Romans era gay

As a scholar who researches modern and contemporary visual cultures of sexuality, I was struck by how the heavy presence of sexual imagery in the ruins of Pompeii seems to confound those writing about it for a general audience. As a gay man and a researcher on sexuality, I am all too familiar with the ways modern gay men look to ancient Rome in search of evidence that there have always been people like us.

It is now clear among the research community that such straightforward readings of homosexuality in classical history are flawed. That is because same-sex relations among Romans were lived and thought about in very different ways from our era. Roman sexuality was not framed in terms of the gender of partners but in terms of power.

Socially acceptable Roman sexuality was about power, power was about masculinity — and Roman patriarchal sex cultures were assertions of both. An adult free man could have sex as the penetrating partner era anyone of a lower social status — including women or slaves and sex workers of both genders. Despite this, I understand how politically important and gay it was for the early gay movement to invent its own myth of origin and to populate history with figures that had been — they thought — romans like us.

The flip side of modern notions of homosexuality being read into Roman history, is the way in which the widespread presence of sex in ancient Roman including in the graffiti and visual culture preserved in Pompeii has been disavowed or — at least — purified by mainstream modern culture. The news romans around the reopening of the House of the Vettii is one such example of mainstream modern culture sanitising Roman history.

The pair had made their fortune selling wine after being freed from slavery. This reading of the fresco, while not necessarily incorrect, overlooks the more complex — and for that reason, more interesting — role of phallic imagery in Roman culture. As classicist Craig Williams writes, the images of a hyper-endowed, hyper-masculine Priapus that were widespread in Roman culture functioned not only as a source of identification but also as an object of desire for Roman men — if not to be penetrated by the large phallus, then at least to wish it was their own.

News coverage of the erotic frescoes found in a smaller room of the house has been similarly too straight forward in claiming them as evidence that that room was used for sex work. While some scholars have certainly argued that perspectiveothers believe it unlikely. Sex was everywhere in Rome, including in literary and visual arts.

LGBT Roman Emperors – the facts!

When reading the recent news stories, I could not help but think that their interpretations, while not wholly wrong, were too skewed into presenting the explicit frescoes as either metaphors for something more noble, or as something that was restricted to a specific site of Roman life — the brothel.

Edition: Europe. The atrium of the House of the Vettii, Pompeii. Courtesy of the Archaeological Park of PompeiiAuthor provided no reuse. Link copied. Rethinking Roman sexuality As a gay man and a researcher on sexuality, I am all too familiar with the ways modern gay men look to ancient Rome in search of evidence that there have always been people like us.

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