Nile, it seemed too coincidental for Antinous's death to be an accident, which it may have been. Some historians believe he committed suicide, others have darker theories.

Hadrian's outpouring of emotion -- was it pure grief? or was it partly guilt? -- was unprecedented. Six days later, on October 30, the emperor directed his men to begin building a city called Antinopolis there on the banks of the river. Back in Rome, at his Tivoli villa of more than 30 buildings covering 250 acres, Hadrian told his architects to create the Antinoeion, which was only discovered 10 years ago, in 1998, and is still being excavated. Pieces of a colossal statue of Antinous unearthed there are on display in the British Museum's exhibit. The statue above, depicting Antinous as Osiris, was discovered near the site of the Antinoeion in 1738 and is on loan from the Vatican.

Hadrian further stunned his contemporaries by declaring Antinous was a god (making him the last non-Emperor god of the Roman era, in fact), and as a deity people began to worship him. Historians know the festival of Antinous was celebrated annually for at least one hundred years throughout many regions of the Empire and perhaps into the fourth century A.D. Its popularity further sped the creation of dozens of busts and fullbody statues of the handsome teen.

The final sentence below is the most important one I read in London:

"Hadrian built a large temple and set up a festival in Antinous's memory. Other Greek cities began to establish their own cults and festivals in honour of Antinous, led by local and senatorial leaders, who wanted to express their loyalty to Rome and to Hadrian. The cult became popular among the common people, where it seems to have competed with Christianity."

Imagine life today if those common followers of the cult of a gay god, Antinous, had exceeded the other fledgling cult. (They knew he was gay. My BF awesomely started reading Gibbon after the exhibit and even Gibbon matter of factly calls Hadrian and Antinous lovers; and he wrote his little book in 1776.)  Human nature being a constant, it might not have changed much, yet everything would be different. With most Western countries primarily worshiping a gay nineteen year-old muscle twink (a few evangelically; millions quietly and decently; millions more in name only, once a year a so), our world would be, well... Abercrombie?

In fact, a cult of Antinous appears to exist. In Hollywood. Lots of bright, brand new paintings of Antinous in a very excited state [healthy!], but sometimes smoking [unhealthy!]. Their doctrine is eleven pages, illustrated. And, yes, they have a gift shop.

Hadrian at the British Museum

The British Museum's Hadrian: Empire and Conflict is groundbreaking not simply because it acknowledges his ardor for Antinous but because it rightly views their love as central to the emperor's life and explains such relationships were common among upperclass men of that time. Hadrian always went his own way: He was the first Roman emperor to wear a full beard and the first to have himself portrayed in a full statue as a Greek god, in this case, Mars, nude. He was also much more open about being gay, and grieved more publicly than his peers thought prudent when Antinous drowned in the Nile at nineteen.

From outside the museum's entrance, visitors are lured by a buff Antinous as Osiris dominating the enclosed courtyard. [More on that, Friday, the 1878th anniversary of his death.] This statue is the only piece from the show that can seen for free (exhibition tickets are twelve pounds) and, true to the tenor throughout, its description begins: "Antinous was the lover of the Roman Emperor Hadrian." Unlike other museums, they won't whitewash history to appease outdated prejudices. As a preamble to the exhibit, a video says, "Although married to Sabina, he openly adored his Greek lover Antinous." The room devoted to Antinous gives much deeper detail. In Thorsten Opper's excellent catalog to the show, the Antinous chapter starts even more succinctly: "Hadrian was gay." Gone is the absurdist pretzel-logic nonsense about us imposing twentieth century mores on earlier times; by that reasoning you couldn't refer to George Washington as caucasian.

If you don't see the show before it closes Sunday, you might consider buying that catalog. The hardcover is a bargain here at $29.95 now $19.77 from Amazon, whereas there in the shop it's forty pounds. Or, of course, you can reread Marguerite Yourcenar's masterpiece Memoirs of Hadrian, translated from the French by her partner of forty-two years, Grace Frick.

True 10: Gay Australian Diver Wins Olympic Gold

Earning four perfect 10s on his final dive, 20 year old Matthew Mitcham, the only openly gay male athlete at the Olympics, won the gold medal in men's 10m platform diving. Via Brian, Outsports, and Queerty, here's the delightful video of him talking to the Aussie press and alongside his mother and his partner in Beijing.

Despite their love of background stories on the athlete's personal lives, NBC entirely degayed Mitcham in their coverage. Think Progress and Daily Kos weren't happy.

Meanwhile, a lesbian athlete who competed in judo at the Sydney Olympics told gay people to "shut up." Outsports has the quote:

The GLBT community should let gay athletes deal with gay issues off of the podium. In the name of the Olympic spirit and humanity… shut up and let gay athletes focus on the endeavors that they have worked so hard to reach.

In honor of Mitcham, and all openly gay athletes who give it their best, here's a handsome devil ready to bestow laurels on the winners at the Olympic stadium in Athens, a beautiful 1920s replica the exact size and location of the original.

Daniel Mendelsohn's How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken

If you're in New York, cancel your plans and go to the B&N at Broadway & 82nd at 7:00 tonight to hear brilliant Daniel Mendelsohn read from his new collection of essays, How Beautiful It Is And How Easily It Can Be Broken. Wherever you are, whoever you are, buy it and read it. He's phenomenally smart. Yes, really. He has twice won the National Book Critics Circle Award, once for his reviews and again for his international bestseller on searching for clues about six distant relatives who were killed in the Holocaust, The Lost, which won four other literary prizes in America and the top prize in France for foreign books as well as being named Book of the Year by Lire. Best of all are his essays, where he displays a very accessible genius on topics from Hollywood letdowns to classic Greek texts, which he taught at Princeton for six years. He's funny, too. And unlike some gay scholars who can be a tad prim, Mendelsohn doesn't avoid sex. All in all, he is the perfect avenging angel. Never did I love him more than when he smote James Schamus's absurd denial in NYROB after Focus Features degayed all the Brokeback Mountain ads as soon as it proved its crossover potential. Mendelsohn's analysis of that movie and the media's reaction is itself worth the price of the 480 page book.

Early reviews are suitably ecstatic.

Booklist: "Drawn to literature, theater, and films with a link to Greek and Roman culture, however subterranean, Mendelsohn reaches an exhilaratingly high level of discourse as he grapples with Oliver Stone’s Alexander, The Lovely Bones, Truman Capote, films about 9/11, and Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. This impressive volume’s poetic title is from Tennessee Williams and provides the catalyst for Mendelsohn’s own profound musing over the timeless bond between the beautiful and the broken. These are works of brilliant and soulful criticism."

Publishers Weekly starred review: "...springboards for Mendelsohn’s agile mind to examine subjects like gender, homosexuality, war and peace. In “Victims on Broadway I” he eloquently peels back layer after layer of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie and criticizes not only the 2005 Broadway production as “stripped of the nuances of character and sensibility” but also the audience for what he sees as their inability to perceive pathos. In a magisterial essay, Mendelsohn finds the same flaw in the blockbuster movie Troy that he believes marred the ancient, lost Greek epics the Cypria and the Little Iliad: unlike Homer’s Iliad, they have not “a single unifying action, but a single unifying notion” lacking in epic grandeur. These essays richly repay the time readers spend in their company."

Mendelsohn will be reading in Sydney August 17-19, at Washington DC's Politics and Prose on September 2, and in Paris on October 5. Next April he will publish his translations of Cavafy. Awesome.

Gay Hadrian at the British Museum

In London, the British Museum's exhibit Hadrian: Empire and Conflict opens today. The show may be a first in that it accurately downplays the Roman emperor's empty marriage and shows the central and abiding love of his life to be Antinous. On October 2, Paul Roberts will give a lecture called "Sex and the Emperor," described online:

Hadrian’s loveless marriage and his passion for a young man were perhaps nothing unusual for an emperor, but his unprecedented grief after his lover Antinous died, and his exceptional commemoration of him, suggest a relationship far from the imperial ‘norm’.

The show is expected to be a blockbuster, especially popular with families, which makes the museum's focus on Hadrian's gay life all the more impressive to those of us living in a country of cowardly curators. In addition to the museum's interactive fare, the Guardian offers this tour of the exhibit, which runs through October 26.
 

Born September 4: Mary Renault

After receiving her degree from Oxford in 1928, Mary Renault became a nurse in Bristol, aiding soldiers injured at Dunkirk and later assisting in the brain surgery ward, leading to her first novel, Purposes of Love (1939), set in a contemporary hospital. She knew the subject well, having fallen in love with another nurse, Julie Mullard, who would be her life partner for fifty years. Renault’s first five novels each had contemporary settings and vaguely or overtly lesbian themes, the strongest are in her third novel, The Friendly Young Ladies (1943). Her fourth won her $150,000 from MGM, which Renault and Mullard used to leave the repressive, post-war, antigay atmosphere of England for the relative freedom of South Africa. (They participated in many Black Sash events, for white women against apartheid, begun in 1955.) Established there, Renault wrote The Charioteer (1953), her first novel with a male protagonist, a gay WWII soldier who discovers that his hidden love for an older former schoolmate is returned. Her artistic breakthrough came with her next novel, again with a gay male protagonist, but set in the more open world of Ancient Greece, which would be her hallmark for the rest of her writing career, in seven additional novels, a biography, and a study of the Persian Wars. Two of those novels tell the life story of Theseus, who in Greek mythology killed the Minotaur thanks to Ariadne’s help, and three other novels cover the life of Alexander the Great, including one narrated by his lover Bagoas, The Persian Boy (1972), the most praised of all her works. It ranks 32nd on the Publishing Triangle list of the best lesbian and gay novels of all time.