1/20/2024 0 Comments Mightfenek blossoming love![]() 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 exuberant frankness of the Greeks and Romans makes a mockery of how narrow our popular vision is, even now.īut things are, as always, not so simple, and not so easy. What we find is the illumination of a world that completely overthrows the puritanism of our own. 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. There are some very contemporary questions provoked by reading these classics. 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. Those scraps of history felt illicit, mysterious, thrilling. When I heard whisperings about Ancient Greek culture at school, I felt like I was being told a secret. 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 first read that speech by Oscar Wilde as a teenager, I felt like the world, and my place within it, was forever changed. Those scraps of history felt illicit, mysterious, thrilling It is that same radical and revelatory feeling I experience when I read these queer tales from the ancient world. It takes our breath away, and its power resonates far and wide. That sudden outbreak of applause in the courtroom is a glimpse of what it is like to witness a birthright brilliantly reclaimed. Every queer person has this same past, and deserves to inherit it. 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. Many people in the court gallery, almost in spite of themselves, applauded. Picking up that golden thread, and placing himself as one of its inheritors, was an audacious and affecting move. 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. Look closer, look longer, and what might first appear as a black sky suddenly seems to sparkle with a hundred constellations.įor queer people, the act of recovering history has often been one of discovering it, too. But history is not the past, only the way it is written. ![]() 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. It is natural, when we feel alone, to seek connection. It is natural, when we don’t see ourselves reflected in the world around us, to look for another world. 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. 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. In the other poem, a boy is like a horse, full of muscular heat, drawn with urgency back to his lover. It moves across the land, mysterious and sacred. In one poem, the springtime, and the blooming of the flowers, becomes the blossoming of love and desire. 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. Longing for a good rider, an open meadow, ![]()
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