Same-sex relationships in history

O.M.G. My previous life as someone who thought all the time about reading queer contemporary U.S. stuff back into ancient Greece totally became relevant again today! I was watching a presentation on some research on same-sex relationships between adolescents, and the presenter mentioned, off the cuff, that these relationships are now "more visible than at any other time in history."

I'm an anthropologist now, so I could have talked about lots of groups and times and places where various visions of what is meant by "same-sex relationships" aren't stigmatized (e.g., in any number of African or Melanesian groups). But it was clear that his ethnocentric vision of "any other time in history" meant Western history. And that was wrong, too. So I got to say so.

Because, DUH, ancient Greece was totally down with the same sex relationships - especially when they involved youth! I think wikipedia's entry on Homosexuality in ancient Greece covers it better than I could, though, so I'm not gonna bother.

Relevance!

Slave girls' Goddesses

So in the U.S. (and lots of other places), we really dig the low-born (and occasionally low-brow) hero. Titanic and Shrek are good examples. But the ancient Greeks had a very different class structure than we do, and you’re really not going to find any good heroes (outside of comedy) that weren’t born seriously aristocratic. The same thing tends to go for women. So when, rarely, we actually see a female slave in Greek myth, she tends to be secretly noble. Like Leucippe and Andromache. Even Briseis - the Achilles’ slave girl in the Iliad - was the daughter of the king of the Leleges at Pedasus.

We rarely see the world from a woman’s perspective, but a lower class woman’s perspective or that of a slave-woman (born a slave) virtually never. Slave-girls were considered to be available for sex pretty much whenever by pretty much whoever (with some exceptions). Whether they were kept concubines, flute-girls (mostly a euphemism), or just unlucky house slaves, sex was wholly outside of their control. Not only were they available to their masters, they were not permitted to form their own sexual relationships without their master’s consent. (27 Pomeroy)

Maybe I shouldn’t even be talking about them, since they are so absent from myth. But they must have grown up with many of the same stories. I wonder, which gods and goddesses they saw as sympathetic. Surely not the aristocratic Athena, but I’d be willing to bet that at least some became supplicants of Aphrodite.