Bad Gays

A Homosexual History

Huw Lemmey,Ben Miller

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781839763298
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

Too many popular histories seek to establish heroes, pioneers and martyrs but as Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller argue, the past is filled with queer people whose sexualities and/or dastardly deeds have been overlooked. We all remember Oscar Wilde, but who speaks for Bosie? What about those 'bad gays' whose un-exemplary lives reveals more than we might expect?Part-revisionist history, part-historical biography and based on the hugely popular podcast series, Bad Gays subverts the notion of gay icons and queer heroes and asks what we can learn about LGBTQ history, sexuality and identity through its villains and baddies. From the Emperor Hadrian to notorious gangster Ronnie Kray, the authors excavate the buried history of queer lives. This includes fascist thugs, famous artists, austere puritans and debauched bon viveurs, Imperialists, G-men and architects. Together these amazing life stories expand and challenge the mainstream assumptions of sexual identity. They show that homosexuality itself was an idea that emerged in the nineteenth century and that its interpretation has been central to major historical moments of conflict from the ruptures of Weimar Republic to red-baiting in Cold War America.Amusing, disturbing and fascinating, Bad Gays puts centre stage the queers villains and evil twinks in history.

1

Hadrian

Hadrian was born the son of empire. His father was a high-ranking and wealthy Roman senator who, as a soldier, had fought in the Roman provinces in modern-day North Africa, and was the cousin of the future emperor Trajan. Hadrian, like his father and Trajan, was probably born in Italica, the first Roman city to be built outside Italy, near modern-day Seville, in January of AD 76.

Hadrian’s family had settled in the Roman province of Hispania Baetica hundreds of years before he was born. An ancestor, probably an Italian who had fought to conquer the region for Rome, was given some land in the newly subdued territory upon his retirement. He married a local woman and became a farmer, a common story typical of Rome’s strategy of colonization and empire-building. To control the territory was not enough: an empire was built on cultural dominance, and the Romanisation of new provinces happened by ensuring the ruling elites of those territories were acculturated into Roman habits, tastes, and values, often through marriage. Baths and amphitheatres were built, gladiatorial games introduced, and (in much of the empire) Latin adopted as the official and primary language. From these colonies new generations of soldiers could be raised, resources could be extracted, and in time the people would come to regard themselves not as vanquished, but as Roman. At the same time, the colonies could have an influence back at the centre of Rome – some desired, some more insidious – including new ideas around sexuality.

Hadrian’s family, like Trajan’s, held political power, providing senators for Rome going back over five generations. Mr and Mrs Hadrianus were an exemplary provincial family in this regard, and their son, little Publius Aelius, may have expected to follow this tradition of making war and retiring into minor public service. The growth of the empire meant that the senate was now populated with senators from further afield than Italy and Rome, especially Spain, with its prosperous silver resources, and Greece, whose classical culture was hugely influential in Rome itself.

But trauma at a young age diverted Hadrian from his family’s well-worn path. In AD 86, when Hadrian was just ten years old, both of his parents died. According to Roman custom, the young orphan and his sister were then adopted by a wealthy male relative; it was just Hadrian’s luck that his new guardians were an official named Publius Acilius Attianus, and his father’s cousin, a young military officer named Marcus Ulpius Traianus, the future emperor Trajan. Ostensibly, this guardianship was for the safe protection of the orphan’s inherited property until he was old enough to take care of it himself, but it seems Trajan extended his role into a more paternal one, and set about planning the education of Hadrian. When Hadrian turned fourteen, Trajan sent for him in Rome.

The Roman Empire was barely 100 years old when Hadrian arrived. Just twenty-five years earlier the city had been devastated by a great fire under Nero; during Hadrian’s lifetime the Colosseum was opened, the volcano of Vesuvius erupted, burying Pompeii, and numerous military victories were achieved on the empire’s northern border in the Dacian Wars. It was a golden age, with a great flourishing of economic and cultural wealth. Even for a youth as well travelled as Hadrian, it must have been a thrilling place to find himself.

Hadrian took to his education well; he had a taste for earlier writers such as Cato the Elder, rather than the preferred statesman of his tutors, Cicero.¹ But most notably, even at that young age, he fell in love with Greek culture, a love affair that would shape both his life and the Roman Empire. His passion for Greek literature and history was intense enough to earn him the nickname Graeculus, or ‘Greekling’, which was not entirely flattering. Greece had been a dominant Mediterranean power long before the rise of Rome, and what was known as ‘Hellenistic Greece’, a loose affiliation of sometimes warring, sometimes allied city-states and leagues, survived right through the period of the Roman Republic. It was not until the time of the first emperor, Augustus, that Greece was finally annexed in 27 BCE. By this stage, Greek influence was already deeply seated in Roman art, philosophy, architecture, administration, banking, and literature. Trade between the two cultures was long established, and young Roman men were sent to Greek cities to learn from the schools there. Many Romans could speak Greek, facilitated by the large numbers of Greeks, freemen and traders as well as slaves, who lived in Rome.

Despite their nascent strength as a republic, and Greek’s waning influence in the region, there was something in Greek culture that the Romans not only admired but aspired to. In the third Century BCE, the Roman nobility became increasingly Greek in their habits, a phenomenon known as ‘Hellenization’, and those with a particular taste for Greek culture were known as ‘philhellenic’. Under the rule of the emperor Nero, a notorious tyrant who, incidentally, was said to have twice been in a same-sex union (a truly Bad Gay), philhellenism became even more pronounced.

Yet there was also an ambivalence in this relationship. The Romans, after all, had conquered the Greeks, and to what extent could you truly want to replicate a loser’s culture? They filled their homes with Greek sculptures; but they were looted sculptures, their display as much a mark of subjugation as respect. When Greek-speaking Romans addressed the Senate, their words were translated into Latin, as much as a sign of inferiority as to help with comprehension. Even within the more Hellenistic aristocracy, there were significant figures who saw Greece as a moral threat, if not a military one. Indeed, Cato the Elder, whom Hadrian studied enthusiastically, was one such figure. Greece, Cato felt, was a degenerate and decadent culture and its adoption would bring trouble for the Romans, whom he saw as a people of noble simplicity and strength. Addressing his own child he said, ‘I shall speak of those Greeks in a suitable place, son Marcus, telling what I learned at Athens, and what benefit it is to look into their books, – not to master them. I shall prove them a most worthless and unteachable race. Believe that this is uttered by a prophet: whenever that folk impart its literature, it will corrupt everything.’²

This Roman ambivalence, that the Greeks were both wise and decadent, worthy of study but worth being wary of, rang down through history, and has had a significant impact on the history of homosexuality. As the classical literature of the Greeks and Romans was supposedly ‘rediscovered’ by scholars in western Europe in the Renaissance, many adopted the same prejudices and intellectual arguments that were being fought almost two millennia earlier. Greek attitudes towards same-sex relationships were known about, and were hard for good Christian academics to square with their otherwise fulsome admiration of the virtues of classical Greece. While most Victorian scholars were disgusted by the ‘unspeakable vice of the Greeks’, as the uptight Mr Cornwallis refers to it in E.M. Forster’s Maurice, those who found their desires drifting in a similar direction found in Greek culture a heroic example that their sort had indeed always existed, and began mining Greek literature for heroes and storylines that might serve as a defence of the unspeakable vice. The works of Greeks like Plutarch and Plato were used to help imagine a positive model for male and female same-sex relationships, although, as we’ll see, neither the Greeks nor the Victorians had quite the same concept of the ‘homosexual’ that we have today.

For the Greeks, the concept did not meaningfully exist at all; the social identities we today understand in the West as a gay man or a bisexual woman, for example, simply weren’t something that people recognised. Greece was not a single political entity with a set of laws and customs that everybody followed; different city-states developed different sexual cultures. Across Greece, sexual activity between men was common; the important prohibitions were not focused on gender, but status (and hence age).

In Plato’s Symposium, Aristophanes uses a myth to demonstrate the nature of love, explaining that lovers are the two reunited components of single souls split in two by Zeus. This myth of soulmates is not as structured around ideas of heterosexual compatibility as you might presume. Aristophanes explicitly mentions same-sex relationships, but the important qualification is that they are between men of different ages. For Aristophanes, if not necessarily for Plato, sex between men and boys was not merely tolerable, but noble in itself. Of such people, Aristophanes says that ‘while they are boys … they fall in love with men, they enjoy sex with men and they like to be embraced by men. These boys are the ones who are outstanding in their childhood and youth, because they’re inherently more manly than others. I know they sometimes get called immoral, but that’s wrong: their actions aren’t prompted by immorality but by courage, manliness, and masculinity. They incline towards their own characteristics in others.’³ Worryingly for us, he says such men go on to become politicians.

What is fundamental to understand, of course, is that this form of relationship is only seen as good and honourable between men and teenage boys, while sexual behaviour between men of the same age was taboo. This is an inversion of our own social norms. Today the defining characteristic of such a relationship to observers would be the abusive power imbalance. In the same manner, in Greek society it would also be the age difference that would be regarded as the core characteristic of the relationship, although in a positive way, and not the gender roles.

This form of pederastic relationship was seen to have many qualities; in the Symposium, Phaedrus suggests that the loyalty between male lovers and their aversion to being shamed in front of each other by acts of cowardice offered them a unique advantage in organising a society, claiming that ‘the best possible organisation [for a] battalion would be for it to consist of lovers and their boyfriends … A handful of such men, fighting side by side, could conquer the whole world’.⁴ In fact, such a battalion did exist in the city-state of Thebes. The Sacred Band of Thebes was a military unit made up of 150 pairs of male lovers and was regarded as the most elite unit in the Theban army, its soldiers being of unusual bravery and moral character.

Still, the acceptance of a certain type of same-sex behaviour is littered with qualifications concerning status. Often, sexual relationships between men involving anything up the bum were frowned upon, because anal sex is too close to penis-in-vagina sex. This would make the receptive partner in anal sex something like a woman or a prostitute, as in many circumstances ‘homosexual anal penetration [was] treated neither as an expression of love nor as a response to the stimulus of beauty, but as an aggressive act demonstrating the superiority of the active to the passive partner’, a drop in status too humiliating to be sanctioned.⁵

To be the receptive partner in anal sex was regarded as being kinaidos, or effeminate: there’s no escaping it, bottom-shaming is as old as European civilization itself, baked into the deep misogyny of patriarchal societies. This prohibition on anal did not apply to men visiting male sex workers, or men having sex with enslaved males, so long as the man of higher status was the one doing the penetrating, a good illustration of how, in Greek society, status was the key determinant of the nature of sexual activity.

This early history of same-sex relationships in Greece and Rome is vital to understanding Hadrian’s story. The philhellenic Romans took up many of the same concepts and attitudes towards homosexuality, but with an important difference. While for the Greeks the pederastic relationship had a pedagogical and philosophical basis – to ensure the induction of noble males into the intellectual and political society they were to dominate – for the Romans the focus was instead on the sensual.

Roman culture was openly celebratory of male dominance and power. There are no European cultures for whom the hard cock was such a symbol of worship; indeed the Vestal Virgins, the priestesses of Vesta, the goddess of the hearth, literally attended to the cult of Fascinus, a deity depicted as a disembodied erect penis, usually with wings. Their role was to tend to the holy fire at the centre of Rome, from which any Roman citizen could light their own fire. As such, the fire symbolised the continuance of Rome and the integrity of the state. That a hard cock was one of the subjects of the Vestal’s adoration is no coincidence, as the integrity of the male body was a symbol of a free Roman’s political status.⁶

That’s because for a free man, a citizen of Rome, to be the penetrated partner in a same-sex act was, in some way, a violation of the integrity of his body. To be a free Roman meant your body could not be violated. In the words of historian Amy Richlin, ‘To be penetrated, for a Roman, was degrading both in a physical sense of invasion, rupture, and contamination, and in a class sense: the penetrated person’s body was likened to the body of a slave.’⁷ This emphasis on virility and conquest is slightly different to the Greeks’ obsession with pederasty and pedagogy, but to much the same ends, and, as we will see in later chapters, becomes part of the dynamic of the politics of masculinity, and the masculinity of politics, throughout modern European history.

When Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus accused his enemy and co-consul Julius Caesar of being ‘Queen of Bithynia’, the accusation was not that that Caesar was gay, but that he had been fucked in his younger days by Nicomedes IV, the king of Bithynia. These accusations clearly stuck. Even in Caesar’s moment of triumph, having crushed the Gauls in the Gallic Wars, a popular rhyme in Rome began ‘Gallias Caesar subegit, Caesarem Nicomedes’ (Caesar subjugated the Gauls, Nicomedes subjugated Caesar). It seems to be true what the senator Haterius said, that ‘unchastity (impudicitia: allowing anal penetration) is a source of accusation for a freeborn (male), a necessity for a slave, and a duty for a freed slave’.⁸

Status and freedom, then, were vital to Roman conceptions of both sexuality and society. Indeed, after his education, Hadrian took his first official appointment, as a member of a decemviri, a ten-man commission that ruled upon the formal status of people. It was a minor role but accepted as a fitting first step into a future senatorial career. From there, he took up the role of a military tribune with the Legio II Adiutrix, a military legion stationed in Aquincum (modern-day Budapest).⁹ A military tribune was a high-ranking officer who was organisationally, although not militarily, second-in-command of the legion. An appointed position, it required administrative skill, but it was also a position for young members of the senatorial rank to learn the qualities and competencies deemed necessary for future service as a senator.

It was expected that most young men on such a career path would become a military tribune for a short time. Hadrian, however, served in the role three times, for three different legions, giving him significant political advantages in the future. More than this, according to his biographer, Anthony Birley, it was in Aquincum that Hadrian developed his lifelong ability to talk to people across the class system.¹⁰

When Hadrian was twenty-two, serving his second tour as a tribune, Emperor Domitian, a ruthless and moralistic autocrat, was assassinated in a palace coup. His enemies in the Senate damned his memory, melting down his statues and pulling down his victory arches, and replaced him with a safe pair of hands, Nerva. The toppling of Domitian had been unpopular with his elite Praetorian Guard, and Nerva was probably a compromise candidate between the guard and the Senate, not least because, being old and childless. He left the door open for either side to make the political manoeuvrings to secure their own candidate not too far down the line. Nerva attempted to soothe both sides, but pleased no one. His authority was fatally compromised, so he named a successor in the hope that this might buoy up his flagging regime. He chose a popular young general who was busy fighting for the empire on its Germanic borders, Marcus Ulpius Traianus. In the Historia Augusta, the general was said to have been told the news by a special messenger dispatched to Upper Germany: the future Hadrian.¹¹ It’s no surprise Hadrian wanted to bring these good tidings, for Marcus Ulpius Traianus was his adoptive guardian: Trajan.

Trajan did not have to wait long to become emperor. The following year Nerva suffered a stroke and died, and with his death, new opportunities opened up to the young Hadrian.

By age twenty-five he was back in Rome, acting as go-between for the emperor and the Senate. In short order he became first the Senate record-keeper, and then the tribune of the plebs. Originally this role had been reserved for non-noble Romans, and was elected by their assembly. Among their rights and duties was the ability to lay the demands of the people before the aristocrats in the Senate, to intercede on the people’s behalf in disputes with the magistrates, and to propose legislation. For the next decade or so, Hadrian ping-ponged between working in Rome, including as a praetor, and fighting on the empire’s northern borders in what is now eastern Europe.

In Rome, Hadrian managed to integrate himself even further into Trajan’s life, becoming increasingly close with the emperor’s family, especially his wife, Pompeia Plotina. Plotina was, like Hadrian, born in Hispania, and was a keen advocate of Greek culture and values. It was probably Plotina who found him his political roles on Trajan’s staff, and it was almost certainly she who arranged for him to be married into the family, to Trajan’s grand-niece VibiaSabina.¹² Sabina had been raised by her mother in Trajan’s household since she was a baby, following the death of her father.

Given what we know already of Roman obsession with status and sexual mores...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Hadrian
• 2. Pietro Aretino
• 3. James VI and I
• 4. Frederick the Great
• 5. Jack Saul
• 6. Roger Casement
• 7. Lawrence of Arabia
• 8. The Bad Gays of Weimar Berlin
• 9. Margaret Mead
• 10. J. Edgar Hoover and Roy Cohn
• 11. Yukio Mishima
• 12. Philip Johnson
• 13. Ronnie Kray
• 14. Pim Fortuyn
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgements
• Further Reading
• Notes
• Index