Pearls in Paradise?

3 Replies to “Pearls in Paradise?”

  1. Dear Ben,
    I’m absolutely no expert and your comments make me want to investigate Greek homosexuality further, but I suspect that your comment is a bit off mark. The relationships between mature warriors and beardless youths in ancient Greece was pedagogical as well as sexual, and occurred in the context of sport and the battlefield.These “beardless youths” were fully muscled young men learning about athletics, battle, and loyalty. I don’t think there was anything effeminate about the younger men in these “daddy” couples. I hate that term, but I use it to make the point about the educational function that older men fulfilled with respect to young men in ancient Greece. The most famous warrior to warrior relationship that was, despite all the polite tut-tutting among gay classicists in Europe, undoubtedly homosexual was that between Achilles and Pratoclus in Homer’s Iliad. If you look at the image below, which I’ve taken from Wikipedia, of a pottery painting dating from 500 BCE, the man wrapping the arm of his lover, who looks younger, is the mighty warrior Achilles, not Pratoclus. And I recently saw an article, was it in the Guardian? or Washington Post?, or the NYT?, during LGBTQ month, about the “Sacred Band of Thebes,” 150 pairs of warrior lovers who were the elite of the army of Thebes and who defeated the Spartan army, saving Thebes from Spartan domination, in 371 BCE, only to be annihilated by the Macedonians to a couple, to a man, in 338 BCE. As I remember, in this article it says that archaeologists have just uncovered a Theban grave site in which some of the skeletons are intwined in each other’s arms.

  2. Thank you for this post, Seb. There is a lot to say about homosexuality in the Middle East and Asia!
    Here’s another anecdote from al-Isfahani’s 10th century The Book of Songs. It’s Anecdote 13, by a poet from Basra, described as “a hardy man … renowned for his nasty satire, as well as being a drunkard.” He got angry with a rival and satirized him thus:
    “He is equitable
    He lets his male lover be the husband of his wife
    The male lover divides his penis equally
    Between her pussy and his asshole.”
    In most societies that I know something about, until very recently, men have pretty much controlled the definitions both of what “masculinity” AND what “femininity” is. I’m thinking especially of Japan, but it is also true of the Middle East and Southeast Asia, where, as in the case of Western societies, a lot of men toy with categories of “male” and “female,” wander between asshole and pussy, and are sexually aroused by the intersections and divergences and frequent hybridities of the two genders. I’ve experienced the pleasures of such cross-gender dalliances in my own sexual experiences with cross-dressers.

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