Download Mapping “Romeic” and “Hellenic” Same-Sex Desire

Mapping “Romeic” and “Hellenic”
Same-Sex Desire: Articulating
Heteropatriarchy and
Male Homosexuality in
Contemporary Greece
Alex G Papadopoulos
Department of Geography, DePaul University, Chicago, IL, US;
[email protected] and [email protected]
This study of the articulation of heteropatriarchy and male homosexuality in contemporary
Greece questions the widely accepted paradigm that male same-sex desire in modernity is
both ontologically and ritually divorced from ancient Greek practices. Drawing on Herzfeld’s
(1982) ethnographic model of the dual construction of modern Greek identity as “Romeic” (qua
actual, vernacular, rural-rooted, and “oriental”), and “Hellenic” (qua constructed, idealized,
cosmopolitan, and occidental), the study explores the similarly dual sociosexual construction of
male homosexuality following the creation of the modern Greek state in 1830. The study
concludes that the Greek national project required desexing the ancient Greek past in the process
of crafting a sanitized, heteronormative, and patriarchal polity in line with its Victorian-era
counterparts in Western Europe. Furthermore, modernity reordered the extensive diasporic
Greek communities in the Europe, the Middle East, and the Black Sea region in ways that
promoted the fertilization of metropolitan Greece with a variety of rural and immigrant sexual
imaginaries.
Women now place their trust
in men who tonight go off
with other men
Being left on their own
dishes piled up in the sink
nightclothes unbuttoned, lying on the sheets
they stoop and rest on low chairs
as their children’s voices from their bedrooms
do not reach their ears.
Women now place their trust
in men who tonight are lying down
with other men”1
(“Greek Fantasy,” written in 1997 by Yiorgos Chronas [1999])
© 2002 Editorial Board of Antipode.
Published by Blackwell Publishing, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden,
MA 02148, USA
Mapping “Romeic” and “Hellenic” Same-Sex Desire
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Mapping Greek Homosexuality onto
Greek Heteropatriarhy
In his History of Sexuality (1990; originally published in three volumes
in 1976, 1985, and 1988), Foucault posits that “homosexuality” is a
modern, 19th-century invention, based on discursive and scientific
sensibilities of that time. The implication is that it is often erroneously
compared to non-Western and premodern milieus. Foucault argues
that Classical Greek pederasty was socially constructed in a very
different way from modern homosexuality because of significant
differences in the ideologies, iconographies, and practices of male
same-sex desire in those times. I suggest here that his position is
absolutist and utterly modern in its attempt to compartmentalize
sociosexual experience searching across axes of time rather than place.
In so doing, Foucault produces an evolutionary picture of sexuality
formation. By describing ancient male Greek same-sex desire as an
obsolete “other,” he cannot consider how antiquity-originating ritual
behaviors and relationships of androcentrism, phallocentrism, and
male domination were translated and modified into sociocultural
and political experiences of the Byzantine, Ottoman, and post-Greek
Revolution nation-state-building eras. Instead, I argue, male same-sex
desire in the Greek world never suffered a definitive rupture in expression or ontology from ancient forms, which serve as the basis for
continuous if flexible sociosexual traditions.
I examine male same-sex desire through the analysis of a substantial
queer Greek male literary and artistic corpus, while also relying on a
personal ethnography.2 I significantly base this “autoethnography” on
visits between 1996 and 2001 to numerous rural and urban places in
Greece, including Athens, Thessaloniki, Thessaly, Thrace, and the
Cycladic Islands. I do so, first, to theorize contemporary Greek homosexuality in terms of Greece’s political economy and the construction
of a national political culture, and second, to define ecological
relationships between male homosexuality and heteropatriarchy in
contemporary Greece. Thus, I map an agenda for further research on
Greek homosexuality and the power relations that insert it firmly into
national and international imaginaries.
The research is informed by three questions: How did/does the construction of an Enlightenment- and Romanticism-influenced political
and state culture in early 19th-century Greece redefine the male sexual
self and produce a spectrum of male sexualities? How do rural-urban
migration and the varied diasporic experiences of Greeks shape
their sexual values and practices? And how have these multiple male
sexualities—also multiple types of male–male desire—underpinned
patriarchy? First, I explore the process of state formation in the 19th
century and argue that (1) it gave rise to a new type of political self
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that read and selectively appropriated the Greek historical record,
(2) it “de-sexed” ancient Greek history to harmonize it with Orthodox
Christian dogma—the other signifying pillar of the new national
identity, and (3) it affirmed masculinist authority structures by relying
on the triadic division of power among patrilineal kinship, patriarchal
Orthodox Christianity, and a strong martial culture tied to expansionist national aims. Second, I consider the question of the spatial
boundedness of Greek sexuality—and Greek male same-sex desire in
particular—by exploring the character of the historic and the contemporary Greek diasporas. I support my assertions with two case studies
of the impact of diasporic experience on Greek homosexuality:
(1) Alexandrian Constantine Kavafis’ gay erotic poetry and diaries,
which have had a profound impact on the artistic expression of homosexuality in metropolitan Greece; and (2) an autoethnography of
Koumoundourou Square’s sexual demimonde. I conclude that we can
discern at least two distinct and coexisting traditions of same-sex desire:
one that is fluid and contingent and rooted in pre-modern and prenationalist value systems, and one that recognizes orientations as fixed
and immutable and has its roots in Western European conceptions of
the self.3
Yiorgos Chronas (1999), a notable poet who wields some influence
in the world of queer Greek men’s literature through his publishing
house and bookstore, Odos Panos (Panos Street), makes important
allegations in his poem “Greek Fantasy” about the ecological relationship between heteropatriarchy and homosexuality in contemporary
Greece. The poem alludes to unequal gender and sexual divisions of
labor in contemporary Greek society, the sociosexual construction
of both home and public spaces, and the spectral continuity between
homosocial and homosexual expression—at least among men.
Chronas also suggests that male desire (beyond the boundaries of
homespace) and female desire, which, at least according to “Greek
Fantasy,” remains largely unfulfilled and unexpressed, are mapped
vastly differently. In Greece, patriarchy, homosexuality, and misogyny
have often been intimately linked, yet little literature is available that
makes this explicitly clear.
This is especially surprising since academia has long focused on and
been fascinated by male–male desire in Classical Greece, especially in
relation to pederasty, pedagogy, and the masculinist character of the
city-state regime. Dover’s (1978) classic philological and art-historical
study staged a set of arguments and methodologies that later scholarship has questioned. Most importantly, Dover argued that same-sex
desire in ancient Greece was essentially analogous to (modern) homosexuality. Since Dover’s landmark study, other scholars have engaged
the subject of family and sexuality in ancient Greece from the perspectives
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of historiography and social history, literary criticism and critical social
theory, sociology, and demography (see recent works by Bremmer,
Cohen, Halperin, Stuart, Thornton, Winkler, and Zeitlin). Their work
is to a degree—and in some cases substantially—influenced by Foucault’s
social constructionist work on sexuality.
Anglo-American and European scholarship continues to break
new analytical ground concerning ancient Greco-Roman sexuality,
yet academia is largely silent on the subject of contemporary Greek
male homosexuality:4 In particular, scholarship on how sexuality is
imbricated into national identity, the family, class, gender, race, the
sex industry, social marginality, the municipal disciplining of same-sex
desire and practice through urban planning, and the AIDS crisis—
to name a few possible research venues—is virtually non-existent. In
Greece there are no university departments dedicated to gender and
sexuality studies, reflecting the fact that there is general public discomfort about discussing these subjects. Thus, there have been no
indigenous studies of contemporary Greek sexuality, most sexuality
scholars coming either from the United States or Western Europe.
A fundamental question that defines the boundaries and nature of
scholarship about Greek identity concerns the purported division
between an ancient and a modern Greek culture. There are several
explanations for periodizing “Greekness” into “ancient,” “medieval/
Byzantine,” and “modern” historic experiences, the counterview
being that Greek culture and identity, although clearly continuously
modified, occupy a continuous if diachronic spectrum of experiences
constituting a single cultural tradition.
On the one hand, Enlightenment and, later, Romantic constructions
of “Greekness” lionized the Classical epoch, and Periclean Athens in
particular. The advent of neoclassicism in Western letters and arts
framed in practical terms the manner in which the intellectual and
aesthetic tradition of the Classical Greek world was appropriated
by the Great Powers, especially Britain, France, and Germany, to be
integrated into modern racist projects of nationalism. The French
imperial expressions of a mission civilisatrice, the pedagogical homage
to Classical Greek (and Latin) in elite British public schools, and the
pillaging qua rescuing of relic artifacts of the Classical and Hellenistic
world by British, French and Germans in the first quarter of the 19th
century established a sense of ownership over, and a reasoned lineage
to, the Classical world.
On the other hand, during the 19th century, the West constructed
the Greeks of the decaying Ottoman World as an Oriental “other,”
tangentially and sometimes incidentally connected to Classical
civilization. Jacob Philip Fallmerayer’s thesis that 19th-century
Greeks were not connected either racially or culturally with Classical
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Greek civilization exemplified such “othering” (Herzfeld 1982:75–76;
Veloudis 1982:28–35). Early 19th-century Greek elites, influenced by
Western-born neoclassicism, also devalued the living Greekness
within the Ottoman state and the Levantine Greek diaspora.
Ottoman bureaucratic practices did not help debunk Westerninspired constructions of 19th-century Greekness as a binary set:
ancient Greekness as a museumized tradition nourishing the Western
European cultural project, and modern Greekness as an ersatz variant
of the ancient original. The Ottoman state ruled over and managed
the day-to-day affairs of its non-Muslim subjects through the so-called
millet regime: Millets were non-territorial administrative contracts with
each of the three major religious minorities of the Empire—the Greek
Orthodox, the Armenian Orthodox, and the Jews—that determined
the privileges and obligations of each religious community vis-à-vis
the sultan. Greek identity was thus subsumed administratively under
Greek Orthodoxy and the corresponding millet—an administrative
regime that included all Orthodox Christian subjects, regardless of
their place of residence within the empire and their linguistic identification. Accordingly, the Greek Orthodox millet included linguistically
diverse peoples of the Balkans, Asia Minor, the Trans-Caucasus, and
the Middle East that fell under the civil and ecclesiastical jurisdiction
of the Orthodox and Oecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople
(Lewis 2001:36). Thus, the Ottoman authorities identified Greekspeaking and Bulgarian-speaking Orthodox peoples as members of
one and the same “Greek Orthodox” millet, since it was their religion
rather than their language that defined their administrative relationship to the state. These came under the label “Rum” (an Ottoman
corruption of “Roman” qua Byzantine Orthodox) and were amalgamated
in Ottoman census records under a single demographic category. The
eventual demise of the millet system with the collapse of Ottoman
power in Southeastern Europe and the establishment of the Greek,
Serbian, and Bulgarian states set the stage for virulent politics of
cultural revivalism and “identity cleansing.” In the two decades before
the revolt against the Ottoman state, Greek elites agitating for
independence were inventing “Modern Greekness.”
Paris-, Vienna-, and Odessa-based Greek elites were in part responsible for the revolution against Ottoman authority (1821–1830).
An essential element of their cultural-political struggle was to recuperate what they constructed as a corrupted umbilical to the Golden
Age (Vlami 1997:73–74). After the revolution, the state fashioned a
political self by appropriating selectively Classical Greek intellectual
and linguistic traditions and integrating them with Orthodox Christian
and Byzantine traditions—which had persisted through centuries
of Ottoman suzerainty over the Greek World—into a new national
imaginary. For example, the state adopted a highly stylized classicizing
Mapping “Romeic” and “Hellenic” Same-Sex Desire
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Greek idiom and grammar fashioned by Adamantios Koraes, a Greek
intellectual of the Western European diaspora, and turned its back
on the vernacular Greek language and its uncomfortable linguistic
links to the multicultural, multiethnic, and integrative character of
the Ottoman World. Indeed, the state was required to engage in this
discursive revisionism if nationhood was to be enacted on the ethnic
grounds that its elites chose. The new prototype political culture
was embraced as purely “Hellenic,” cosmopolitan, modernist, and
Western.
Importantly for us, however, this selective rereading of Greek
antiquity completely “desexed” the new political culture, burying the
ecological relationships among ancient Greek martial culture, maleto-male homosociality and patronage, and male homosexuality that
defined important aspects of civic life in cities like Athens, Sparta and
Thebes. For example, nationalist pedagogy required the commemoration
of the heroic lore of King Leonidas’s 300 hoplites at Thermopylae and
the bravery of the Theban Sacred Corps, but it silenced the mention
of the male homosocial/homosexual bonds that made them so effective.
With Foucault, then, this triangular and interdependent system of
sociosexual values was an essential part of the ancient Greek experience, but, counter his reading of Greek male homosexuality, this
ecological construct continued to operate in 19th-century Greece and
thus became a prime target of the architects of Greek modernity. Consistent with Foucault, again, the Greek state operated in accordance
with the Victorian ethic of repressing sexual expression. Writing about
the ascendant bourgeois repression of sexuality since the 17th century,
Foucault could have also been addressing the 19th-century Greek
nationalist project:
Calling sex by its name thereafter became more difficult and more
costly. As if in order to gain mastery over it in reality, it had first been
necessary to subjugate it at the level of language, control its free
circulation in speech, expunge it from the things that were said, and
extinguish the words that rendered it too visibly present. And even
these prohibitions, it seems, were afraid to name it. Without even
having to pronounce the word, modern prudishness was able to
ensure that one did not speak of sex, merely through the interplay of
prohibitions that referred back to one another: instances of muteness which, by dint of saying nothing, imposed silence. Censorship.
(Foucault 1990:vol 1, 17)
In that sense, the Greek state became a sponsor of the heteropatriarchal, sexually restrictive, procreation-based Western paradigm,
thus founding a new sociosexual discursive benchmark for the culture.
Outside the circle of intellectual and political elites, vernacular practices evoked rural values, the conservatism of the Christian Orthodox
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and Byzantine traditions, and were deemed “Romeic” (after Rum),
reminiscent of the Ottoman past and by implication inferior (Herzfeld
1982:19–21). Ergo, an elite nationalist few constructed an idiosyncratic bridge between a romanticized and “sanitized” Classical Greek
heritage and the new heroic, desexed, neoclassical “modern Greek”
identity. It is the elites’ selective seeing and reading of Greek antiquity
that helped construct “Graeco-Christianity” as one syncretistic charter
cultural tradition out of the two unlikely bedfellows of Classicism and
Orthodoxy.
I hypothesize that the Greek state’s imperatives in 1830 gave rise to
a new and parallel sociosexual self alongside an existing, vernacular,
and organic one, rooted in ancient practices and modified over time
by Christian and Ottoman practices. This new sociosexual self was
masculinist, patriarchal, and entrenched in the emerging political
culture and economy of the new state. The first king of Greece, Otto,
son of Ludwig I of Bavaria, and Otto’s consort, Queen Amalia of
Oldenburg—both admirers of Greek antiquity—became the prototypical First “Greek” Couple and attempted to nurture in Athens a
Mittel-European authoritarian political and social culture. As Bavarian
architects ordered and adorned the new capital’s public spaces with
an invented official architecture, the Greek political economic elites
fell increasingly in line with the capitalist and diplomatic exigencies of
their era. The “English,” “French” and “Russian” parties dominated
the domestic political scene, themselves local reflections of Great
Power politics and economics in Southeastern Europe. In the
politically volatile years following the establishment of the Greek
State, Ottoman-era collective millet identity politics dissolved into
masculinist personality politics focused on rivalries among the Greek
Revolutionary heroes. While Revolutionary heroines existed (the captainesses Manto Mavrogenous and Bouboulina among them), none
found themselves in the Greek political ruling class after the Ottoman
Turks were defeated. The new politics was decidedly heterosexist and
masculinist.
Ancient Greek masculinity was not informed singly by heterosexual
imperatives, procreative or other, but was fluid and conditional upon
life-stage, class status, ritual behavior, and local and communal norms
and customs. In both ancient and modern cases, however, masculinity
was patriarchal in that women were subordinate and men held considerable political economic privilege. The patriarchal practices
associated with the ancient Greek traditions are still evident in the
Greek countryside, although cultural sectionalism assures that it is
impossible to generalize about the status of women in rural Greece.
Admittedly, these practices have been modified by Christianity and
eroded by modernization and demographic change—especially rural
Mapping “Romeic” and “Hellenic” Same-Sex Desire
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urban migration, the rising status of women, and changes in fertility
patterns.
The new sociosexual paradigm, in contrast, is Western, cosmopolitan, explicitly urban in character, and Cartesian in its absolute
classification of and distinction between, on the one hand, homosocial
and, on the other hand, homosexual/heterosexual behavior and
identities. I see contemporary Greek male homosexuality mapped,
often uncomfortably and destructively, across the behavioral spectrum
that spans the “Romeic” and “Hellenic” identities. Thus, I suggest
that the coexistence of the “Romeic” and “Hellenic” cultural paradigms gives rise to multiple sexed identities, some of which come into
direct conflict with the continuing Greek patriarchal project. Westernstyled, post-Stonewall gay and queer sexual identities are only some
of several expressions of contemporary Greek male homosexuality—
and those would be situated on the “Hellenic” end of the cultural
spectrum. “Romeic” sexual behavior and identities, in contrast, are
contingent upon class, situation (“rurality” immediately comes to
mind), spatial sequestration (service in the military comes to mind),
and life stage. These selective homosexual, bisexual, transgender, or
transvestite practices are overlaid significantly by homosocial practices
that either marginalize or entirely exclude women.
What, then, is the evidence for a “Hellenic–Romeic” spectrum of
sociosexual identities and behaviors? Furthermore, is the “Romeic”/
“Hellenic” sexuality pairing peculiarly Greek, Levantine, Mediterranean,
or otherwise regionally specific? Foucault (1990) is silent on the
matter in his History of Sexuality. In it, he speaks about the Western
experience as a counterpoint to ancient Greek male homosexual
culture and does not explore the regionalizations of sexual desire.
In his book Same Sex, Different Cultures, Herdt (1998) questions the
validity of the term “homosexual” for same-sex desire and sexual
practice outside a strictly Western cultural domain. He writes, “The
ancient Greek is not a homosexual, the Azande warrior who takes a
boy lover is not gay, and the Sambia of New Guinea are neither of
these and do not identify with these identities. To “export” such ideas
and place them on other cultures constitutes a kind of old fashioned
colonialism” (Herdt in Browning 1998:28–29). Herdt’s allegation,
then—that same-sex erotic and emotive relations are commonplace
and mainstream in some cultures—leads us to question how such
relations can be sustained when operating within a procreative, matrimonial, and patriarchal system. The Greek case is instructive here.5
Gender-role-affirming and fertility festivals in rural Greece are
mainstream and commonplace. In the pre-Lenten celebrations of
“Lydinos” in the village of Kypsele, in the island of Aegina, villagers
invoke divine intervention for family and agricultural fertility by
constructing and displaying the effigy of a man with exaggerated,
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exposed genitals. And in the village of Agia Eleni in the Prefecture
of Serres, virginal adolescent males pull a plow through the village
and then lie on the ground simulating coitus with the earth as part of
the Easter-time firewalkers’ festival (Figure 1). In the Dionysian,
ecstasiastic fertility festival of “Maides-Artozenes” in the Village of
Makrynitsa, in Thessaly, men crown themselves with cherry blossoms
and brandish maenadic thyrsoi6 in a parade. I suggest that such folk
traditions, for example, harbor evidence of ideological and conceptual
continuity of a moral and social canon that promoted homosocial
behavior and male same-sex desire in the service of patriarchy.
Festivals are important community-building events and symbolic and
affirming of the androcentric, phallocratic nature of village life, the
centrality and critical importance of male fertility, and the separate
and less recognized contribution of women to the village’s
prosperity.
Most extraordinary among these fertility rituals is the “Bourrani”
festival in the town of Tyrnavos, in Thessaly. In 1952, Thanos MourraesVelloudios documented ethnographically and photographically in
great detail the Bourrani celebration. Christian crosses and evocations
of the Trinity are here incorporated into a pre-Christian, magical,
pagan event celebrating the “Borreas” (the northern wind—hence,
through linguistic corruption, “Bourrani”). In Mourraes-Velloudios’s
photographs, male-only celebrants dance line-dances while brandishing waxen and wooden penises, pour libations on the ground and
on the penis simulacra, masquerade as the god Pan, prepare and
consume a ritual meal of soup made of different grains, and socialize
in the shade of pine trees (Figure 2). The men kiss the penis effigies,
poke each other playfully with them, and wear them in headdresses
while resting and conversing or dancing (Figure 3). The procession
terminates at the Church of Prophet Elias in the highlands outside
Tyrnavos. While the atmosphere is patriarchy-affirming and homoerotic, it is not homosexually lascivious (Mourraes-Velloudios
1996:92–94). Rather, the homosociality reproduces a moment when
Dionysus and the Christian god converse, when homoerotic and
homosocial practices glide into perfect alignment, and a time when
church, landowners, and breadwinners (males all) reconfirm power
relations in the village.
This patriarchal, homosocial behavior promoted the domestic
sequestration of village women and facilitated homoerotic behavior
among Greek men,7 though village men did not identify as gay or
bisexual, avowedly “modern” sexual identity categories. Rather, these
homoerotic/homosocial practices supported a masculinist political
economy of the village, underpinning the powerful triad of village
priest, village president, and chief of police. I call such village structure
and rituals of male homosociality “Romeic,” after Herzfeld’s (1982)
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Figure 1: “Anastenaria” firewalkers’ festival in Agia Elleni, Prefecture of Serres. Four strong and masculine village youth pull a plow simulating
the breach of the Earth’s hymen. (Translation by author. Photo, ca. 1952, published in Mourraes-Velloudios 1996:33). Used with permission of
Agra Publications, Athens, Greece
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Figure 2: Bourrani festival in Tyrnavos, Thessaly. A group of farmers surrounds
a chief, who wears a crown adorned with an effigy of a penis and carries another
as a “scepter” and offers a libation. The penis effigies are, in fact, vessels for
wine and are either ceramic or made of wood. (Translation by author. Photo,
1952, published in Mourraes-Velloudios 1996:101). Used with permission from
Agra Publications, Athens, Greece
use of the term to describe cultural identity and practices rooted in the
Ottoman-period Greek village life and tradition.
The gender-bending, homosocial libertinism of fertility festivals
documented by Mourraes-Velloudios (1996) should not be seen as
expressive of rural licentiousness. Patrilineal kinship traditions, Orthodox Christian dogma (based on a patriarchal Trinity), and the statistpaternalistic nature of the polity at local and national levels make
heteropatriarchal, multigenerational families the ideal. Historically,
recognized erotic behavior in rural settings was heterosexual and
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Figure 3: Bourrani festival celebrants playfully simulate intercourse between maenads and satyrs. (Translation by author. Photo, 1952, published
in Mourraes-Velloudios 1996:110). Used with permission of Agra Publications, Athens, Greece
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intended for, though not necessarily limited to, matrimony and procreation. Betrothals and matrimony were characteristically defined
in line with class qua property interests, and dowries framed the
manner in which property passed from one patriarchal unit to
another, bypassing the hands of the bride.8 In such an environment,
explicitly homoerotic relations of a formal or informal kind were (and
are) unthinkable. Only in the city might such relations find covert
expression.
Subjugating the homoerotic in deference to the political and
economic power of the heteropatriarchal complex in the countryside
was nonetheless disturbed in modernity. The heteropatriarchal Greek
national project, rapid urbanization, declining fertility rates, and the
improving social standing of women all meant that local power was no
longer narrowly defined by the village’s male elites. Since the Second
World War, and especially since accession to the European Communities in 1981, the Greek economy has grown significantly. It has
been thoroughly restructured through intense mechanization of agriculture, the consolidation of small farms into agribusiness cooperatives,
the expansion of (primarily) light industries, the rapid growth of service industries (especially tourism), and the establishment of market
linkages to European Union markets. As economic modernization
has progressed alongside significant rural-urban migration, remote
parts of the Greek space-economy have become integrated into the
political economies of Athens, Brussels, and the world.
Has this growth and development meant that Mourraes-Velloudios’s
(1996) magical village life has disintegrated, never to be seen again?
I would suggest not. Rather, I would argue that it has migrated, in
the form of displaced farmers and their children, to the working-class
neighborhoods of Athens, Thessaloniki, Patras, Larissa, and Kalamata,
to name a few of the fastest-growing urban centers of Greece. The
“Romeic” eroticism of these newly minted urbanites flows next to, and
is articulated into, Western erotic expressions that now increasingly
characterize a growing urban middle and upper class.
Where is “Queer Greece”?
The locus of male Greek homosexuality goes beyond Thessalian
village rituals and Greek urban places. I suggest here that the changing character of Greek diasporas have historically shaped—and
continue to shape—sexual customs. Accordingly, Greek sexual and
heteropatriarchal practices cannot be adequately studied at the
national and local levels. Although a national-level study may be
possible in some cases,9 the spatial organization of Greek sexuality
requires consideration of extensive and varied Greek diasporic
experiences.
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Understanding the Greek Diaspora
The advent of a sovereign Greece in 1830 brought forth nationalistic
comparisons of different genres of “Greekness,” which, like all
nationalisms, required the repression of some beliefs and practices
and the cultivation of some sort of mythical Greek unity and authenticity.
On the one hand, flourishing elite Greek diasporic communities in
Western Europe, the Black Sea, and the Levant could then compare
themselves with the newly constructed referent national culture. On
the other hand, drawing upon romanticized and narrow imaginaries of
Greekness, these diasporic elites, alongside the ascendant Athenian
political elites, created affinities based on a cultural orthodoxy of
linguistic idiom, dress, manners, taste, customs and practices. Robust,
culturally sophisticated, affluent Greek communities throughout the
Levant—especially in Constantinople, Izmir, and Alexandria—thus
enlivened this national conceit of cultural unity and correctness.
The geographical largeness of the 19th-century Greek diaspora had
to do with the strictures and opportunities that the Ottoman Empire
had historically afforded the Greek Orthodox millet. While the
Ottomans defined “Greekness” as an administrative-religious category
conflated with Christian Orthodoxy, the spatial distribution of Greeks
across Ottoman political space from the east coast of the Black Sea to
the tributary principalities of the Danube and the prosperous
Alexandrian Greek community in North Africa allowed “Greekness”
to be defined variably. Within the vast tent of that label, I would
suggest that both the metaphysical and customary construction of
the sexuality of these “Greeks” varied as well.
Among recent transnational diasporas and alongside the longstanding Greek diaspora of the Eastern Mediterranean and the
Middle East has emerged one partially related to post-Second World
War European economic reconstruction (1950–1970). This new
transnational diaspora of unskilled and semiskilled rural Greeks—
made up at first by male and ultimately by both male and female guest
workers—followed demographic growth, mechanized agriculture,
and slow economic growth domestically, as well as high demand for
industrial labor in Western Europe, the United States, Canada, and
Australia.
While Greeks immigrated abroad in considerable numbers during
the 19th and 20th centuries, some Greek diasporic strongholds came
apart. Starting with the 19th-century nationalist revolutions in southeastern Europe, Greek communities of Southern Bulgaria, Serbia,
Romania, and Albania retreated from these newly founded states as
a result of various expressions of ethnic cleansing. At the same time,
“ethnics” associated with these same states who lived within the
boundaries of the growing Greek state faced similar “cleansing”
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pressures. The collapse of Greece’s Asia Minor campaign against
Mustafa Kemal’s forces in 1922, for example, caused the virtual extinction of the Greek community of Izmir. Greek defeat in that war set the
conditions for a massive population exchange orchestrated under
the Treaty of Lausanne of 1923, and the influx into metropolitan
Greece of more than one million diasporic Greeks of Asia Minor and
Thrace. Greeks also fled Istanbul in massive numbers after the antiGreek riots of 1955, never to return, while at the same time thousands
of rural Greeks took up industrial jobs in Stuttgart and Liege. Meanwhile, the majority of the Greek Alexandrian community decamped to
Greece, Cyprus, and Beirut following the advent of Arab nationalist
rule in Egypt in 1956. The break out of post-Cold War ethnic warfare
in the Caucasus put Greek-culture communities there—especially
in Georgia—under threat of extermination. The Greek government
rescued most of them in an airborne military operation coded “Golden
Fleece.” Other persons of Greek heritage residing in territories of the
former Soviet Union “returned” to Greece under very liberal laws of
“Right of Return.”10 These ex-Soviet émigrés often speak an ungrammatical Greek patois, and are not well equipped to compete in a Greek
labor market now in sync with the European Union. Their “Greekness,”
perhaps indisputable, cannot be accommodated very well within the
national imagination forged by Athens and Athenian elites.11
The “return” of these often-rural diasporic Greeks to the national
homeland is significant to our understanding of how Greek sexuality
is mediated by transnational diasporic change. These persons have no
tangible connection with metropolitan “Greekness” in any of its dominant forms, ranging from “Romeic” “magical” village life to sophisticated
“Hellenic” life in Athens. Their insertion in the country’s landscape
in some ways reinforces the identifiable “Romeic/Hellenic” binary
of sexual practices and injects variant homosexual-heteropatriarchal
behaviors into contemporary Greek society.
The sociosexual impact of different diasporic experiences on Greek
homosocial and homosexual identities has registered itself in both
intellectual and material terms: in the cultural and artistic contributions of diasporic gay intellectuals such as Constantine Kavafis; and
in the changing sexual practices on the part of “repatriated” Greeks of
the diaspora now living in metropolitan Greece.
Case Study I: Gay Diasporic Literature and the
Poetics of Same-Sex Desire.
Alexandrian Constantine Kavafis’s literary contributions helped
catalyze contemporary artistic expressions of male same-sex desire
and constructions of a popular imagination about modern Greek
homosexuality. In his study of the impact of Kavafis’s homoerotic
Mapping “Romeic” and “Hellenic” Same-Sex Desire
925
poetry on Thessaloniki poets starting in 1915, Plastiras (1996) notes
that the philosophical and historicist dimensions of Kavafis’s poetry
resonated with the existential anxieties of Macedonian poets and their
historical imagination of Greek antiquity and Byzantium. Kavafis’s
homoerotic, poetic internal monologues became the foundation for a
realist erotic poetry genre that still influences literary expressions
of male homosexual desire in Greece (Plastiras 1996:3). Although
Kavafis’s eroticism is best mapped onto the self-indulgent and decadent
fin-de-siècle existence of bourgeois Alexandrian Greeks like himself,
the testimonial character of his poems and journals provided a
framework, precedent, and ethic to others wanting to pronounce their
eros from the literary rooftops, like contemporary poet Nikos
Christianopoulos. Yet even for Kavafis, his elite social standing could
not protect him from heteropatriarchy. He writes in his journal in
1902:
I thought, tonight, to write about my eros. Yet I am not going to
do it. How all-powerful prudence can be. I have liberated myself
from it, but I am still wary of the enslaved, the eyes of whom may see
this sheet. And thus I stop. How poor of soul [I am]. Let me mark a
letter, though—T—as a symbol of my sentiment, or of this moment.
(Kavafis 1998:2)
Kavafis’ impulse to reveal the homosexual self becomes a spore for
a new generation of erotic poets in Greece proper: G T Vafopoulos,
Zoe Karelly, Giorgos Ioannou, Alexis Aslanoglou, Vassilis Dimitrakos,
Yiorgos Chronas, and Nikos Christianopoulos. In certain ways, they
go beyond “Kavafian ‘logos,’” as the literary establishment calls his
elegant, suggestive, and luxuriant testimonial manner. They adopt a
bitter, critical—but also self-critical and self-loathing—attitude and
an in-your-face, unapologetic style. Here the accused is featured as
homophobia, itself constructed as the handmaiden of heteropatriarchy. Christianopoulos describes the ways his poetry and existential
anxieties differ from those of Kavafis:
Kavafis is a poet of desire: he craves it, he relishes it, and he idealizes
it. He occasionally speaks of abandoning the decadent life, though he
even mentions it merely because he fears corruption. Other times,
he pursues decency [poetry without explicit eros], but only because
he is concerned about public censure. Sometimes, again, he becomes
upset with his “rationality”—not his conscience—which fooled him
in missing on [erotic] opportunities. He dedicates his later years to
the remembrance of erotic pursuits … I am a poet of erotic agony.
What Kavafis omits are major issues for me: unattainable satisfaction, exploitation, the physical and emotional battering, corrupt
morals, annihilation of the self, remorse, guilt, disgust, despair.
(Christianopoulos 1999:130–131)
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The poetic outlets of Christianopoulos and his contemporaries
filter Kavafis’s elite diasporic eroticism through their own class, local,
and historical imaginations and their erotic practices, producing fresh
literary images of male homosexual life in contemporary Greece.
Their poetry unfolds in no uncertain terms the maps of their sexual
quest. The periodicity and the spatial structuring of these quests
reveal how parts of the Greek metropolis have become resignified by
male homosexual practices performed in the image of machismo and
heteropatriarchy, and at the same time in heteropatriarchy’s shadow:
Christianopoulos writes explicitly about the Thessaloniki male
homosexual demimonde in a direct, everyman idiom:
From Vardari [Square] to the Fountain,
and from the Tower to Courthouse Square,
I am searching for you on all the “for sale” sidewalks,
I tore through all the construction sites to find you.
Could you be in a movie house?
Are you playing in a billiard hall?
Are you making a sucker happy
in some room, some park, some bar?
So I roam all alone and thirsty
from Vardari to the Fountain.
My fever cannot be suppressed,
My heart cannot be manned by others.
(“Saturday Night,” Nikos Christianopoulos [1998])
Vardari, or Democracy, Square is the axis mundi of Thessaloniki’s
sexual margins, with the turn-of the-century Fountain located at the
terminus of Egnatia Avenue, opposite Vardari.12 The segment of the
grand avenue to which Christianopoulos refers is today an icon of old
Thessaloniki. Here Roman imperial buildings and Byzantine churches
are arrayed next to Ottoman period Turkish baths (hammams), the
north edge of the Saphardic Jewish Modiano market, neoclassicalstyle apartment buildings, and much newer, post-Second World War,
modernist, cement and glass mid-rise buildings. Since the late 1940s,
Egnatia Avenue—and, by extension, the neighborhoods girding Vardari
Square—have been in a state of advanced neighborhood transition.
From its solidly middle- and upper-middle-class past, the grand avenue
has become a haven for working-class commerces, cheap hotels
marketing to Slav and Albanian shoppers from neighboring countries,
and sexual minorities. Thus, the Fountain, Vardari Square, the waterfront White Tower, and the Courthouse Square prescribe an urban
polygon of publicly performed male homosexual activity. Female
homosexuality is virtually invisible in the city. Christianopoulos’ gay
Mapping “Romeic” and “Hellenic” Same-Sex Desire
927
everyman would frequent the parks, the expansive parking lot of the
General Staff of the Third Army, putatively straight porno theaters,
and off-the-bright-lights side streets where gay sex can be procured for
money, looks, favors, or other.
In his book Canal d’amour (1996), chronicler and writer Thomas
Korovines composes an ethnography and geography of sexual
marginality in Thessaloniki in the 1980s. The “canal d’amour” is a
small street that runs along a section of the medieval walls of the city
in a poverty-stricken district that still bears its preliberation Turkish
toponym, Barout Hane, or Gunpowder Depot. His narrative is less
explicitly about the games between the “eromenos” and the “erastes”
(the lover and his object of desire) than about the intersection of male
same-sex desire with other denizens and practices of the urban
margin. Above all, Korovines is a critical observer of the interactions
among men in pursuit of sex with other men, the civil authorities, and
the general public. In particular, he describes the multiple mappings
and intersections of poverty, sexual desire, sexual assault and violence,
and immigrant subcultures on the drug and prostitution trade in the
poor Ladadika district (olive-oil sellers market), in Vardari Square,
and in the Barout Hane districts. He describes decayed urban neighborhoods, geared to the satisfying of male same-sex desire, that operate
through police tolerance, bringing together Greeks of all classes,
Albanian migrant workers, repatriated Greeks from the TransCaucasian diaspora, Roma people, and the authorities. He paints a
picture of an obscene economic system where sex, cash, protection,
violence, drugs, and disease intertwine.
The poets Kavafis, Christianopoulos, and Chronas, among other
voices of Greek male homosexuality, subvert the silencing and the
censorship that Foucault attributes to the bourgeois state. Importantly,
they reveal that “Romeic” blue-collar and “Hellenic” white-collar
male homosexualities are not airtight behavioral and ontological
containers. The effete poet always falls in love with the grocer’s son.
In fact, the two paradigms constantly interpenetrate each other, redefining their ontology in terms of their homosexual “other.” “Romeic”
eros needs “Hellenic” eros as its crucial counterpoint.
Case Study II: A Night at the Brothel:
Diasporic Eros in Working-Class Athens
I am a member of the Greek diaspora and an expatriate living in the
United States. Though I had previously visited Greece annually in the
summer, I arrived in the summer of 1996 with a new intent: to understand my placement within the erotic landscape of Greece. My guides
through erotic Athens, Thessaloniki, and Mykonos were four close
Greek friends: “T1,” a philologist and secondary-school educator
teaching in the Greek periphery; “T2,” a Florentine-educated architect
928
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practicing in Thessaloniki; “D,” a choreographer with the National
Theater, also in Thessaloniki; and “C,” a freelance reporter and theater
critic who shuttles between Athens and Thessaloniki on a weekly basis.13
Self-identified as gay, they regularly navigate the erotic spectrum of
opportunities that emerge from the contingent articulations of
“Romeic” and “Hellenic” sexualities. That summer, and in four subsequent summer visits, they became my informants in a personal discovery
of places where male same-sex desire manifests itself.
In our journeys, I found evidence of the spaces Christianopoulos
and Chronas describe in their poems. Putatively straight Greek men
and the daring among the much smaller number of self-identified
gay males cruise municipal parks and parking lots, avenues and side
streets, adult cinemas, marked cafés in city squares, even certain
church squares, among a myriad of potential such places. These gay
men signal these spaces as places of male desire through body postures
and movements and their erotic productions, thereby subverting these
places’ charter identity and function. This customary use of urban
space as gay space is not outwardly much different from how gay men
may be perceived as operating in American cities. But the impetus
informing their actions is very different. In particular, this erotic activity
embodies the very sociosexual tension between opposites: countryside
versus city, village magic versus Cartesian urbanity, diaspora versus
autochthonous origin.
“C” showed me an urban place in Athens where male “Romeic”
and “Hellenic” same-sex modalities have been articulated with one
another in a highly subversive manner. The territory is defined by
Koumoundourou and Omonia Squares, the municipal meat market,
and Athenas Avenue and described by heteronormative society as a
straight red-light district.14 On a number of nights, “C” and I walked
around the territory and observed interactions among clients in automobiles and sex workers walking languorously on the sidewalk. Both
groups were male. (In keeping with heteropatriarchal precedents,
female sex workers are sequestered in domesticated spheres, or
brothels, marked by a light by the door—not always red.)
During one of our extended expeditions, we spent several late-night
and early-morning hours in a brothel managed by a transsexual person
whom “C” had befriended. Through the night, the manager of the
brothel explained to us the articulation of two streams of sex-seekers.
On the one hand were men seeking the services of female sex-workers
—very often immigrant Albanian, Russian, Ukrainian, or diasporic
Greek women. These men shuttled from brothel to brothel comparing
the qualities of the women and their prices as if they were olive oil. On
the other hand there were putatively straight men, though selfidentified as gay, seeking sex with men. These men loitered around
the brothels offering sex to the men seeking sex from the women.
Mapping “Romeic” and “Hellenic” Same-Sex Desire
929
These latter seekers thus derivatively engaged in male same-sex erotic
activity, the brothels serving as a kind of catchment area for men. The
brothel manager’s account of red-light district life and our own
observations suggest that “Romeic” and “Hellenic” same-sex desires
often occupy the same spaces. To some degree, the women figure as
either human shields or media for male–male desire. They are, it
seems, superfluous (see Nast this issue).
Conclusions and an Agenda: From Angel to Safe Sex
The Greek erotic landscape has changed dramatically in the last
quarter-century. As Greece has become increasingly less “Romeic”
and more “Hellenic,” its sociocultural construction of sexuality
increasingly approximates that of its European Union partners and
the United States. According to my informants and the Greek gay
press, “Romeic” sexuality is still found in smaller regional centers like
Serres and Kalamata—and in the countryside—but gradually Greeks
appear to be emulating Western Europeans and Americans, adopting
rigid sexual identities. Today’s options are increasingly being reduced
to identification with straight, gay, bisexual, or transgendered practices.
There are many plausible causes for the shift. The “GraecoChristian” nationalist project and conservative public-school education
annihilated and silenced all references to the homoerotic character of
ancient Greek martial societies through selective readings of the
Greek past. “Hellenic” pressures through modernization, urbanization, rising levels of education, and cosmopolitanism, nurtured
by increasing prosperity, openness of markets, and the explosion of
international tourism, have eroded and often extinguished village
homosociality and same-sex sexualities. These same socioeconomic
processes have shattered the social cohesion of many rural communities
and have made urbanites out of the practitioners of MourraesVelloudios’ magical festivals. At the same time, the historic Greek
diaspora throughout the Eastern Mediterranean, the Middle East,
and the Black Sea and a contemporary one in the labor markets of
Western Europe, North America, and Australia have given rise to a
system of exchange of sexual customs and values that has broadened
the spectrum of sexual expression to include permutations of both
“Romeic” and “Hellenic” erotic traditions.
In either case, male same-sex desire operates within a patriarchal
model, at least to the extent that life in Vardari and Koumoundourou
squares attests. As the other social extreme, “Hellenic,” Western-styled
cosmopolitan male same-sex desire operates as a segment of the
leisure, tourism, and entertainment sectors in resort communities like
Mykonos and Rhodes. The international gay clientele is conspicuously
male, and the available venues and diversions are fashioned to attract
the gay male’s pink dollar, or euro, as it were.15
930
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In the last two decades, Greek attitudes towards male homosexuality
have shifted. In 1983, director and screenwriter George Katakouzinos’
film Angel, based on a documented case of “Romeic” same-sex desire
turned into tragedy, was chosen as an Official Selection in the Cannes
Film Festival. The film tells the story of a naïve young man, the son of
rural parents displaced in Athens, who falls in love with a macho sailor.
The sailor presses the young man into prostitution as a transvestite as
a means of escaping the abject poverty of their youth. Katakouzinos
depicts the consumers of transvestite sex for sale as putatively
heterosexual. Angel’s tragic mother, his quadriplegic sister, and his
grandmother—who is a retired prostitute—are invariably depicted
as entirely dependent and disempowered, sequestered in the house.
Female sexual expression is entirely absent, unless one accepts
Katakouzinos’s premise that the “ersatz” femininity of transvestite gay
men sufficiently substitutes for it. In many ways, Angel’s angst-filled
imagery is in keeping with Christianopoulos’s and other contemporary
gay Greek poets’ Athens of pulverized gay souls, working-class desire,
and physical danger. The film ends, as the real case did, with the
young man murdering the brutalizing partner.
Eighteen years later, in 2000, directors Thanasis Papathanasiou
and Mihalis Reppas produced the film Safe Sex, a farcical comedy
constructed around several vignettes involving the sexual adventures
of forty Athenian men and women of different classes and circumstances. The film became the greatest box-office hit in the history of
Greek cinema. Among the characters are Alexi and Panos, a gay,
male, middle-class couple who would fit as well in Greenwich Village
as in the posh Athens in which the screenwriters map them. Their
sexual anxiety revolves around suspicions regarding compromised
monogamy and Stathis, their “bi-curious” neighbor. In another
vignette, Makis, a “call boy” interviewed by a TV “magazine show”
about his life in the sexual margins, laments coyly on camera how
poverty made him, a straight man, succumb to (male homosexual)
“perversion,” while, off-camera, he takes calls on his cellular phone
from clients—their gender unspecified—in a business-like fashion.
The yawning gap in artistic values between Angel and Safe Sex
notwithstanding, the two films mark a measure of distance between
two very different views of Greek same-sex desire. If Angel is paradigmatic of “Romeic” sexuality, Safe Sex suggests that at least middleclass Athenian men who desire men have “evolved” into homosexuals.
The depiction of women in Safe Sex also suggests that, at least in the
Greek metropolis, women have gained significant ground in social
and economic status and can live productive lives outside traditional
marriage. Although the film often portrays them as either young
kitten-like sex objects or neurotic, aristocratic matrons, it does contain
female characters that reflect the social advancement of Greek women.16
Mapping “Romeic” and “Hellenic” Same-Sex Desire
931
Contemporary Greek male homosexuality and heteropatriarchy
and their ecological relationships to ancient and other historic forms
represent an important and largely unexamined area of scholarly study.
Moreover, the work shows that contra Foucault, ancient homosocial
and homoerotic practices and imagery persist across time and survive
the sociosexual rupture caused by capitalism and modernity after
the 17th century. Encapsulated in village vernacular practices, they
emerge as a “Romeic,” Dionysian counterpoint, to a “Hellenic,”
Apollonian sexuality—the former evocative of the Ottoman legacy,
the latter anchored to the modernist project. Here I suggest that we
can garner new understandings of the construction of Greek national
identity and Greece’s nationalist project by exploring their connection
with sexual identity construction. Of exceptional importance to
geographers and anthropologists of Greece would be further research
on the relationship between the homosexuality-patriarchy complex
and the geographical and sexed nature and mechanics of the Greek
diasporic experience.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Dr Heidi Nast for nurturing this project and for
her patience and help in the editing of multiple drafts of
the paper. I would also like to thank Dr Beth Kelly of DePaul
University’s Women’s Studies Program and the reviewers for their
constructive criticisms. The paper is much stronger thanks to their
attention.
Endnotes
1
The translations of the poems and diary notes of Greek authors that appear in this
article are my own. The translation of contemporary Greek poetry is especially challenging, as the poets often use highly idiomatic vernacular language.
2
I was born and raised in Greece during the 1960s and 1970s. Since immigrating to the
United States in 1980, and especially since 1996, I have integrated fieldwork in rural
and urban Greece into my geographic research.
3
This hypothesis owes a great deal to Michael Herzfeld’s (1982) conceptualization of
contemporary Greek identity as having a dual character: a “Hellenic” one mapped on
the 19th-century nationalist revisualization of the ancient Greek self and a “Romeic”
one reflecting the culturally diverse actuality of Greek life in the immediate aftermath
of the Greek Revolution.
4
Similarly excellent ethnographic work has been done on the construction of Greek
national identity, the culture of honor, gender, family, and fertility, religion, death rituals,
and the refugee experience. See Argyrou (1996), Cowan (1994), Dubisch (1995),
Gallant (2000), Herzfeld (1982), Hirschon (1989), Karakasidou (1997), Panourgia
(1995), Seremetakis (1991), and Sutton (1994).
5
Note that there are substantial differences in local culture across Greece. Customs,
linguistic idiom, dress, diet, worship, and death rituals varied historically and vary
contemporaneously among regions and groups that make up Greek society. Moreover,
it is critical to note that under “Greekness” we may cautiously include Hellenized
“others,” such as the Vlachs, the Sarakatsan, and the Pomaks.
932
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6
A thyrsos is a wooden staff decorated with vines and garlands, commonly used in
antiquity by celebrants of Dionysus.
7
The status of women improved dramatically once modernization took much of the
Greek countryside by storm in the last quarter of the 20th century. The first Andreas
Papandreou socialist government abolished—in fact, outlawed—the practice of dowry
gifting, although Greeks, especially in rural places, continue to practice it.
8
There are exceptions to this rule. For example, among Greek Catholics on the island
of Thera, property passes from one generation to the next through the mother’s line.
9
The upcoming volume titled Queer Italia (forthcoming), edited by Gary Cestaro,
represents this approach.
10
Like other states with significant historic transnational diasporas (eg Israel and
Ireland), the Greek state extends residency and even citizenship to persons who can
prove familial and cultural affiliations with Greece, even when these persons may have
never set foot in the country before.
11
This new harvesting of the diaspora has spawned racism among nationalist Greeks.
Refugees from the former eastern bloc are sometimes derogatorily referred to as
“Rossopontioi” and “Tourkosporoi” (“originating in the Russian coast of the Black
Sea” and “spawn of Turks”). In both cases, the intended injury is supposed to take the
form of constructing these persons as non-Greek.
12
“Vardar” is a Bulgarian toponym for the central Macedonian valley that terminates
on the north Aegean coast. It is also the Bulgarian toponym for the Axios River that
used to traverse Thessaloniki. For Thessalonians, the very utterance of the words
“Plateia Vardari” (Vardari Square) conjures an image of illicit sex, poverty, and
immigrants.
13
These persons can comfortably be counted as members of an intellectual, if not also
economic, international male homosexual elite. Consistent with Nast’s description of
American queer patriarchs, these Greek gay men are university-educated (often in
elite universities abroad), multilingual, and employed in highly competitive professions. They provide support of Nast’s thesis regarding an ascendant queer patriarchy
that is flourishing in the age of transnationalism.
14
As in Thessaloniki, Athens’ red-light district overlaps with Ladadika, the olive oil
market. Given the explicit structural connections between the olive-producing
countryside and Ladadika districts, and the rural origins of “Romeic” sexuality, it is
perhaps not a coincidence that the two often occupy the same urban spaces.
15
No resort haven for gay women equivalent to Mykonos, Ibiza, Sitges, Provincetown,
or Fire Island comes readily to mind. Interestingly, the town of Eressos on the island
of Lesbos, alleged home of the poet Sappho, has become a minor pilgrimage site for
gay women. The tourist infrastructure catering to them at Eressos is in no way comparable in either extent or quality to the grand tourist infrastructure gay males enjoy
in resorts like Mykonos.
16
It is perhaps important to point out that female homosexuality was never broached
by the filmmakers.
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