 Good evening, welcome to the British Library, I'm delighted to introduce tonight's event, The Further Queer Adventures of Alexander the Great, boyfriend, activist and porn star. I've not actually had the chance to introduce an event like that in all my years at the British Library, so fantastic start. So my name is John, I look after the events program here at the library and this evening we are delighted to see what we call a coming together of sort of the three illustrious names in the study of sexual identity in history. The centrepiece will be a talk on Alexander the Great by Professor Lloyd Lewell and Jones in the centre there, after which he'll be talking to Ben Miller and Hugh Lemme of the Badgaze Podcast and Book fame. Later on at the end of the conversation you'll be able to put your questions to the speakers, those watching online at home will be able to fill in the questions format below the video window and those of you here in the normal way put your hand up and wait for the microphone. Of course the event accompanies the British Library exhibition on Alexander the Great which has only got a couple more weeks to run until the 19th of February so please do get a look at it, people are loving it, it's a story, not of archaeology but of storytelling, two and a half thousand give or take years of storytelling about Alexander of which there have been many you'll be surprised. And of course it's LGBT plus History Month and we're delighted to be hosting the event in the context of that as well. So Hugh and Ben created the Badgaze Podcast in 2019 to explore the histories of queer people who may have been overlooked in history for their sexuality. Everybody from the Emperor Hadrian to anthropologist Margaret Mead, Lawrence Arabia, Jay Edgar Hoover and of course Ronnie Cray. So Hugh himself is just next to me here is a novelist, artist and film critic and filmmaker living in Barcelona, he's an author of four books. He writes on sex, culture, history and cities for many magazines and journals including Freeze and Architectural Review and as an artist and filmmaker his work has appeared in numerous international institutions. And his partner in crime over on the other side is also internationally based over in Berlin, Ben Miller. He's a doctoral fellow in Global Intellectual History at Freia Universitat and he's also been a member of the Board of the Schwerler's Museum, the world's largest independent institution dedicated to archiving and preserving queer histories and visual cultures. And together they wrote last year the book Badgaze, A Homosexual History which is on sale at the bookshop tonight and they'll be signing copies after the event and those who want to buy the book if you're watching online there is a books tab at the top of the page and also our main speaker tonight Lloyd will be signing copies of his book, The Persians, his most recent book. Thank you and that's enough from me over to our team, thank you. Great, good evening everybody, am I on? Good, lovely to see all of you here or to hear all of you here and to see only an enormous glowing light that has completely blinded me. And thank you John for the invitation and for the lovely introduction. My name is Ben Miller, I'm going to talk for 30 seconds about what Badgaze is and then that he'll introduce himself and then we'll introduce Lloyd and get to Alexander, the main event of the night. So Badgaze is a project that is about trying to investigate the untold, darker side of queer history, all of the people who are maybe not as eager to claim during the rainbow bedect pride months which seem to be multiplying. If you live in Germany, have a passport from the U.S. and do a lot of work in the U.K., you have fewer than three separate LGBT plus history and pride months which is great for bookings but but anyway that's the point of it and to try to connect the kind of more complex and deep and thoughtful conversation that we have about queer history when we're among ourselves, when we're among friends, when we're in our intellectual and our activist communities with broader and more mainstream publics. Hugh, do you have anything to add? Do you want to introduce yourself briefly? Oh great, okay. Well then I will get right to introducing Professor Lloyd Little in Jones who will be giving a talk. Then Hugh and I will be asking a couple questions each and then we will open the floor up to all of you and then we will all be over wherever the books are hopefully selling and signing dozens, if not tens. So Lloyd Little in Jones is Professor of Ancient History at Cardiff University. He specializes in Achaemnid Persia and in Greek social cultural history and in the reception of antiquity in popular culture. He is the editor of Edinburgh Studies in Ancient Persia and Screening Antiquity for Edinburgh University Press. Born in South Wales and educated in Hall and Cardiff, Lloyd travels extensively throughout the Middle East especially in Iran, often leading cultural tours. He has acted as historical consultant for major Hollywood movies and for television documentaries including Oliver Stones Alexander in 2004 whose soundtrack was playing when we came in to which we were saying backstage we really think that we should have been sort of lowered in a big burst of dry ice in one of these balconies. Lloyd is the author of several books, most recently Persians, The Age of the Great Kings which is on sale at the book stall tonight and he also contributed an essay to the British Library book accompanying the exhibition. So Lloyd. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you so much. It's a real pleasure to be here. John I want to thank you sincerely for the invitation and I also want to congratulate everybody who's been involved in this magnificent exhibition which I saw for the first time this afternoon. It really is a magnificent achievement and shows the importance of the the longevity and the the spread of myth making in its best possible way. If you haven't seen the exhibition please do go. So the further queer adventures of Alexander the Great and I'm going to start with a quote comes from an online site called fanpop.com. I think he was probably gay. There was a translation error. It was supposed to say Alexander the Gay but someone translated it wrong to Alexander the Great. This is going to set the tone for the evening. I should warn you for warn you there are a few fruity images all right but I've tried I'll try to move them on as quickly as I can. Don't. When Robin Lane Fox's biography of Alexander the Great first appeared in 1973 it was marketed I quote as the dashing story of the spell-binding young gay who conquered the world. Of course in those innocent far-off dreamy days and certainly within the ivory-towered publishing houses of academia gay had a very different resonance although we should remember that it was also in the early 70s that homosexuals began to define themselves through this use of the word gay outing themselves in the first open declarations of a specific sexual identity in western culture. Now interestingly by the time Lane Fox's Alexander went into its fourth edition to coincide with the release of Oliver Stone's movie Alexander in 2004 so post-gay activists, post-aids but firmly in the era of the metrosexual male, Alexander was marketed by the publisher as being I quote tough resolute fearless a born warrior and ruler of passionate ambition so passionate then but no longer gay it would seem. Ever since the 20th century discovered that horrid thing Freud called sex and began to consider sexual preferences as an integral part of sexual identity. Alexander has been scrutinized and analyzed for what his love life said or says about the man himself. In his pulp historical scholarly book Alexander's Lovers for instance Andrew Chug notes that I quote to understand Alexander well it is necessary to follow his heart more than his politics. The question of Alexander's homosexuality once the preserve of scholars such as Tarn whose determined attempt in 1948 to straighten the matter out as he said no pun intended I'm sure and future and close future discussions down met only with Badeon's very famous hatchet job of a dissection of Tarn's old pedantic conservatism a decade later. The sexual revolution of the 60s and the 70s stimulated even classicists to think in new and exciting ways and Alexander's sexuality was thrown wide open for debate in classrooms on gay political marches in popular literature magazines and in pornography and the strengthening gay communities of the liberal west happily embraced the ancient ruler not only as a gay prototype but as a gay hero. In recent decades enthusiasm enthusiastically flawed gay interest websites have been busy appropriating Alexander as a role model for the modern gay man so much so indeed that Castle's queer companion entry dedicated to the Macedonian conqueror notes that Alexander is a staple in the long list of historical gays that can be claimed from history. Now claiming is one of the traditional ways in which gay men and women and increasingly transgendered individuals have sought to demonstrate the political clout and the social and cultural worth of their sexuality or gender identity through identification with historical figures who have supposedly shared their same-sex desires or idiosyncratic gender characteristics. Oftentimes this has meant penetrating a smoke screen set up by straight historians who have underplayed, misrepresented, tried to remove or purposefully erased all questions of queerness in order to protect their subject. Famous individuals from classic classical antiquity have long provided inspiration for gay men and women who regard the concept of a queer golden age as aspirational a blueprint for future free from prejudice judgment ridicule and hatred. Out of this idea emerged lesbian sexuality championed by Sappho and male homosexual identity and not simply the platonic sort as emphasized by the figure of Alexander a vigorous attractive active masculine sexual identity that empowers gay men. Now the sexual legacy of the Greek world still lurks under the surface already there to bubble up and no one has ever forgotten that Alexander the Great indulged in homosexual acts. This is why Alexander heads the list of nine gay men and four gay women at gayheroes.com although why the apostle Paul is there is anyone's guess I really can't get my head around that but that's for another day and another exhibition. Now this talk is not about the real Alexander how can it be as this magnificent exhibition shows it is not about the historicity or even the historiography of Alexander and his sexuality although these thorny subjects continue to perplex and divide both Alexander scholars and Alexander devotees. This talk is not concerned with ideologies surrounding ancient expressions of sexual identity either but it does look at contemporary expressions of the sexual and the gendered self because the focus here is on exploring modern concepts of homosexual identity which have attached themselves to the figure of Alexander. It's the modern perception of Alexander's sexuality is queerness that is concern of concern to me. There are of course numerous queer Alexander's each adopting a very different persona in the ever-shifting ever-morphing multivalent world of queer identities. Alexander can be the romantic hero dreaming of a better world safe in the arms of his boyfriend. Alexander can be the porn star gagging for rough sex with his squaddies and Alexander can even be the American boy next door. There's a really charming musical that came out off Broadway in 2014 called A Kiss from Alexander and I'm not going to get time to discuss it tonight but I can answer some questions on it if you want. So he's even you know Alexander the Broadway baby is always there as well. Alexander then has been fairly claimed by the gay community and this gay claiming of Alexander affords homosexual men a sexual fantasy figure with which with historical kudos and for some a clear element of camp as well. Any treatment of the perception of Alexander in modern popular culture must engage with the celebrated Alexander the great trilogy conspiring a comprising of fire from heaven the persian boy and funeral games of the novelist Mary Renault. Gore Vidal described Renault's Alexandria as one of the most unexpectedly original works of art of the 20th century. Renault was preoccupied with Alexander he appears in other parts of her work too he is alluded to at the end of her first historical novel The Last of the Wine in 1956 and in The Lion in the Gateway in 1964. Renault's telling of the persian invasions of Greece for young readers calls draws into mind the golden Alexander who will come in the future. Further it seems that Alexander served as an inspiration for other characters. Renault's biographer David Sweetman finds echoes of her thesis for instance in Alexander but fundamental to Renault's preoccupation with Alexander was her belief that he was indeed Alexander the great. She was not impressed with those who demonized Alexander or defended him weekly and insisted that he should be judged by the standards of his own day. In her notes to the persian boy she comments on I quote a present-day outbreak of bad mouthing which goes far beyond a one-sided interpretation of the facts to their actual misrepresentation. Her insistence that Alexander be judged by the standards of his own day also extended to the question of course of his sex life. Renault was absolutely clear that Alexander lived in a world where men had sex with men as well as with women. Renault herself of course was bisexual and part of her motivation for shifting her novels set in the contemporary world to those set in the world of ancient Greece seems to have been to have the opportunity to write about same-sex relationships more easily. The transition is witnessed in her last contemporary novel The Charioteer of 1953 which has been called a study in homosexual love. Alexander served the subject of same-sex relationships primarily because of his famous attachment to Hephaestion. In fire from heaven the intensity of the relationship is not in doubt although the sex is never described. Renault's Alexander prioritizes the soul over the body and she quotes Plato's fadress in a section prior to a scene in which Alexander sleeps with Hephaestion. For his Hephaestion himself, Alexander's lack of interest in the physical aspect of their relationship is depicted as a source of some clear frustration. Renault conjures up a fascinating response by Hephaestion to Ptolemy's assumption that he is having a lot of sex with Alexander. I'll read a section of this out for you. He was getting at least what he would not have changed for any other human lot and the world could know it. The rest was his secret. He came to what terms he could with it. Pride, chastity, restraint, devotion to higher things. With such words he made tolerable to himself his meetings with a soul-rooted reluctance too deep to suffer questioning. Perhaps Olympius' witchcraft had scarred her child. Perhaps his father's example all thought Hephaestion. Perhaps it was that in this one thing he did not want the mastery and all the rest of his nature was at war with it. He had entrusted his very life much sooner and more willingly. Once in the dark he had murmured in Macedonian you are the first and the last and his voice might have been charged with ecstasy or intolerable grief. Most of the time however he was candid close without evasions. He simply did not think it very important. One might have supposed that the act of love was to lie together and talk. Hephaestion suspects that Alexander feels that sex endangers his very virtue and while Renault allows Alexander to be attracted to women his lack of having any interest in sex with them is however emphasized and underscores the peculiar partnership he has with Hephaestion. All in all the Alexander that emerges from the pages of Mary Renault is somewhat chaste and I think Chastity is the hallmark of Alexander's relationship with Hephaestion in Oliver Stone's 2004 biopic too although Stone himself has not stated if he was in any way influenced either directly or indirectly by Renault's novels the film's implications are that Hephaestion is Alexander's soulmate his true spouse but Stone does not make the sexual relationship explicit indeed in a scene that takes place on Alexander's wedding night to Roxane we have the teary-eyed Hephaestion admitting himself into the bridal chamber and proffering Alexander a ring which he slips onto his left hand suggesting to a modern audience marriage but what follows is a protracted sex scene between Alexander and the snarling rampantly sexed up Roxane it is furious love making perhaps suggesting Alexander's inability to make any form of emotional collection with his bride. It has been claimed that Warner Brothers the studio that financed Alexander alongside the German company Intermedia took steps to deemphasize the movie's gay aspect in its advertising campaigns the trailer for instance denotes declares Alexander's passion for Hephaestion while showing this love scene between the king and Roxane a line from the film part of Ptolemy's narrative however says clearly that quote Alexander was defeated only once by Hephaestion's thighs and indeed for his part Stone said that his interpretation of Alexander's life and character were true to the historical record this is what he has to say Alexander to me is the perfect blend of male female masculine feminine yin yang he could communicate with both sides of his nature when you get to modern day focus groups who will get offended in Hawaii or Maine you can't get out of it it'd be naive not to be concerned in America anyway I didn't know there would be a parallel situation going on and this parallel situation he refers to here is that that in the wake of the USA presidential election of 2001 and the passage of prohibitions on gay marriage in a number of states homosexuality had resurfaced as the focus of debate and controversy amongst cultural critics for instance Bob Velivsky a film critic with focus on the family a christian group warned of the film's potential to corrupt there will be people he said who will see Alexander the great by sexuality as applauding that lifestyle and unfortunately it will lead some young boys and some young men down a path that I think they will come to regret one day but interestingly for many gay men Alexander simply did not live up to the expectations either not only did they anticipate a bromance of epic proportions but they expected some really good man-on-man on-screen action from testosterone fueled bad boy Colin Farrell and puppy-eyed pouting heartthrob Jared Leto but what they got was a tepid shy and ambiguous story of boy on boy infatuation at the best interestingly then it's fan art and fan critic that actually comes into play and gives us the idea of what the public the gay paying public actually wanted so we find for instance some fans responding favorably to the soft core functioning of their relationship and even if a physical relationship is involved others in fan fiction tended to look for the raunchier elements of that side of the expression and others indulge themselves in full-on fantastical pornography to meet the need of a of a disappointed demographic early in 2006 spanky boys studio and i'm sure several of you are quite familiar with their releases released Alexander the great gang bang hardcore skin flick which centered on a surprisingly passive alexander's erotic encounters with his soldiery the warrior orgy turns into a gang bang and alexander is on the bottom would you like to join as we've seen much of the attention given to alexander especially on gay interest internet sites is to claim him as a homosexual prototype and often to provide contemporary gay men with a role model with a historical gravitas and no shortage of sex appeal either the nature and character of alexander is caught up in current multiple projections of queer identity certainly when stones alexander hitch the screens for the first time the internet internet erupted with gay fan sites perhaps seeing in the movie issues which simply were not there long before the film's actual release for instance rumors were already circulating that stone was making and promoting a gay focused and gay friendly life of alexander and social media speculation ahead of the film's premiere insisted that it would fixate on the ruler's gay identity as we've noted angry voices were raised at this censure and the a particularly vocal opposition came from social media users in Greece in Greece the movie alexander is causing great sadness because he is depicted as gay although no irrefutable evidence has been proved that he was it's just a theory and that's a myth if it has not been proven that he was i think hollywood is wrong to portray him as gay but then again what else can you expect from a left-wing liberal movie industry in november 2004 a group of 25 greek lawyers threatened to take legal action against oliver stone and to sue warner brothers for the defamation of alexander's character however eventually on viewing alexander before its official release date the lawyers dropped their case although they urged oliver stone to include a clear coda in the film's opening titles that alexander was a work of fiction this stone rightly ignored meanwhile the gay and lesbian alliance against defamation welcomed the film's premiere argument stone broke new ground for historical blockbusters in showing a man who unashamedly loved other men the threatened lawsuit did not mark the first time the subject of alexander's sexuality had caused controversy two years earlier hundreds of greeks had stormed an academic conference when a speaker presented a paper on the subject of alexander's homosexuality the events which took place at the institute of balkan studies seventh symposium on ancient macedon in thessaloniki in october 2002 i recalled by my friend and colleague professor daniel ogden who was himself presenting a paper at the event he's told me this many times over a glass of wine and it makes for a great story but i'm going to quote the the official version that he gives advanced publicity had attracted the wrath of local nationalist to spare other words party leos to that evening session and the leaders duly arrived with mob and camera crew in train some 40 police were deployed to protect the speakers the principal incitement was dr kate morrison's paper on homosexuality at the macedonian court but a fence was also taken at the adjacent papers my own says daniel ogden a war of witches at the court of philip the second philip could never have been a part of this kind of black magic and christian coven and also earned badeon on the death of philip the second and badeon's crime was to have doubted the hellenism of the macedonians the three of us were branded agents of scopye a day later the national newspaper stochos ran with an article headlined so who are these anti-greeks noting that daniel ogden has written tens of books in order to demonstrate that the ancient Greeks lived in a dark age of magic prostitution homosexuality bastard children and adultery the intolerance shown towards the conference speakers and the disregard for the process of historical investigation was compounded and endorsed by the mangled conviction that in essence Greece has always been an orthodox christian society and that the christian moors of the modern Greeks were shared by their pre-christian ancestors christianity of course comes into play often in this debate in 2013 for instance american republican senator for new mexico bill shearer decided to attack the state's endorsement of same-sex marriage licenses he used alexander to voice his dissent archaeology he stated shows the importance of the family unit working together as the first and most basic unit of human cooperation there is overwhelming existence that the unit of mom dad and children has been encouraged from the earliest pre-written record alexander may have indulged in homosexual activity but he married a woman interestingly the u.s armies don't ask don't tell don't pursue policy which had come about as a compromise during the clinton era in washington so that gays might remain anonymous in the military also was challenged by the systematic use of alexander the great would alexander the great be allowed to serve in the u.s military if he were alive today asked one south carolina journalist in 2006 having heard of the dismissal of alexander nickelson a u.s army linguist who was removed from service by some by somebody who had outed him in his unit online arguments for the presence of gays in the military is often endorsed by alexander's brilliance on the battlefield even if those championing him are sometimes factually a little off-key i quote from one source alexander the great conquered the known world with a gay army another writes in a blog that i love this one homosexuals are among the world's greatest killers always have been an uncle sam expert wants to to recruit expert killers alexander the great was a real swish such flawed if essentially good willed uses of alexander might strike some as eccentric but in the face of a still aggressive widespread homophobia gays essentially represent an enemy within the employment of this image of alexander in the process of the normalization of gays in the military no matter how distorted that image might be must ultimately be something positive and empowering in this light a blogger twists the standard rhetoric of online discrimination and speculates how alexander might have felt about having straight people infiltrating the ranks of his army citing a fictional fragmentary letter dated 325 bce written by a mastodonian general to alexander he offers evidence of a survey of troop attitudes towards straights in the military before turning his attention to the intent behind alexander's marriage to roxanne it's worth quoting in full dear alex i've interviewed our troops as to whether there are straight people among us as you commanded here are some partial results 10 percent believe that there are no straight people in mastodonia but since we want to put some foreign people in service and recently the defeated persians there is a possibility that they may be straight troops our troops do not oppose to serving with straight people as you know iran does not have homosexuals 10 percent were too drunk to answer as is expected from a mastodonian homosexual and alcoholic warrior you should be proud 60 percent actually do not care and say that they know straight guys in the army 100 wonder if you actually like roxanne and if you married her just because you like her or if it was for political reasons then he turns personal it is not there's something wrong about dating women you know but they they have seen your male lover hefeistian he seems very sad and when he's drunk he weeps all men are bitches is what the troops have heard him yell that reminds me i brought the flowers and the i'm sorry card for him you asked for it has a teddy bear as you ordered sir should i put it's just politics in it i send you many kisses and you will be present in my erotic dreams sign general of h h r r and parties in order to celebrate the newly published landmark edition of arian's biography of alexander the great the n u nyu center for ancient studied hosted a conference in 2011 aimed at exploring the writings of arian which are so central to the myth making of alexander my colleague from cambridge paul cartilage was asked to comment on the nature of alexander's sexuality and part of his answer ran like this the evidence for actual sex with bagoas is firmer than anything physical with hefeistion who may have been more of a bosom buddy as we used to say than a sexual partner it's the relationship with bagoas that is really extraordinary isn't it he was a non-greek a non-man as the greek saw it so alexander in having an openly sexual relationship with him would have been transgressing all sorts of cultural and political boundaries i'm inclined to believe he did and to admire him for it and i'm very much with paul on that point so then when it comes to alexander's sexual predilection does a eunuch a castrated man count at all if so does a eunuch arouse alexander's gay desires or his straight desires mary reno seems to answer that question decisively since a decidedly erotic charge emerges in her i think the best of the novels the persian boy originally reno had not intended to continue the story of alexander after fire from heaven but she became quite bewitched by the idea of this persian eunuch and played with him constantly in her endeavor to uncover something more about alexander's sexuality thus it is bagoas the castrato who evokes the active gay alexandria rather than his more famous friend hefeistian while fire from heaven is all about love the persian boy is absolutely all about sex reno deliberately presented bagoas this eunuch character not as a stereotypical eunuch effeminate corrupt running to fat but as beautiful and noble and worthy of alexander's attentions now when oliver stone came to retell his version of the story he seems here to have adopted reno's vision completely casting a handsome live and sensual francesco bosh a trained ballet dancer as the eunuch at one point in the film alexander goes to bed and bagoas climbs in with him and gently they kiss on alexander's wedding night when alexander beds rocks on bagoas briefly enters the room sees that there is now someone else in bed and discreetly leaves but in another scene bagoas dances publicly for alexander and alexander kisses him openly publicly and absolutely unashamedly it's no wonder that alexander and bagoas had such a resonance with the gay movie fans in fan blogs fan sites mainstream gay media gay male fans were given what they finally desired but there is more here than meets the eye bagoas clarifies the active sexuality of alexander in a way that hefeistian had not it is hefeistian who is frustrated and impotent rather than the castrated bagoas ultimately for both reno and stone the sexual union between alexander and bagoas symbolizes of course the king's desired union of east and west at the conclusion of her notes to the persian boy mary reno observed of alexander that i quote no other human being has attracted in his lifetime from so many men so fervent a devotion this passion has persisted well beyond alexander's own lifetime as exemplified by mary reno's own response to him which was specifically elicited the question of the sexuality of alexander taken as its starting point the iconic account of alexander created by reno in the 60s and 70s i've tried to explore here several 21st century responses to alexander by people who identify themselves through a range of genders and sexualities what we've witnessed here are numerous queer alexanders the chaste boyfriend the active lover the bisexual the de facto eunuch both male and female the sex god the porn king and the gay warrior these images reflect the advances in and the development of sexual and gender liberation experienced in the west from the 1960s onwards but they also reflect these advances that are not uncontested particularly by some christians and nationalists alexander continues to be a source of inspiration and heated debate for some though alexander is not just a top 10 gay hero he is the ultimate fantasy whose kiss we continue to crave thank you very much thank you for that i'm absolutely fascinating romp through the representations and i think misrepresentations maybe of alexander great i was really struck by this depiction in that sort of seminal cinematic masterpiece alexander the great gangbang that he was represented as a bottom or a receptive sexual partner and i was quite struck because not only have i never seen him sort of representing that role before but i never thought about him in that role either how does that really relate to sort of contemporary greek and macedonian understandings of homosexuality same-sex desire and and i guess how how has that then gone on to be taken on by homosexuals legend history as a representation of power and sort of masculinism it's really interesting um it's the only evidence i've come across from for thinking of alexander in that kind of way as a as a bottom maybe a power bottom to use that kind of lingo but it blows the greek conception of what homosexuality or if we can even use that word of male to male sex out of the water because of course within the greek mind the passivity of the sexual recipient of penetration is inevitably therefore seen as the the weaker the more feminine the therefore the more out of control lacking what the greeks call sofrosiny which means self-awareness moral probity uprightness so alexander's character in within that film just completely disappears um so it's it's it's not a it's it's not at all a typical way of seeing it and what's really interesting about the filmic versions of alexander of course that the casting of alexander is always paramount isn't it you know so we've we got collin farrell in the 2004 one irish known at the time for his hard drinking hard living i mean really stoners exploiting farrell's sexual persona a very aggressive male heterosexual persona of course and several decades before in robert rosson's 1956 alexander it was my compatriot richard burton who was cast in in the role again you know notorious this is just pre-liz taylor days but still already had made his name in hollywood for being um a hard drinker a hard liver and a lover of the women as well so you know there's always this kind of trajectory in in hollywood where we can't dismiss we can't kind of dislocate the historical figure from the actor who plays them at all so i suppose if stone had really wanted to um to foster an image of a gay alexander he could have either have cast an unknown so we could read onto this unknown anything we want to or uh a more uh out uh gay actor which of course they don't exist in hollywood as we know certainly not in 2004 um i wanted to ask a little bit about this kind of imperial nostalgia that flows through this whole memory culture coming through alexander that you described and you talked about sort of the flow as you said the flawed but good nature inside of it and it was it was interesting for me to think about that i think he and i are very used to thinking about the um flood and not necessarily very good nature inside of that imperial nostalgia i think it's fascinating that in all of these depictions of alexander he's racialized as white um and is whiter than the other people who are around him um and i think it is also interesting that it is interesting to remember how this kind of gay imperial nostalgia is often and this is something that comes up a lot in my work in the sort of german context is linked to a politics of misogyny anti-semitism um white supremacy really extreme misogyny i mean that that that the that when i was that i was joe thinking laughing about that that um blog post about how homosexuals are expert killers because you find stuff stuff like that written in german masculinist magazines in the teens and 20s by people who become nazis who are basically saying we are the greatest warriors because we're so powerful because we've just rejected women entirely out of sort of hatred and so it's a part of the kind of spot in the myth of sparta yeah so it's basically two two questions coming out of this one what happens when claiming goes bad and two how does today's claiming um even the kind of claiming that brought us all here tonight to talk about this um potentially play into even kinds of even contemporary kinds of of imperial nostalgia i mean we are here in in the british library and the persian manuscripts didn't fly here on by themselves you know when we when we deal with any aspect of alexander's story inevitably we are dealing with east west conflict um east west conquest um and the resolution of that as well now it's really interesting that's um if you were to trace the development of alexander portrayed in um scholarship since the second world war there was a real aim after the the second world war by people like erin spadian to try to make alexander um a kind of arbitrar of wanting to bring the nations together you know this is the time and the founding of uh of of the united nations and so forth this idea is you know that what alexander was trying to bring through his conquests was um a sense of togetherness or oneness and this is something that stone picks up in his movie so on the balcony at babelon you know babelon is not shown as a kind of captive city um by these macedonian marauders instead it you know it's shown opening its doors to alexander welcome him became as the liberator um so it's kind of like um operation this is a year after the u.s invasion of iraq so it plays on the whole idea is absolutely operation babelonian freedom is what's going on there we see it very clearly so they they are aware of that but what i what i found in oliver stone's movie is then while he's aware of these big themes he cannot like so many others who come before him help but indulge himself in the standard orientalist tropes all the time so you know the um when alexander goes into uh into the harem for instance you know uh of dirias what we have there are girls you know in yash mack stroke in persian kittens and all of this kind of thing and and and stone and i actually spoken about this and i've said you know you you're really getting it wrong then you're sending the you know we're stuck in the same world as elvis presley's harem scarum you know where he does exactly the same thing go east young man sort of thing and stone recognized the the the faults he'd made there but of course it's it's too late then it goes out so there's no um there's there's no happy ending to that narrative at all unfortunately um because i think in in his 2004 film um stone never really addresses the fact that alexander's empire was one of of colonization of course right yeah i'm also really fascinated by the this sort of role that mary reno plays in sort of establishing the this very modern representation of um of how we understand alexander and obviously from from as soon as people have started to identify themselves as i was homosexuals or even as inverts um through to like modern gaze there's um people have always looked back to to antiquity for these models to say we've always been here but um i was struck by the the the coincidence that um fire from heavens released in 1969 the same year as stone wall um and it emerges sort of sort of contemporary contemporaneously with this um gay liberation movement but also this new urge to find these these historical icons um did did she have like an overpowered effect in sort of setting the stage for this contemporary understanding of alexander and specifically when you're talking about where they sort of um remove the sex but cement the sexuality as a sort of as an identity raffer than as a form of behavior i think what comes out in the major studies of of her sweetman's excellent biography more than anything he doesn't really acknowledge that she's in in step with the time okay but what he does acknowledge all the time is is her own personal journey to her own sexual liberation as it were so as she matured when it became into her 40s and her 50s that's when really she found her own sexual identity she began a long relationship with with other women with another woman and therefore became more empowered to to to use antiquity in that light but i don't think she's ever particularly aware in anything that i've read about her of the the wider zeitgeist with what's going on unfortunately it would be lovely to say that she is completely in step with this but it doesn't really seem to be in the case but does a market find her even yes yes it does most most definitely and you really see it with the um the publisher's choice of imagery for the for the for the book covers for instance one or two of them are on display in the exhibition here and there's a really good one for the very first edition of the persian boy for instance which is shown in the exhibition here it's actually a Leonardo da Vinci sketch but it's actually of a of a of a Renaissance woman but it's it's quite erotic it's a the he she theme is definitely there as as the the the the figure turns away from us but but continues to hold our gaze it is something about drawing us into it so and you'll see that during the 1970s and into the 80s the the the publishing imagery that's utilized becomes increasingly gay-centered i suppose we could say yeah muscle muscle curuses and all of that kind of stuff great i'm gonna ask one more question and then after that we're going to go to the audience so start getting your questions ready if you have them um my final question is about this figure of a bagoas who i'm really fascinated by the reception history in the west of this kind of racially othered third gender figure is vast it's a huge it's an enormous projection fantasy for generations of gay men as they're kind of creating themselves i'm the most familiar with the us and german context but i know this is true in the in the british one as well in which in this kind of search for social roles that is a part of the response to the pathologization and the medicalization of the 19th century anthropological and ethnographic records in the colonies become a place where you go to figure out this question like who are we what do we do and there's this and there's this there's this search for these kinds of figures i'm wondering how you see the reception history of bagoas playing into that story and i'm also wondering if we know anything more about the actual dynamics of the relationship between them i'm really interested by the characterization of this as a relationship between equals when bagoas was not as equal like how what was the what what do we know of the actual relationship between them and then and then how do we think about the the reception history in that in that broader light as with everything about alexander we know nothing of his real life everything we have with alexander comes at least 150 200 years after his death the one thing i say to my students all the time yeah who want to um work on alexander is don't because you will never get close to this man we're always dealing with with the mythology with the legend and but what what is interesting is it's straight away the the bagoas legend is woven into that narrative hiarion and bicurteous both of whom pick those up so so there is and yet it comes from a longer greek fascination with the the unit character now within um bagoas's own society within akim and iran um kastrati castrated men um were were part of a highly sophisticated court culture um they were castrated so that they could serve as body servants of the great king um of the great king's women principally his his wives and concubines and because of their their castration they they occupied they occupied this strange position as a sort of third sex they really were seen as as something specifically third sex but there was no prejudice about it and it doesn't mean that they were combined you know confined to the harem or anything like this we we have lots of evidence in assyria and in persia from genuine bona fide near eastern sources that these individuals could serve in the army they could serve in the government um but what it meant was um as we see later on in imperial china for instance if these men put themselves through the act of castration which is you don't do likely you can imagine the death rate was enormous for this it meant that you could enter into a highest level of society and actually gain real real power but what the greeks do with it almost immediately when they come into contact with eunuchs for the first time as the persian empire encroaches into the greek world is they begin first of all a fantasy on the on the the idea of the castrato but also this kind of using it as this orientalist trope of decadence um and a kind of uh you know despotism which demands castration of these these young men for instance so euripides in his play um uh helen for instance about 419 bc he has this um frigian character who's clearly meant to be a eunuch and this frigian is given this long long um passage to sing um and of course we should remember that you know greek tragedy was a was a sung event not really recited and this um this must have been a tour de force rather like the sort of queen of the night aria in de zauberflöte where where this um greek is imitating the falsetto voice of this thing so they play with it constantly playing with it but they can't accept it xenophon says for instance that um the the persians created eunuchs by castrating them they made them like dogs or stallions that they took away their kind of you know their their masculinity and made them um abject servitude was something about them completely the opposite of what was really going on with inside that society great well thank you for that um we are now able to take a few questions from the audience someone will bring you a microphone there's a nice person wandering put your hand up real high so we can see you because the lights are real bright i see someone here in about the uh third row thank you thank you very much for a wonderful um tour de force there through through that sociology of um sexuality is there a sense in which um the relationship between alexander and begoras kind of because begoras is portrayed as not quite being a man as this ambiguity that in today's view in culture which is often dominated we could say is often dominated by the the straight male gaze that that relationship's okay because begoras wasn't really a man type of thing i think yes i think that's absolutely it he's not really seen as a man um and moreover he's not greek either of course you know and in the greek mind the easterners the persians were effeminates so according to hypocrite's in his air's waters and places the people who inhabit the the west of greece so the kelts they tend to be cold-blooded um stupid but um good warriors whereas the people who inhabit the east in the heat of the east are warm-blooded effeminate but very calculating that means that these two polar opposites mean that to find the ideal person the ideal man was to look at greece itself of course which is the perfect perfect center point and this is the world the way in which the greeks saw their world you know it is the othering of others so everything in greece works as this polarity man woman um polis countryside us them it's all part of that same rhetoric they see their world in very very narrow ways in that way yeah and you can you can you can pile them together so foreigner woman you know that all stacks up yeah thank you as it does now um i just wanted to add we have a question uh there in the microphone we'll we'll go to this person um but i wanted to add if you're watching online we were told that someone is looking for your question so ask your question in the chat and someone will find a way to get it up to us up here but yep uh so this is about the reception of reynolds work when it came out so i remember myself being completely like the young teenager in the early 80s going oh my god what i found in the library um and everything i've read about since it seems to have had a really positive critical reception but even in the 1980s when i was a young gay man um there was not very much positivity around right so i'm just wondering if it's the case that reynolds work i've always wondered this reynolds work actually had only a positive reception or there were also a negative reception to it and if it did only have a positive one why was that in a pretty queerphobic time yeah it's a good question as far as i'm concerned i've i've only ever seen positives i've never seen a really bad review of it ever never even saying that it's out to kill it's out of touch what's the reason for that classics is the reason you dress anything up in a toga right and it becomes presentable okay we've we've been trained in the west to think that way for centuries now okay um you know you you put any um scantily clad maiden in in in something which is just pinned at your shoulders and it becomes fine you know we can look at it you know it's not nudity so i think really um whether she knew it or not reynolds harness that yeah and i think that's the that's the easiest answer and i think the honest answer we can dress this up in in classical robes and it suddenly becomes acceptable always has done maybe we have someone in the front row here hello thank you um i'm intrigued about the alexander musical when did it come out and how gay was it pretty freaking gay so it came out in 2014 i happened to find it just by like doing this kind of web searches so i got in touch with the uh lyricist and the composer and they were very good they sent me a a recording of it and the opening shot of that i had on here this real muscle mary that's a guy called craig ramsey who played alexander in it um it was very much an off off off off broadway for captain with very low budget quite clearly but great aspiration so um one of the things i really like about it um it's very tannin cheek the whole thing as you can imagine and they use the concept of the greek chorus to to turn into the greek chorus boys and so they they play on that all the time the the lyrics are painful the story is transparent and i'm not surprised it didn't get any further than it did but i love the i love a i love a trier right sure do we have any i see someone here next to the next to the cameras yeah behind the camera one of the sort of classic blunders in the history of thought is to sort of take the ideas that we have now in the way of the conceptualized things like medicine or science or whatever is like more or less correct and the people in the past were just sort of mistaken or perhaps um you know just unaware of what they were doing um and i just wonder that when you sort of historic are not used in particular but in general when so figures like this are historicized as gay or trans or whatever do you think that there is a potential danger in sort of taking sort of modern conceptions that reflect sort of very specific relations of say like production and social reproduction and projecting them onto a past in which they perhaps don't really hold of course there is absolutely but i think i think it is warranted because for me as an ancient historian i love my i love my discipline and i wanted to i wanted to speak you know so myself and my colleagues can do the nitty gritty and know exactly where things are in their place and i had i wanted to i could have given you a more sort of you know alexander in the mind of the romans who created him for instance but i think that it's absolutely appropriate in in under the heading of reception studies for each one of us to take any aspect of history and to claim it for ourselves to read it as we need to see it i think it's an important thing it's it's empowering it opens debate and what i always say to my students in cardiff is that ancient history is not a dead subject you know it's it's not about it's not over with it's ongoing it's constantly evolving let me give you a really good example what's happening right now in iran as you know my country i know very very well it's a great crisis that's going on with women trying to find their voices trying to remove the veil that's dominated them for for the last 40 years the way in which that is being used with the real currency which the islamic government don't know what to do is by using the figure of syrus the great he is the alexander for the iranians okay and they say that you know he was the it's a myth but they say that he founded the first ever bill of human rights for instance it's a myth the real thing is in the there's a there's a cylinder in the british museum it was made in a Babylon it was written in Babylonian it has nothing to do with Iran at all but the iranians believe it and if they want to believe it let them believe it because give them something to hold on to in their history you know and i think therefore it's it's an appropriate thing to do i do want to add something yeah no just this is also an interesting point that comes up at time and again when we're doing the podcast and obviously we're reaching back to people who lived in a time where there was no conception of homosexuality as we understand it today or and definitely being gay but we we talk about them sometimes as gay people um and in having that conversation if as long as you sort of talk talk through that you're working then actually it doesn't just shed light on their understanding of contemporary forms of identity formation and sexuality but it also sheds quite a lot of light on the way we ourselves have constructed our own forms of identity and that sort of give and take between the past and the present in in casting people in current sort of modes of thought is can be just as enlightening absolutely and between the present and multiple pasts right because oftentimes we're talking about people on our show who lived 100 150 years ago who are talking about the classical past themselves and so these are like all these different temporalities occur and and watching how people across these different temporalities make these kinds of um of of affective connections with and projections onto historical figures um and yet it's also always complicated something that comes up again and again in the show is um this question of figures who have been claimed both by either gay or lesbian history especially during the kind of years of liberation and trans history and you know you'll you'll get someone in you know in the most the most absurd version of this right as absurd as the internet meme of the you know tomb of the um army of lovers and the historian saying well i think they were just very good friends right um is you know the person who gets execute kicked out of the army um is serving in the in the in the army as a man uh is discovered to have been assigned female at birth is kicked out of the army uh protests that they're a man has been married to a woman goes by male name etc etc etc and then you find the article about them and it's called a lesbian history of and it's like um and but but there are a lot of places where that tension is actually genuinely quite complicated because these memory claims can be very simple and positive and empowering but they can also be conflicting and they can be used for terrible ends right what's done with frederick the great during by by gay nazis in the in the early 30s is not a particularly um it's not a history it's not a process of historical identity formation or of or of this kind of claiming um that i think but i would hope any of us here um would be particularly comfortable with and so these things are like i agree with you have to be really careful um but i still think it's interesting to do it i think we must we must know the reality we must try always to aim for the reality try to get to the nugget and the philologists and the art historians and the historians must get together and keep that alive and keep doing that but i think beyond that let's allow history as it really is to breathe because history is not finished it's it's not a final project you know that history has not been written history is evolving it's amorphous it changes it breathes it does its own thing it contracts and it always will and we'll look back and we'll be able to identify what's going on right now in a hundred years time but sometimes of course it's only hindsight that shows us where the trajectories are going as well what did it mean for queer life in britain in 2023 that the british library hosted yeah a talk about alexander the great seriously more questions hands high so we can see you we have yep back row um i'm interested particularly about you saying that you'd never seen a representation of alexander as a bottom anywhere other than in that particular film because i had always been struck by his image as being quite feminine like the flowing hair the lack of beard i mean even the picture behind you is a bit of a twink and like i'm curious about um hit the reception of his image as it is because it's pretty consistent in antiquity and the medieval i guess into the modern as well how did people view him with his kind of boyish good looks and his youthful youthful appearance did they take him for that that's that's a really good question now this is probably the only representation of alexander we have from his own lifetime it's a small piece by this size and actually he can't see it here he's got little little horns in his head it's him as the god pan actually um so there was always this element of alexander morphing into the divine anyway but really it's not until 2030 50 years after his death that the alexander alexander image becomes codified and it's done first of all through his successor kings who are all trying to sort of claim some kind of contact with him on coinage for instance so on coinage you're absolutely right i mean he's always shown as a kind of an afeb so in this like james dean in a way you know caught in this this this bubble of youth i suppose um you know we never see representations of him with a beard or you know grown up as a bit true amount so you're so you're right he's frozen in time um in in a lot of respects um there are points that always are played up with alexander so you'll notice in that there's a sculpture that we see as we first go into the exhibition alexander's sculptor from life apparently always try to capture the um oh the i don't know the the movement of the man so he always seems to sort of hold his head at an angle or or kind of off center to look back at us the other thing they always go for these kind of leonine locks this kind of cow's lick that he has at the front and an over large eye very often seen in silhouette of course in a coin which kind of looks sort of into the middle distances always looking to the heavens where of course you know the gods sit and where of course he will he he he resides as well so it's a very very manufactured image you're absolutely right to say it and and it stays that way so you might know the famous alexander mosaic which was discovered in pom pompe where you see him on horseback defeating dirias the third and again all of the hallmarks you know the the tussled hair the big eye they're all there so it seems to be you know just like elizabeth the first created a kind of patent for her imagery alexander had that done for him um in successive years what's fascinating about this exhibition of course as he blows all of that out of the water because we see so many alexander faces there you know and as every society wants him for their own they morph him into whatever he needs to be of course which is really fascinating and there was maybe one more I see was that what do you want one more yeah yeah thanks for the talk I just realized now that the alexander movie came out the same year as another colossal based on classics which was Troy yes and it's quite known that alexander which is what's Troy's based on and alexander identified with Achilles and there has been suggestion that there were identification between aphestion and patroclus and I was wondering if there was a connection with these movies coming out the same year in particular in the case of the relationship between Achilles and patroclus in the movies where it's very downplayed there is no queerness in it patroclus is portrayed as a cousin of Achilles very young and Achilles affection towards him is basically just familial while there are more recent story tellings about that like mother in Miller's the song Achilles which instead portrays as a queer relationship so was there a debate going on about queerness and the klaxies at the time or um certainly um I really don't know if Wolfgang Peterson and and Stone were ever in communication about this my instinct is to say no um they they weren't um again the idea of the casting of the star becomes really important here because of course they cast Brad Pitt as Achilles and of course he comes I've called this in the book I've written about um the Hollywood Hollywood in history um I've called it um the archaeology of stardom it's almost like a a movie star is like an archaeological site you know and you've got a dig beneath so they got their latest movie but for instance you know Charlton Heston um at the bedrock of Charlton Heston will always be Moses right and no matter what he does you know Moses is always there so with Brad Pitt you know you've got Thelma and Louise and all this kind of you know sexualized perfect man fight club and all of that and on the top of that then they layer Achilles but it's just um Brad Pitt in armor right I mean there's no change whatsoever you know and one of the opening scenes of the movie shows um there's a there's a reveal showing a sleeping Achilles Brad Pitt and the camera pulls back to see a woman next to him and then pulls it back more to see actually he's having a threesome with two women you know so there's no doubt uh straight away that this is a straight Achilles you know um because of course in Hollywood from its formation really certainly from the 1930s anyway pre-code you know postcode um no Hollywood star is going to risk his identity by playing that kind of role you know things are morphing now maybe but certainly back in 2004 there was no question um that that could could happen within the the context of um antiquity however you're right Alexander was obsessed with with the Iliad not so much odyssey Iliad always um but again all of our knowledge about his fascination with this great epic only comes from Roman like writers who are keen to make that link of course between Hephaestian and Alexander and Achilles and Petroclus interestingly of course within the Iliad itself and within the tradition in uh later classical Greece Achilles was the passive partner and Petroclus of course was the more active one which is something that most people don't want to even think about anyway again well oh is that a question from online we have we have an online well it's I wouldn't normally read out a statement rather than the question but this is so good I'm going to do it so this is from uh Julia who's watching in from Brooklyn NYC so not a question more like fan mail thank you Lloyd Lewell and Jones for the breathtaking and loving world wind of a brief history of this ancient heartthrob the past hour has been a catharsis of joy I've never encountered another person who's read Alexander's lovers Alexander's been hit my hero since the early 2000s drawn in by Colin Farrell's thighs I stayed for the I stayed for the love of Mary Renault from the nature of Alexander the fire from heaven and trilogy and the charioteer and the historical aspects of Alexander's legacy Alexander's compassion female captives his embrace of even eastern cultures his ever-forward trend-setting ways beards are so Philip of Macedon are just so I just many examples of why generation after generation we continue to fall in love with his legacy thank you for giving us this lecture it was equivalent to a rock concert for me I wish I could have been there in person to thank you and shake your hand thank you for the nerdiest het sis female in Brooklyn you've made me a very happy lady oh well that's very kind thank you so much Julia very kind thank you can we possibly top that it seems like a perfect place to we need to bring it to an end there I think we do thank you all so much for coming out tonight one is more a big round for a Lloyd Louie Lynn Jones professor Lloyd Louie Lynn Jones at Cardiff and stick around come talk to us for the low low price of one of our various books which will be around to sign and thank you so much thank you have a good night