So, Your Humble Blogger mentioned comfort books a while back, so perhaps inevitably, Mary Renault’s The Mask of Apollo (New York: Pantheon 1966) got picked up again. It’s getting pretty thumbed-through by now; I don’t know if this is the same book I first read in my early teens or if I bought another copy of the same edition somewhere along the line.
Do y’all know Mary Renault’s stuff? I’ve read all eight of her historical novels set in Ancient Greece and enjoyed them all, to a greater or lesser extent. Mask was really profoundly formative, though. The first dozen or so times I read it, of course, I was still wanting to be a professional actor, so I naturally identified more with Niko than with, say, Theseus (I don’t remember ever wanting to be a king, or a wrestler for that matter). I can’t remember my reaction to his homosexuality; I certainly don’t remember being upset by it in any way.
In Ms. Renault’s Greece, all the good guys are gay. In fact, for all of them, true love is expected to be between an older, wiser man and a talented, beautiful boy; that love is both romantic and erotic (the sex is, if you will, explicitly implicit, rather than explicit). Some of them are married to women, of course; there is no same-sex marriage. Homosexual love is not expected to be exclusive of marriage, which is for procreation, politics, and (if one is lucky) companionship, but certainly nothing between a woman and a man is considered to be as potentially fulfilling as the love between two men.
How much did my favorite book influence my ideas about gay sex? By the first time anybody came out to me (looking back, was the young woman in my highschool who used to joke about being lesbian actually lesbian? I suspect so, now, but it never occurred to me at the time. I wish I could remember her name.), I was already pretty liberal on that issue, but then I was pretty liberal on a lot of issues by then. I honestly don’t know. I do know that by the time I was bar mitzvah, one of my best fictional friends was gay; it came as no surprise that many of my real friends would be gay as well.
Redintegro Iraq,
-Vardibidian.