God = Boy

Continuing our busy week of LGBT History Month events, on Thursday evening Madam Arcati and I braved the looming blizzard to go to the wonderful Petrie Museum for a "lavishly illustrated lecture" by academic and Egyptologist John J Johnston, all about the legendary gay boy-god Antinous, lover of the Emperor Hadrian.


Petrie Museum

Mr Johnston is a fascinating and erudite speaker, and with consummate ease encapsulated not just the story of Antinous and his sad death, but his legacy in myriad works of statuary and art, and his continued camp cult status even today.

Visit Dolores Delargo Towers - Museum of Camp for the remarkable story of Antinous.

This particular god was the last to be created in the Roman epoch (an unprecedented act of hysterical campness by his lover the Emperor) - and suited the mood of those decadent times very well. His image appeared everywhere across the Empire, from his birthplace in Greek-speaking Asia Minor, to the memorial city established after his death Antinoopolis in Egypt, to such far-flung lands as Spain, North Africa and even Britain. Antinous came to represent the eternal beauty of desired male youth (and his fabulous arse!).


[left] Gay historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann with a picture of Antinous; [right] gay adherents of the cult of Antinous

His legend captured the hearts and minds (and more no doubt) of successive generations of aesthetes, romantics and chicken-loving homosexuals, with numerous reproductions of his image, poems and prose dedicated to his story, and the adoption of Hadrian and Antinous as symbols of often persecuted gay love.

This lecture was brilliantly told, brilliantly researched, beautifully illustrated, and utterly, totally enthralling...

LGBT History Month continues throughout February 2012.