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Greek Nationhood and Greek Love 3 JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION bs_bs_banner NATIONS AND FOR THE STUDY OF ETHNICITY AS NATIONALISM AND NATIONALISM EN Nations and Nationalism •• (••), 2016, 1–19. DOI: 10.1111/nana.12186 Greek nationhood and ‘Greek love’: sexualizing the nation and multiple readings of the glorious Greek past ANNA APOSTOLIDOU† Hellenic Open University, Patra, Greece ABSTRACT. The paper addresses the ways in which the idea of homosexuality has been expelled from local dominant narrations about the Modern Greek nation and seeks to culturally frame this historical erasure. The ancient past and Ottoman rule are viewed as the two key moments of negotiating (and repeatedly placing in obliv- ion) any link between ‘Greekness’ and homoeroticism. Placing this institutional si- lence in juxtaposition to multiple Western readings of ‘Greek love’, the study provides ethnographic instances that reveal the appropriations of the Western gaze and moments of breaking the silence about Greek homosexuality. Selected individuals and cultural locales serve as terrains of negotiating the present-day Greek state’s façade as cosmopolitan, Western and post-modern. On the one hand, Greece is perpetually re-constituted as a topos, appropriate(d) for projections of varying versions of history-telling from Western and local agents alike; on the other hand, homoeroticism is being negotiated through consecutive articulations of Greekness in past and present tense. KEYWORDS: antiquity, Greece, homosexuality/homoeroticism, nation Gazing Greek love: Western thinkers, Western politics An array of disciplinary terrains, from archaeology to classical studies and from art history to the history of epistemology, has engaged with the wealth of ancient Greek civilization in an attempt to trace genealogies of practices and concepts from the distant past to the modern assemblage of the Western world. Even though detailed analysis of social organisation and sober historic evaluation are discernible in such scholarship, the main result of this preoccu- pation is the construction of ancient Greece as a locus of projections, fantasies, emotional and political investments. A number of celebrated historians and social thinkers have been tackling the issue of ancient Greek homosexuality with increasing interest over the last fifty years (Halperin 1990; Davidson 2001, 2007; Halperin, Winkler & Zeitlin 1990). The work of Foucault (1984), groundbreaking and insightful as it may be, has nonetheless contributed to the establishment of the ancient Greeks as a © The author(s) 2016. Nations and Nationalism © ASEN/John Wiley & Sons Ltd 2016 2 Anna Apostolidou mandatory, albeit rather questionable, reference point for same-sex sexuality in late modernity. According to Dover, another key figure in this discussion, homosexuality began in ancient Greece and spread rapidly to take in the whole world (Dover 1988: 118). In my view, it is quite debatable whether there is enough evidence to provide a coherent schema of the same-sex practices and/or identifications of the ‘ancient Greeks’ (and by that I refer to upper-class Athenian citizens of the fifth century B.C.). The literary and visual material as well as the social evaluation of those artefacts in their own time do not suffice for a conclusive analysis; no ‘one Athenian attitude’ towards homoeroticism can be discerned but rather a range of ‘disagreements, contradictions and anxieties, which make up the patterned chaos of a complex culture’ (Cohen cited in Larmour, Miller & Platter 1998: 27). The present analysis does not seek to suggest that ‘Greek love’ can be substantiated as a historical reality, however. On the contrary, it will show that this set of data has been used for reflexive and political improvisation over the last two centuries, elevating the very theme of ‘Greek love’ to an imaginary ideal, often an exportable good in its own right, repeatedly (re)presented for the satisfaction of various audiences. In the following pages, I wish to place the focus of inquiry on modern-day articulations, arguing that, even though dominant conceptualizations of contemporary ‘Greekness’ have been inextricably linked to heterosexual masculinity on the basis of the triptych ‘Motherland – Religion – Family’, there are nevertheless instances in which the canonical schema can be queered, resulting in nuanced understandings of desire that give rise to a range of socially intelligible sexual subjectivities. I claim that recent ‘coming out’ narrations of Greek men-desiring men indicate a profound reassessment of the links between Greek and homosexual identities through appropriations of ‘Western’ examples, interpretations of historical ‘facts’ and appeals to local ‘values’. The ethnographic material presented here comes from twenty-one months (2003–2005) of participant observation in activist groups and LGBT venues in Greece, which was part of my fieldwork research on the disclosure strategies of men-desiring men in Greece and the emerging discourse about the Greek national narration in relation to homosexuality. The fieldwork, which included standard ethnographic techniques such as free association, daily diary and note-keeping and the creation of networks of research interlocutors, resulted in the collection of forty-one life histories and several shorter semi-structured interviews (all from Greek nationals) on specific topics of interest. In the phase of data analysis, I employed narrative analysis on the discussions and inter- views, also incorporating discourse analysis to inform my findings. All the life histories come from men with whom I had socialised for weeks (in some cases, many months) before the interview and hence I consider their value interpreta- tively significant. In this context, the excerpts presented in this paper constitute either indicative examples of collective viewpoints or unique cases, which illustrate certain points I have found to be central in the topic under analysis. © The author(s) 2016. Nations and Nationalism © ASEN/John Wiley & Sons Ltd 2016 Greek nationhood and Greek love 3 From Greek love to Ottoman style The paradigm shifts that have occurred in relation to the issue of Greek homo- sexuality over the past thirty years are indicative of the political purposefulness on the part of analysts insisting on the theme of Greek love.1 Performative readings of ancient social roles (Davidson 2001: 46) and commentary on the reclaiming of the homosexual Greek past to justify the rise of the modern homosexual (Bravmann 1994) both illustrate the historical and political purposefulness of the grounding of homosexuality upon an abstract already- canonical location (i.e. ancient Greece). The Western gaze on Greek antiquity, both romanticising and puzzling, is well-embedded in the ‘seduction of the Mediterranean’ (Aldrich 1993: 206-7, 217), which runs through the relevant analysis and political positioning. The legitimating authority of the glorious ancestral narrative has at various times in history been recruited to serve various ideological groundings of same-sex desire. A set of investments, fantasies, legends and disillusions, aptly termed ‘Byronisms’ (Roessel 2002), has long established the ‘land of Alexander’ as a location of gay heroic history (Hale 1990), which has consequently influenced the inflow of travellers to the fantasmatic landscape of modern Greece since the early nineteenth century. A more subtle and systematic appropriating strategy can be traced in the way Greek studies operated as a ‘homosexual code’ during the great age of the Victorian English university reform, so that homosexuality would eventually emerge as a positive social identity. Indeed, at a time when in Greece attempts were being made to re-gain a much-needed glorious past, excluding the profane elements of male-to-male desire, in Victorian Oxford, a strategically revived idiom of Greek ideality hoped to reinvigorate English civilization, wherein claims for the Hellenic world, including its homosexual aspects, were being widely urged (Dowling 1994: 77). Political opportunism in both systems during the same moment in time treated the same issues – better, the same set of texts – to cre- ate completely antithetical narrations about the past that served the cultural climate of each setting: Greeks excised the issue altogether in order to protect the fragile newly founded modern nation, whereas the British intelligentsia spotlighted the abstraction of Greek love, elevating scattered literary speci- mens into a historical and, more importantly, sexual canon. The rather extensive literature retrieved form Anglo-Saxon scholarship finds no counterpoise on the Modern Greek terrain. As with many other aspects of history, which remain unaccounted for, silenced and fairly secluded from local official narration, the issue of ‘Greek love’ has remained remark- ably absent from Modern Greek studies or has been treated with acute scepticism. In the account of N. Vrissimtzis (1995), at times rather unclear and politically crude in terms of terminology and use of resources, the author presents the case that ancient Greeks disapproved of male-to-male erotic relations as much as the modern ones do. He recounts the strict legal system of the time, in combination with the limited and institutional pederasty, © The author(s) 2016. Nations and Nationalism © ASEN/John Wiley & Sons Ltd 2016 4 Anna Apostolidou concluding that such limited practices should not be conflated with homosex- uality, which was not a widespread and admissible phenomenon in ancient Greek society (Vrissimtzis 1995: 80). With
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