Capturing the ancients’ dazzling queer energy in image and story

I.

Eros, too, wakes with the season, as Earth

rolls through spring, and ignites with flowers.

Then the god departs from Cyprus, and goes

among men, scattering seed on the ground.

‘I have not had contact with my siblings for many decades, nor did I attend my parents’ funerals’

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Misadventures in babysitting: ‘We trusted her. Here she was drinking and dancing as our son cried’

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II.

Boy, you’re like a horse: already sated

with seed, you’ve come back to my stable now

longing for a good rider, an open meadow,

a crystal stream, a shaded grove.

Theognis, Elegies

In these two brief lyrics by the Ancient Greek poet Theognis, which are the first translations in 300,000 Kisses: Tales of Queer Love in the Ancient World, we get a glimpse into the sunlit classical Mediterranean. In one poem, the springtime, and the blooming of the flowers, becomes the blossoming of love and desire. It moves across the land, mysterious and sacred. In the other poem, a boy is like a horse, full of muscular heat, drawn with urgency back to his lover. These verses are frank and tender. They give us sight of a world long before our own, where queerness was not only acknowledged, but shown to be utterly part of the fabric of life. The erotic takes place alongside the elemental; nature governs the passions; everything is full of longing and it is only right that we are too.

It is natural, when we don’t see ourselves reflected in the world around us, to look for another world. It is natural, when we feel alone, to seek connection. All of us look for a past, but what happens when, gazing back in time, we see a world without us? That idea of a world without us is a lie, and the gaps in its history are no accident. But history is not the past, only the way it is written. Look closer, look longer, and what might first appear as a black sky suddenly seems to sparkle with a hundred constellations.

For queer people, the act of recovering history has often been one of discovering it, too. Is it any wonder that, placed in the dock during his trial for gross indecency, Oscar Wilde spoke of a love common to Plato, and Michelangelo and Shakespeare? History and culture were proof of an enduring love that could produce some of the greatest works of art his audience knew. Picking up that golden thread, and placing himself as one of its inheritors, was an audacious and affecting move. Many people in the court gallery, almost in spite of themselves, applauded.

Those names Wilde spoke of may be familiar to you, but I invite you to add the names of the characters and writers in 300,000 Kisses, too. It is a long and glorious list. Every queer person has this same past, and deserves to inherit it. That sudden outbreak of applause in the courtroom is a glimpse of what it is like to witness a birthright brilliantly reclaimed. It takes our breath away, and its power resonates far and wide. It is that same radical and revelatory feeling I experience when I read these queer tales from the ancient world.

When I heard whisperings about Ancient Greek culture at school, I felt like I was being told a secret. Those scraps of history felt illicit, mysterious, thrilling

When I first read that speech by Oscar Wilde as a teenager, I felt like the world, and my place within it, was forever changed. I found a hoard of jewels hidden from public view: a vibrant, justifying life beckoning me with what felt like a promise of belonging. When I heard whisperings about Ancient Greek culture at school, I felt like I was being told a secret. Those scraps of history felt illicit, mysterious, thrilling. I went off in pursuit of as much evidence as I could get my hands on, finding queer heroes and heroines and reading myself through them as I went.

[ 'Oscar Wilde, my grandfather, talked himself into prison' ]

[ Would Oscar Wilde have survived in the #MeToo era? ]

There are some very contemporary questions provoked by reading these classics. Who do we imagine love for? Who do we credit with desire? On whom do we bestow the gift of immortality? Can the body be changed to better suit the soul inside? By picking up these questions in our own time, and by tracing them back through the tales of the ancients, we see new pathways, new pasts, and new ways of moving forward. What we find is the illumination of a world that completely overthrows the puritanism of our own. The exuberant frankness of the Greeks and Romans makes a mockery of how narrow our popular vision is, even now.

But things are, as always, not so simple, and not so easy. Though the translations in this book showcase much discussion of beauty, camaraderie, and desire, there is also material not so easily assimilated into modern progressive thinking. The ancient world is not a perfect mirror, nor is it one that offers uncomplicated images. A variety of gender roles and gender identities emerge in both the Roman and the Greek world, but they are not universally celebrated.

If you read these new versions of the classics, you might find yourself seeking to map our own language and understandings on to this past. It is hard to move the words we use for our identities back in time – each arises out of its own historical context. Still, while the ancients might not have had concepts like ours (gay, or bisexual, or queer, or trans), the essential humanity tempts us to draw links, and of course there are careful links to be drawn.

Framed by misogyny

Of course, any representation of sex and desire has to make room for fantasy, and for the power dynamics of the gaze, and it is difficult to know what women, gender nonconforming people and people of the lower classes would have made of these tales. In Martial’s Epigrams, for instance, we meet two impressive butch women, Philaenis and Bassa. The gaze of the writer is both enthralled by their power and also keen to censure their rejection of men. He is both aroused and irritated. As modern readers, we catch a peek into this queer world, all the while being made aware of the misogyny that frames it. We also recognise a similar tendency in the modern male gaze: the objectification of women coupled with a terror of their sexuality.

A love spell found on papyrus from Egypt shows the incantatory depths of female desire, full of energy and violent passion; and the tale of Iphis and Ianthe, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, plays with gender roles and the love between women

The relationships between queer women are much less well-documented in the literature of the Greek and Latin classics. Even in this book, where the artist Luke Edward Hall and I bring together new versions of texts about what we might now call gender nonconforming characters and queer women, the insights are often fragmentary. Sappho’s pulsing fragments are hymns to women beloveds, and a rare graffiti poem from Pompeii attests to the ways in which female desire and relationships were passed through song and stone. A love spell found on papyrus from Egypt shows the incantatory depths of female desire, full of energy and violent passion; and the tale of Iphis and Ianthe, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, plays with gender roles and the love between women.

[ Poets, patrons and homosexuality in medieval Ireland ]

It struck me, as I was reading these texts and writing these new English versions, how often these stories, which regularly end in tragedy, subsume the beloved into the world of the gods, or hold the shape of their bodies in flowers that return each year, or constellations that outlast any mortal. Their queerness, and their endurance, is wrapped up in myth-making, in origin stories, so that the world around us might be seen as the product of desire, yearning, and the deep grief of separated lovers.

The characters in 300,000 Kisses are moved by the gods, by their passions, and by nature’s changing seasons. Women turn into flowers, and etch their longing into stone; men inscribe their tears into petals, frequent steamy bathhouses, and carve dildos from the branches of trees growing from the tombs of their old lovers. The gods, painfully in love with handsome mortals, grieve and turn their beloveds into constellations. In this way, queer love is written through the landscape and through the heavens, deeply connected to the world it exists in, running a bright thread of longing across the intervening years. When we consider the many and ongoing erasures of queer history, the baffling silences of the archives, it is deeply moving to see a world, far off from our own, with queerness flowing through its very fabric.

This is no utopia, but it does acknowledge, unashamedly, the rich variousness of the human and the divine. In these sun-bleached shores and deep, lush groves, there is space for celebration and for the ecstatic dancing of the passions. If a hyacinth might be an inscription of queer love, or the stars in the sky an immortalisation of queer desire, perhaps the way we see the world might be changed by these tales of heroes, heroines, sex workers, gods and demigods. Theirs is a vivid chorus, prophetic and time-bound, bleak and colourful. In 300,000 Kisses, for the first time, we have tried to capture some of the dazzling queer energy of the ancients in image and in story, and to bring it, like a treasure, across the vast millennia, and into your hands.

300,000 Kisses: Tales of Queer Love in the Ancient World Luke Edward Hall and Seán Hewitt is published by Particular Books