Why is there so much gay talk in plato

Alastair Blanshard does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment. In our sexual histories series, authors explore changing sexual mores from antiquity to today.

In recent years, we have seen significant advances won for LGBT rights through hard-fought legal cases and well-targeted political campaigns. Yet it is worth remembering that for decades, recourse to such methods was not available to LGBT people. The law-court and the parliament were deaf to their pleas.

For many, it was only in their dreams that they could escape oppression. One should not underplay the importance of such fantasies. They provided succour and hope in a grim world. One place in particular attracted the longings of gays and lesbians. This was the world of ancient Greece, a supposed gay paradise in which same-sex love flourished without discrimination.

It was a powerful, captivating dream, one which scholars of ancient Greece have started to pull apart, revealing a culture in which homosexuality was much more regulated and controlled than previously thought. Was this a coded reference to indecent passions, asked the prosecutor.

It is that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect … It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, when the elder man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him.

That it should be so the world does not understand. The world mocks it and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it. In this spirited defense of same-sex love, Wilde created a genealogy of historical moments in which homosexual love had blossomed. He rewrote straight history and offered a different version of the past in which his own 19th-century passion joined a continuous tradition that stretched back to the very foundation of European civilization.

He sought to recover a love that time and prudish censors had tried to erase. From the days of the Old Testament through to the flourishing of culture in Greece and the Renaissance, Wilde sought to bear witness to a gay past of free romantic expression.

Thoughts on Plato's Symposium and Phaedrus

Yet for all its brave defiance and elegant phrasing, there is little in it that is truly original. The rhetoric Wilde advanced had been in circulation for decades. Any educated homosexual in the 19th century could have given you a speech along much the same lines, citing the same canonical figures and possibly a few more.

Wilde was tapping into a shared gay fantasy about the past, a fantasy in which one culture stood out above all others, the world of Classical Greece. It is hard to overstate the affection with which 19th-century homosexuals like Wilde viewed the Greek world. Here was the utopia that they dreamed about — a place in which homosexuality was not only accepted, but celebrated.

The legacy of this tradition was so potent that many felt even when visiting modern Greece that it was still possible to feel the traces of this passion. In the warmth and light of the Mediterranean, numerous 19th- and early 20th-century gays and lesbians sought to fleetingly recapture visions of this lost paradise and recreate it amongst its ruins.

Looking at these images today, it is hard not to be struck by their sense of desperate, wilful escapism and rejection of the contemporary world and all that it offered, even as they used the latest photographic techniques in creating these tableaux. Quite what their Italian models thought of these odd Germans and their desire to dress them up in wreaths, togas, and splay their bodies on leopard skin rugs remains a mystery.