The Roman conquest brought the Golden Age of Greek homoeroticism to a screeching half. Night descended over hallowed Hellas where the Thebans had passed a law proclaiming ''that it is illegal for anyone to maintain that sex between men is not beautiful.'' Caesar had to refute his having been bedded by King Nicomedes, gritting his teeth while outside his tent his men ribbed him mercilessly about being Nicomedes' boy, while warning girls to watch out for the baldheaded fucker. During the Middle Ages the English king Henry II ...
Read More
The Roman conquest brought the Golden Age of Greek homoeroticism to a screeching half. Night descended over hallowed Hellas where the Thebans had passed a law proclaiming ''that it is illegal for anyone to maintain that sex between men is not beautiful.'' Caesar had to refute his having been bedded by King Nicomedes, gritting his teeth while outside his tent his men ribbed him mercilessly about being Nicomedes' boy, while warning girls to watch out for the baldheaded fucker. During the Middle Ages the English king Henry II was forced to tolerate his son Richard Coeur de Lion's love for the young French dauphin Philippe II, while Savonarolian religious intolerance in the midst of the Renaissance made death the penalty for love among men.Berlin became the capital of male-male love until Hitler gassed a few thousand, and after the war the fatherless sons of soldiers became Hershey Bar whores, even more available than before the conflagration, there and in Italy, honey for the likes of Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote. Homophobic harassment followed in even the most civilized countries, in Central Park, for example, until the Stonewall Riots of 1969. In France, where homosexual acts have been allowed since 1791, following the French Revolution, gays are silently mocked and avoided, when not despised, and even in the wondrous freedom of the States a jock would need undaunted courage to announce, to his locker-room buddies, his preference for them over the chirping maidens in the showers next door.So when a lad, in our times, looks on a painting of the nearly totally nude Sebastian, his tear-filled eyes turned up to the heavens, arrows piercing white skin trickling with blood from open wounds, his natural desire is to stem his suffering, suffering familiar to gays since the day they realized their difference, and the difference of their inadmissible passion. Mocked, gassed, burned at the stake, humiliated in the gym, beaten up in parks, how would it be possible not to identify with beautiful, youthful, courageously-suffering Sebastian?This book covers the history of Sebastian, from homoerotic Renaissance paintings to the full-frontal lascivity of Derek Jarman's film Sebastiane.
Read Less