Monday, March 31, 2008

Julius Caesar, Hadrian, Tiberius, Nero, Commodus, Elagabalus, Virgil, Ovid, Lucretius, Horace, Martial, Juvenal and Firmicus.

The Warren Cup, portraying a man and youth

Eros and Silenus

The Romans were bisexual.

Cato the Censor complained about 200 B.C.E. that a handsome slave boy cost as much as a farm.

Handsome slave boys were much in demand.

Of Julius Caesar, Suetonius wrote:

"When Thermus sent Caesar to Bithnyia, he wasted so much time at King Nicomedes' court that a homosexual relationship between them was suspected, and suspicion gave way to scandal when, soon after his return to headquarters, he returned to Bithynia: ostensibly collecting a debt incurred there by one of his freedmen." (The Twelve Caesars, Book 2, Pengiun Classics version).

Suetonius describes ten of the twelve emperors that he writes of as being bisexual.

Hadrian loved Antinous, a young ex-slave who was famous for his beauty. In 134 A.D. Antinuous died at the age of 21 under mysterious circumstances. The 58-year-old Hadrian was so upset over Antinuous' death that he declared him a god, built a temple for him, and named an Egyptian city after him.

According to :

Tiberius, who spends most of the later years of his reign as emperor – from AD 26 to 37 – on the island of Capri, is said to have a special penchant for his spintriae (groups of young boys), with whom he surrounds himself and indulges in all manner of promiscuous behaviour. The walls of his bedrooms at Capri are reported to be decorated with various sexual acts and positions 'in case a performer should need an illustration of what [is] required'...

Nero's reported sexual activities range from being seduced by his mother Agrippina to forcing his unwanted attentions on married women and boys. Famously, he takes two homosexual lovers, Pythagoras and Sporus, in 'marriage'. Nero is said to behave as the wife to Pythagoras and husband to Sporus, whom he has had castrated. Taken together with his 'artistic' performances when he will often take on a female part and dress accordingly, Nero's behaviour scandalises Rome and plays an important part in his downfall.

Commodus emperor from AD 180 to 192, is said to have a harem of 300 girls and the same number of boys and to put on great orgies.

But for sheer shock value, none can compare with the Syrian, Elagabalus, emperor from 218 to 222, who believes himself to be a living god.

Elagabalus is remarkable not only for being only 14 years old when he becomes absolute ruler of the Roman empire but also for his sexual activities while holding that office... shocking in the eyes of respectable Roman society is his 'marriage' to a slave named Hierocles. Elagabalus likes nothing better than to dress as a woman and go around with his 'husband', who is even encouraged to beat the emperor as if he is his real wife. Sometimes Elagabalus plays out scenes in which Hierocles finds him with another man and punishes him for his 'infidelity'.


Louis Crompton wrote:

The Romans condoned sex with captured or purchased slaves of either sex.

Since slaves formed a large part of the population in late republican and imperial times, young male bedmates were available in abundance and freely enjoyed without censure....

Homoerotic poems are part of the repertory of nearly all the major Latin love poets...

Virgil, as the author of Rome's national epic the Aeneid, ranks as Rome's greatest poet.

He is of importance for the gay literary heritage for two reasons. He wrote the most famous of Latin homoerotic poems (his second, or Corydon, eclogue) and he also made a serious attempt to introduce the heroic tradition of Greek love into Latin literature...

For Ovid, however, stories of the loves of the gods for beautiful boys were simply raw material to be exploited poetically.

As a result, Ovid was the main source for such myths in the middle ages, when he became, somewhat surprisingly, the favorite poet of Christian Europe, much admired and widely quoted and imitated in what has been called "the Age of Ovid."

...Not all the homoerotic stories of the Metamorphosis are in book ten. Book three tells the tale of Narcissus. In Ovid's version, Narcissus is loved by girls and boys, but it is specifically a boy he scorns who sets the curse on him; he falls fatally in love with another "lovely boy" when he sees his image reflected in a pool.

Eugene Rice , at , wrote :

The Epicurean poet Lucretius (94-55 B.C.E.) took it to be a self-evident law of nature that attractive adolescent males, before they grew up and began to be desired by women, should be desired by men....

The sex of one's partner could be a matter of surprising indifference.

Horace, who never married, "burned with desire, sometimes for tender boys, sometimes for girls."

Martial writes, in the (fictive) first person singular, of penetrating males anally, penetrating females vaginally and anally, and being fellated by both male and female partners.

What mattered ... was role, age, and status.

The freeborn adult Roman who liked to copulate with males penetrated slave boys, eunuchs, and male prostitutes with as little reproach as he penetrated his female slaves, his female concubine, or female prostitutes.

In contrast, seducing a puer praetextatus, a freeborn male Roman who had not yet put on the toga virilis (this rite of passage happened at about age fifteen), was a serious offense; and fathers tried hard to protect the pudicitia (sexual modesty, chastity) of their sons. No easy task: "A handsome son," notes Juvenal, "keeps his parents in constant fear and misery, so rarely do pudicitia and good looks go together."

Nor did citizens who valued their reputations have sex with each other. For a free adult male to be penetrated anally or orally by another free adult male, by a freedman, by a boy, by a male prostitute, or by a slave was a disgrace.

Roman male homosexuality was predominantly a form of pederasty that did not exclude relationships with women and was governed by a firm distinction of role that stigmatized adult male passivity as servile and effeminate.

The contrast between Roman and Greek homosexuality is most striking in how the two societies tried to regulate the sexual relations of adult citizens and freeborn boys.

In Athens, ideally, both parties were freeborn and social equals; the tie between them was consensual; and (in some instances) educational as well as sexual.

At Rome, the typical same-sex relationship was between a citizen (active) and his adolescent slave (passive)....

Firmicus, like Ptolemy before him, recognizes all the commoner inflections of sexual taste. For example: "If Mercury and Venus are in conjunction in the 19th degree of Aries, they make the natives impure of mouth" (inpuros ore=fellators). Saturn in aspect with Venus in any way "will make the natives molles, cinaedos, men who give themselves to slavish acts." It is the celestial ambient that produces professional and amateur prostitutes, even lesbian prostitutes (mulieres vero viragines meretrices).

But what is most useful for us to retain from the ancient theorists is a renewed sense of the range of sexual categories available to Romans, of the elasticity and variety their sexual tastes, and of the candor with which they report and picture their sexual acts.


Thursday, March 27, 2008

Dirk Bogarde

Dirk Bogarde (1921-1999) made women swoon.

He was once Britain's most famous actor.

In 1939, while working in theatre, Bogarde met Anthony Forwood.

When Forwood's marriage to actress Glynis Johns came to an end, Forewood became Bogarde’s partner.

During the Second World War, Bogarde was decorated for bravery and achieved the rank of major.

During the 1950s, Bogarde starred in a number of films including: Doctor in the House (1954), Doctor at Sea (1955), The Spanish Gardener (1956), Doctor at Large (1957), A Tale of Two Cities (1958), The Doctor's Dilemma.

Bogarde became Britain's leading box-office star.

Dirk Bogarde never married and was reported to be homosexual.[2]

He shared his homes, first in Amersham, England, then in France with Anthony Forwood.

Dirk Bogarde's brother Gareth Van den Bogaerde 'confirmed in a 2004 interview that Bogarde was engaging in homosexual sex at a time when such acts were illegal, and also that his long-term relationship with Tony Forwood was more than simply that of a manager and friend.' [3]

In 1961, Dirk Bogarde played the part of a homosexual barrister in the film Victim.

The barrister has had a relationship with a young man. The barrister takes on a group of blackmailers and thus puts at risk his career and his marriage.

Victim helped lead to the decriminalization of male homosexuality in 1967.

Victim was not shown in many of the larger cinemas and it did put off some of Bogarde's fans. (Dirk Bogarde)

In 1963, Bogarde played the part of the rather gay valet in Joseph Losey's The Servant.

In the mid-1960s, Bogarde moved to Provence in the South of France, where he lived with Tony Forwood.

In 1971, Bogarde played the part of Aschenbach in Luchino Visconti's Death in Venice , based on Thomas Mann's novella. Aschenbach becomes obsessed with a beautiful boy.

Other films include Visconti's The Damned (1969), Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter (1974), and Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Despair (1978).

In the 1980's Bogarde began writing books, both autobiography and novels, the first being A Postillion Struck by Lightning.
Bogarde was knighted in 1992.

He was the first actor to act the part of a sympathetic gay character in British film.

The Official Dirk Bogarde Website

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Findlater and Fischer

James Ogilvy, 1750-1811, was Earl of Findlater and Earl of Seafield. (The Earls of Findlater)

He was born at Huntingtower Castle, in Perthshire, Scotland.

In 1779, he married Christina Teresa Murray but he left her two years later.

Between 1793 and 1810, he made 14 trips to Carlsbad, a spa in the Austrian Empire.

In 1801, in Carlsbad, he erected Findlater's Temple, a neoclassical gazebo.

He owned vineyards at Loschwitz near Dresden.

His close friend was Johann Georg Fischer.

When James Ogilvy died, Fischer was his sole heir.

Fischer was sued, successfully, by James Ogilvy's Scottish relatives.

They claimed that Fischer had become Ogilvy's heir as the result of a sexual bond between the two men.


Friday, March 07, 2008

John Amery - bisexual Jewish Nazi

John Amery

Ronald Harwood, in the Daily Mail, 5 March 2008, told us about John Amery, a Jewish member of the English upper class. ( Why the son of a Churchill cabinet minister became a mouthpiece ...)

John Amery was the son of British government minister Leo Amery.

Leo was Secretary of State for India in Winston Churchill's Cabinet.

Leo's mother came from a Jewish-Hungarian family.

John was a diamond smuggler, gun-runner, fascist, bisexual, and a bigamist through his marriages to two prostitutes. In 1942, John Amery made a Nazi propaganda broadcast from Berlin.

As a boy, John attended a school in Switzerland. When he got syphilis, he told his tutor that he had caught it by acting as a prostitute with men.

At the age of 20, John appeared at Bow Street Magistrates Court. He was accused of using his car to block a street while he went drinking. He already had 73 previous convictions.

John married Una Eveline Wing, a prostitute.

Una reported that John was still earning money as a male prostitute. John also enjoyed masochistic sex with female prostitutes.

John travelled to Spain to fight for the fascists in the Spanish Civil War.

When World War II began, John was in Paris where he got a new prostitute girlfriend, Jeanine Barde.

MI6 reported that John was no threat to Britain.

John was invited to Germany by Hitler.

In Berlin, in 1942, John began a series of nine broadcasts of Nazi propaganda to Britain.

Back in Paris, with a second wife, prostitute Michelle Thomas, John began to plan for a British legion who would fight for the Germans.

Mussolini invited John to Italy, and there John was captured by Italian partisans.

Eventually, John was put on trial in Britain, found guilty and hanged.
Video: Hitler was Jewish?

Thursday, March 06, 2008

Peron, Evita and the Nazis

Juan Perón was President of Argentina from 1946 to 1955 and from 1973 to 1974.

What do we know about Peron?

1. Peron was sympathetic to homosexuals.

"He resisted the entreaties of the military in 1943 to crack down on homosexuality.

"Instead he ordered the police and judiciary to let up on their gay-baiting." (Juan Perón - Biography of Juan Perón)

2. In 1945, Perón married Evita, originally known as Eva Duarte (1919–1952).

The marriage was partly political and partly economic.

Peron was somewhat lacking in charisma and the common touch. Evita had charisma and was able to appeal to both women and the workers.

Peron, in power as president, did some good things. Social security was made universal. Education was made free to all who qualified. Vast low-income housing projects were created. (The Legacy of Juan Peron)

However, the Perons are said to have looted Argentina. Reportedly they siphoned money from their charity organizations and political fundraising to various Swiss bank accounts.(

3. Reportedly, Peron had links to the CIA through Licio Gelli. (Fascism and the Establishment in Italy : Gladio and the stratergy ...)

4. Reportedly Peron allowed many Nazis to come to Argentina after Germany's defeat. (Evita, the Swiss and the Nazis)

It has been suggested that Hitler was allowed to escape to Argentina. (aangirfan: Hitler and Argentina)

Peron's Career

1. Juan Perón was born into a wealthy ranching family in 1895. BBC - h2g2 - The Years of Billy Joel's 'We Didn't Start The Fire ...

2. Peron joined the military and at one point traveled to Italy to study fascism.

In 1943, as a colonel, he played an important part in the military coup against the civilian government of Ramón Castillo.

3. In the military-led government, Peron became Secretary of Labour and Welfare.

In this job, Peron worked to lessen the power of the left-wing parties.

He also replaced the unions with 'syndicates' which could be useful allies of Peron. BBC - h2g2 - The Years of Billy Joel's 'We Didn't Start The Fire ...

4. When Peron became president in 1946, he worked hard to keep the support of the 'syndicates'.

5. In the early 20th century, Argentina was one of the top 10 richest countries in the world, due to its agricultural exports.

Peron decided to expand industry and introduce protectionist policies.

Peron took over key British and American-owed companies in Argentina.

In 1947 he began the first 'five-year plan' to boost newly nationalized industries.

6. Peron raised rural wages and forced landlords to sell their food products cheap.

The result was that the landlords stopped growing so much food.

The amount of land under cultivation dropped from nearly 22 million hectares in 1934-38 to just over 17 million in 1955. (The Legacy of Juan Peron)

7. High levels of corruption led to Peron's downfall.

In 1955, the military toppled Peron.

8. In 1973, Perón again became president, but he died within a year of taking office.