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 oblivion) any link between ‘Greekness’ and homoeroticism. Placing this institutional silence 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 preoccupation 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 interviews, 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.

From Greek love to Ottoman style

The paradigm shifts that have occurred in relation to the issue of Greek homosexuality 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 create 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 homosexuality, which was not a widespread and admissible phenomenon in ancient Greek society (Vrissimtzis 1995: 80). With a similar ideological motivation, we trace analogous discursive mechanisms, which can be easily attached to the rise of nationalist ideology, as it has been cultivated in modern Greece in the past two decades. From the explicit state denial and censorship of any mention of classical Greece’s homosexuality during the Greek military Junta (1967–74) (Loizos 1993: 71), after the change-over, the far-right moved to an equally homophobic, yet more conciliatory, rhetoric. At least on the level of popular discourse, the loudest voices on the issue of homosexuality in antiquity come from politically engaged individuals, who are clearly ideologically grounded on the terrain of the far right. This is by no means a coincidence: the common argument that we are currently ‘in danger as a nation of being eaten up by poústides [fags] (see note iv)’2 circulates alongside loud contesta- tions about the threat to Greece from Albanians and homosexuals.3 In responding to such collective fears, systematically cultivated by the ultra-right, the desire to clear the ancients’ name from the global insult they have suffered appears as a central concern. Despite the verbum of relevant ancient texts that enjoy a broad circulation, any mention of same-sex practices in correlation to Greece’s marvellous past remains strictly anecdotal, and the connection between (any era of the historical) past and homoeroticism is attempted exclusively on television talk-shows, passing condemning comments uttered with characteristic unease. As Yannis (29 years old, municipal employee) testiﬁes, not without some bitterness:

We don’t hear anything in schools about the private aspects of the ancients; the paintings and sculptures about homosexuality are banned from our ‘great’ museums; no academic dares to touch the subject. … The whole world is buzzing (vouízei) about it, with pride that is, and we have no sense of homosexual history. I, myself, have no clear idea what really went on with the ancients. … We do something typically Greek: we hide behind our ﬁnger (Greek idiom for ‘turning a blind eye’).

Moreover, the euphemism ‘Greek love’ is practically non-existent in public and mainstream discourse; although its meaning was indeed known to certain ﬁeldwork interlocutors, the phrase is not encountered in naturally ﬂowing conversation in contemporary Greece. In the dominant logic that equates male homoerotic desire with the act of anal penetration, the term that is used instead of ‘Greek love/style’ is – funnily enough – the notorious ‘Ottoman style’ (othomanikó). If Greek love has been invested with richer and more nuanced meanings, merely by way of its theoretical and political re-articulation, othomanikó is widely employed to describe the anal sexual act as demeaning with reference to both same-sex and different-sex encounters. Following this ostensibly odd analogy, we may link this linguistic choice to the country’s recent history and the repercussions it bears for contemporary viewings of same-sex desire.

Such an interrogation entails an understanding of the past two centuries that have shaped the Modern Greek state and the sensibility of nation-building cultivated during this period. The newly freed Greece of the mid-nineteenth century urgently sought a European identity, which could be granted by recourse to ancient Hellenism via a narration of linear continuity. The ancient patrimony, as contained in objects, texts and ideas, began to function metonymically for the nation’s essence: thus, the turbulent journey of the concept of ‘ancient Greek love’ can be placed in the matrix of this agony of nation-building. It was a time when Greece needed to divest itself of all Ottoman elements and was reaching out to Enlightened Europe. In this emancipating ambience, the four centuries of Ottoman rule needed to be construed as ‘a brief episode that interrupted the national journey’ (Hamilakis 2008: 64–65). In forging alliances with a Greek nation-state back in time, ‘the multiethnic character of the entire Ottoman Empire, including the segment today known as Greece, was ignored and the equally inconvenient fact that there had hitherto never existed a Greek national entity as such was readily suppressed’ (Herzfeld 2001: 16). The national project demanded a careful cleansing of unfitting elements, in order to support the idea of continuity, glorification and any present currency worth defending. This tradition of silence and oblivion of historical ‘dark spots’ is part and parcel of a wider strategy of memory cleansing that took place during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, one that would accompany the canonical national narration for decades to come. In this process, a parameter of ‘moral censorship’ (Herzfeld 1986: 9) imposed on diverse spheres of cultural activity was apparently prominent. As Papadopoulos contends, the national project altogether required the de-sexing of the ancient Greek past in the process of crafting a sanitised, heteronormative and patriarchal polity in line with its Victorian-era counterparts in Europe (Papadopoulos 2002). This marks the beginning of the modernist demonization of homosexual imagery: the (culturally, historically and sexually) penetrated male Greek body was one of the gravest symbolic injuries within the nexus of national identity building.4 Thus, the connotations of ‘Ottoman style’ have been handed down to contemporary Greeks as among the darkest of collective agonies recalling national subordination and mark the disavowal of Ottoman history and, at the same time, the collateral disavowal of local same-sex history and desire. The strategic gendering and sexing of the ideal of the nation (Parker et al. 1992; Layoun 2001) have long served to sustain the desired coherence of such an abstract ‘imagined community’. A series of ‘othering’ mechanisms and devices are employed in this process, with women and male homosexuals featuring as objects of sexual control and repression (Mayer 2000: 1). The personification of the nation, the attribution of a body, emotions and sexuality to such an intangible entity, takes place in a process of strengthening its reality and lessening its uncapturable and fictitious essence. Furthermore, the metaphor of the nation as family is one which informs our experience of nationhood and has a two-fold effect: on the one hand, it helps naturalise the

© The author(s) 2016. Nations and Nationalism © ASEN/John Wiley & Sons Ltd 2016 6 Anna Apostolidou abstraction of the national imagined community as a brotherhood (Anderson 2006 [1983]), drawing emotional and authoritative power by dominant understandings of nature and biology; on the other hand, by doing so, it further accentuates the force of kinship in the cultural value system. In the case of pre-1990s Greece, gender conformity was in fact the metric system of manhood (Faubion 1993: 217–222), subsuming sexuality to a great extent. As in other neighbouring cultures (Tapinc 1992), gender roles were assigned by one’s position in the act of penetration (active-passive split), and masculinity (andrismós, the role of the man) was attributed to men through an elaborate rhetoric of raw nature, animal instincts and libidinal needs demanding urgent satisfaction in their contact with any passive recipient (indifferently of their gender). This gender system coincided with and was anthropologically recognised by the ‘honour and shame’ model that stressed the performance of socially honourable masculinity and through the control of (female/effeminate) sexuality (Campbell 1964), and it is further legitimised by the passive-active dichotomy that has been very prominent in discussions about homosexual identity in Greece (Yannakopoulos 1998). In this context, the political significance of male homosexuality in Greece (Faubion 1993) translates to an imminent and urgent threat to contemporary political economy. Nationalist ideology draws heavily on the stereotypical sexualization of the ‘Other’, persistently grounded on gender segregation, where homosexual men are ‘alleged national traitors that offer citizens a sense of defiant pride in the face of a more formal or official morality and, sometimes, of official disapproval, too’ (Herzfeld cited in Bjelić & Cole 2002: 289). This intersectionality between gender and nationhood is better illustrated by a typical Greek response, as voiced by a middle-aged female guest on a television show: ‘I am Greek and a Mother. And homosexuality constitutes an insult to both these identities’.5 In the closely woven nexus between the national family metaphor and good citizenry, the young homosexual son (son to his mother and to his nation) incarnates a threat that is most difficult to tackle, both emotionally and ideologically: he constitutes the enemy from within, the permanent threat to the body of the nation that can be neither engulfed nor separated, because he is intrinsic to the very fibre that helps weave the national ideology: the Greek family. In this dynamic, the concept of respectability, closely tied with good citizenry, bolsters the force of nationalism, thus rendering sexual deviants as national exiles. Furthermore, in the process of naturalising power, as feminist critique has aptly demonstrated (Yanagisako & Delaney 1995), family and kinship have long fostered society’s hierarchies and legitimised the status quo. On the foreground of such a polysemic discourse, there follow certain examples of a counter-discourse that seeks to contest the dominant incompat- ibility of the concepts of homosexuality and Greek nation. Organised as straightforward resistance moves or not, these ethnographic examples indicate a recent re-evaluation of the multiple exclusions of same-sex desire from the canonical portrayal of Greece.

East/West, past/present: sites of negotiation

Personal takes

Leonidas, a man in his early seventies, walks beside me on the paved street Dionysiou Aeropagitou that leads up to the Herodion Theater. This is incidentally his neighbourhood and a place at the heart of the Historic Triangle (Istorikó Trígono), a recent neologism for the area that concentrates many of the temples and sites of archaeological interest at the centre of Athens. He has not stopped telling me stories about ‘a sweeter and freer time’, one that (I cannot help but think) coincided with the peak of his youth. Even though he makes passing reference to several incidents of violence, both verbal and corporeal, he contends that ‘hidden homosexuality was sweeter’ in the 1970s Greece, as it constituted ‘an aesthetic expression’ comparable to the ambiance of Paris as he remembers it at the time. He repeatedly praises the beauty of the boys he used to have random sex with as they bring to mind ‘the beauty of the Parthenon and the ancient statues’. In the full deployment of Leonida’s narration, idealisation and aestheticization of the past are employed and inserted in contemporary discourse to mark a link between the aesthetic expression of 1970s Paris and his own take on Greek classical antiquity, igniting a dialogue between a sense of ‘Greekness’ and a plea to the West as an aesthetic oasis. Evading the social conditions that have, by his own admission, rendered his life as a homosexual man quite troublesome, he chooses to imagine his identity within the interchanging reference of a long-gone Greece and a cultivated Europe. The terms he uses in imagining his youth force a coupling of the West and antiquity, which casts aside all the injurious elements of ‘homophobia’ that he repeatedly mentioned when discussing the situation around Greek homosexuality during the past fifty years. A few months later, I am talking to an informant I have recently met. Thanos (38 years old, private employee) is talking tenderly about his boy- friend, his life in Thessaloniki and his mother’s fragile health, when he suddenly stops to point out with his eyes two men in their fifties who are entering a gay bar across the street. ‘Take a look at those American loúgres’ (slang for ‘mean’ homosexual), he jogs me on the elbow, his eyes filled with disgust. ‘They come here and think they own the place, they take the best boys (ta kalýtera paidiá) and they think they are exceptional (spoudaíes). … These are the ones that pollute our country (vromízoun ton tópo mas)’. As I fail to see something notably filthy about the two elegant, well-dressed middle-aged men, I ask a bit provocatively ‘What do you mean? What is your problem with them?’ He looks at me evidently disappointed with a touch of contempt: ‘I guess where you studied there were loads of these loúgres, but here this style is not welcome. They are corrupted, paederasts and filthy (vromiáres), take my word for it’, and he immediately resumes the discussion about his mother in an appreciably softer tone.

This man’s readings of their West (Americans) and my West (England) as filthy/polluted chimed with a tone of Mary Douglas’ analysis of dirt as out-of-placeness (2002 [1966]). What is perceived as corrupted and degenerate from several interlocutors is the sexual attitude of those men to be out as gay and pursue the objects of their desire, especially when this takes place on Greek soil; the exhortation of Thanos is justified by the out-of-place character of this expression of sexuality. The underlying assumption is that we may invite foreigners for the purpose of profit and boosting the national economy – Greece has been heavily depended on tourism for many decades – but their morals and their exploitation of ‘our best boys’ is not to be accepted and celebrated. These men specifically incarnate the bad West, whose progress is construed as moral decline, and the performance of (here: homosexual) masculinity as national pride incurs a sense of aversion and contempt. Embedded in the canonical national ideology rhetoric, this man resists identifying with the tourists as a gay/homosexual subject, but chooses to be subsumed by the attitude that views foreigners as ‘wrongly’ sexualized and dirty. Claims to their pederasty and degeneracy help maintain a discourse that deems the country economically and socially explicated by an evil, omnipotent West; the notion of this vulnerable ‘Greekness’ erases any potential solidarity on the basis of sexual orientation and condemns the West as an evil agent. I have chosen those two men’s accounts because of the disparities that their profiles present in terms of educational and social background. Even though there is also a notable difference in their age, the most significant difference is that the first man is a wealthy, well-travelled professional with a solid education, while the second one is a high-school graduate from a working-class family with considerably less contact with ‘Western’ cultural locales. It is worth noting that politically and commercially active agents, as well as intellectually cultivated informants, are practically the only ones who actively engage with the issue of Greek homosexuality in the past. On the other end, working-class homosexual Greeks show no interest in tackling the ancient past for identification or other purposes; they insist on the moral corruption of the modern-day Western intruders and fail to see any advantage in adopting foreign trends as far as sexuality behaviour is concerned (even though they usually appear quite susceptible to current commercially driven Western trends). The growing self-apprehension of Greek gay men and culture as ‘Western’ is further facilitated by the fact that, since the mid-1990s, the new labour in the local sex work industry are not Greek nationals anymore. Many informants’ accounts attest that immigrants from ‘the East’ or ‘the Third World’ have occupied the position of the virile, young men who used to have sex with men in exchange for money. In this economic restructuring, the Orient is perceived in a broad sense as helpless and lacking power, thus facilitating Greece’s ‘performance’ of westernisation. Since this period coincides with Greece’s incorporation into the European Union, as well as the gradual growth of gay tourism, a shift of balance has occurred in the imagining of socio-sexual identities of Greek gay

© The author(s) 2016. Nations and Nationalism © ASEN/John Wiley & Sons Ltd 2016 Greek nationhood and Greek love 9 men. Namely, on the one hand, new patterns of immigration have brought an influx of disempowered foreign men who provide cheap services in the unoffi- cial sexual industry and, on the other hand, the advent of western tourists, who are considered as equals and somewhat role-models by middle- and upper- class Greek men, have left the ideal of the ‘Greek’ youth, which dominated the fantasies of previous decades, somewhat empty. Foreign nationals have been sharply divided into ‘westerners’ and ‘strangers’ (xénoi), thus creating a hierarchy of national order with heavy economic and sexual connotations. In this new context, there is an emerging position of Greek gay men in the middle area of this spectrum, granting Greek gay men a relatively stronger positioning in comparison to the near past. However, comments about the ‘general moral degradation’ of Americans and Northern Europeans, often with no direct reference to homosexuality, attest to a potent cultural negation to be engulfed in the overtly progressive ways of the West. If the Ottoman rule is to be held responsible for the past years, the West is equally to blame, since it covets the Greeks’ traditional values, as they inhere in our innocence, strong family ties and ‘clear’ gender roles. It is interesting to observe the remarkable collective proficiency that Greeks exhibit ‘in handling stereotypes of westerners about the Orient and non-westerners about the Occident’ (Herzfeld 1997). Even if (their own) homoerotic desire is the focus of negotiation, the chameleon discourse that seeks refuge in diametrically opposed viewings of East and West brings forth deeply rooted national ‘feelings’ that expose a desire to escape responsibility both as selectively Oriental/Western subjects and as members of the nation. As Mosse’sworkhas also demonstrated (1993), the conveyance of nationalistic ideology into daily practice is performed by the constant manipulation of concepts of sexuality, and it is the case that marginal groups, such as Jews and homosexuals, have often found themselves stereotyped as ‘unmanly men’ and outsiders bent on destroying all existing community. The mutual impact of attitudes to sexuality and gender and the transference, and subversion, of such stereotypes and ideals in everyday life coincides with the present analysis, as the latter exposes the vulnerable elements of nationalistic masculinity that my research discussants reclaim.

The olympic ga(y)mes: a site of contestation

Drawing on the discussion of the manipulation of Western projections as prisms through which modern Greece understands itself, the example of the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens has offered exceptional ethnographic material. The municipality designed a years-long re-structuring of the capital, aimed at presenting Athens as a modern city that appeals to ‘westerners’ and local citizens alike. Widely viewed as the vortex of a gradual process that began in the 1990s with the country’s full incorporation in the European Union, this cultural occasion was presented as double proof: ﬁrstly, as a reminder that the modern country is a continuation of the ancient state and, secondly, as evidence that it deserves the full respect of the West (meaning: the whole world).

In this process, a rather stressful period preceded the Olympics, one which caused a great sense of anxiety over the appeal of the city of Athens to the inflow of foreign visitors. The discourse cultivated during that time heavily stressed cleansing the elements what were deemed as nationally marginal. Brothels, stray dogs and homeless people became victims of the state’s anxiety to sweep away the capital’s undesired and disreputable residents. In this process, there were two distinctive discourses circulating in (and about) the country: One was addressed to the Greeks, appealing to their sense of dignity, and asked for the use of all possible means to avoid humiliation in the eyes of foreigners. Indeed, in a period of notable economic shortage, this event was a convenient means of disorienting the Greek population, concealing the impoverishment of contemporary culture and attempting to establish a link to the grandiose ancient past. On the other hand, reports made for circulation abroad highlighted the smooth-flowing preparations and the Olympic spirit’s return to its birthplace. This double pledge was sustained through the Athens 2004 Olympics and had a significant influence on the way in which the Greek ‘gay community’ sought to combine the two aspects of this discursive disemia in order to produce an appealing event, based on the ‘Western lens’. Tzanelli (2008) observes this double discursive performance in the event of the Athens Olympics of 2004, a highly visible cultural occasion, where the production of an internal Greek logos and another one addressed to the (imagined) West created what the author terms ‘diforia’, which I take to be close to Herzfeld’s ‘disemia’ (1997).6 Owing to the priority of sanitising the national façade, reference to homosexuality-related activity was officially not permitted and was in fact excluded from distributed tourist information. According to credible reports, also verified by two gay friends who participated in the organisation of the Olympics, the climate during the organisation and realisation of the scheduled events was notably homophobic: The Greek Homosexual Community (EOK) issued a press release entitled ‘Municipality of Athens wins a golden medal for homophobia’ (12 August 2004), which read: ‘With a concrete directive that is given in the training seminars to volunteers of the project “Show them the Athens that you love”, any information about strip-show places, gay or lesbian venues and brothels is explicitly prohibited!’ Within this context, the strategic appropriation of the western projection that gay activists and businessmen employed consisted in the following: Grigoris Vallianatos and Maria Cyber co-organised a series of parties that took place concurrently with the athletic events of the Olympic Games (13–29 August). The advertising leaflet was entitled ‘Olympic Ga(y)mes’ and promised seventeen nights of ‘Olympic hedonism’ in selected gay venues. This initiative was straightforwardly recalling the ideal of Greek love/hedonism as imprinted in the imagination of Western visitors and, at the same time, it aimed at the presentation of the capital’s newly formulated gay neighbourhood (Gázi) as a contemporary, vibrating gay site in tune with the ones to be found all around the Western world.

Many of my ﬁeldwork interlocutors attended the parties. The orthographic manipulation put forward by the term ‘Gaymes’ was not observable by all. However, those who did catch the implication expressed great admiration that gay and Olympic Games could ﬁt in one single word so neatly. As Miltos (44 years old, artist) comments:

For me, these experiments with meaning are the most important of what is happening today with our community, which is not a community, but all the same… If we can turn these national occasions to our beneﬁt, we are in the verge of changing the overall mentality.

My above reading sustains that the Olympics functioned as an ‘official event’ where the presentation of the country sought affinities with the glory of a sanctioned past and Western modern state. On the opposite extreme of this, we find the subversive manifestation that targets the gay tourist gaze towards the country as a continuation of the assumed-as-hedonistic Greek love of the remote past. Mainly for purposes of commercial consumption, the city appeared in gay-targeted flyers as a rich cultural space (in terms of homoerotic culture). The clever linguistic coinage of the term Olympic ‘gaymes’ intended to trigger the Western/tourist imagination and present a hybrid concept in which the Olympic spirit and gayness could be found to co-exist in the present tense. Secondarily, this celebration of the contemporary gay Athenian scene was intended for the timid local movement and especially those men not involved in political action. Legitimization of the co-existence of Greekness (better, a Greekness) and homosexuality was thus re-instated for the awareness-rais- ing of the ‘homosexual’ community, which, under the guise of entertainment and consumption of a cultural event, would find a comfortable notional space to accommodate non-heterosexual orientation within personal and collective identifications. This crack in the country’s heteronormative assemblage was masterfully utilised in order to nuance the concept of Greekness, provoke cultural and erotic ties between locals and foreign visitors and attempt a contained, yet powerful, link to a version of the historic past in all its celebrated vivacity.

Mykonos: an island of culture

As noted before, although at times exaggerated or viewed through a ‘blunt tourist glance’, ancient Greece has received good press compared with barbaric Rome (Dover 1992). Responding to the Western generalised gaze, contemporary Greeks improvise ways to reconcile the expectations of Western orientation with local traditional gender and sexuality codes, which are in turn, through this very process, challenged, re-inscribed and ultimately transformed. The most notable example of this attempt to ﬁt the West into the Modern Greek schema has a territorial manifestation: Mykonos. On my ﬁrst night on the island, I was chatting with a gay man from Austria, when a really handsome young man entered the bar. ‘Doesn’t he look like a

Greek god?’ my companion asked me. Feeling utterly embarrassed at being Greek and not having spotted the similarity, I nodded affirmatively. On my third day on the island, I was urged to visit the Elysium Hotel ‘to get a feel of what things used to be like in ancient times’. I hurried there the same evening to find a fully equipped modern hotel with an American buffet break- fast that hosted pool parties for notably drunk gay tourists, which did not quite match my idea of the Symposium. I found myself quite puzzled at first because I was apparently missing out on some significant signals and secondly because I caught myself thinking in academic terms: the antiquity narrative has been appropriated for profit. ‘Apparently, locals and businessmen represent what satisfies the fantasy of foreigners, which is a common practice in a peripheral country, where tourism has been a great source of national income for many decades’ I noted in my diary. The official Greek gay guide had informed me of the two main features one may enjoy in Mykonos: indescribable natural beauty and the fact that the island is a gay Disneyland. Embedded in the Western gaze, relevant readings often claim a trans-historic ‘hedonistic continuum’. For example, James Davidson’s (1999) and Robert Aldrich’s (1993) books on gay Mykonos and the seduction of the Mediterranean, respectively, are texts that stand between the genres of travelogue, classical history and diary, combining ancient history, mythology and personal experience in arbitrary analogies. Indeed, Greek businessmen in Mykonos have realised the financial potential of the Greek love representation and do not hesitate to project it in ways that will satisfy the cli- ents’ desired fantasy. Pola Bousiou’s (2008) reworked notion of MacCannell’s ‘staged authenticity’, i.e. the strategy of self-acclaimed performances of ‘genuine’ social roles employed to satisfy the tourist gaze, is very accordant to the ideal of ‘Greek love’, since this is par excellence a concept fit for aesthetization and fetishization. Apart from places known as exclusively gay, there is a great number of businesses that are ‘characterised as gay-friendly for marketing reasons’,asa local woman cared to explain to me. Many of the businesspersons who appropriate the term ‘gay’ or ‘gay-friendly’ for their businesses also use derogatory terms for homosexual men and reveal a very strategically thought out managerial choice. A 35-year old heterosexual-identified man, who has been working on the island for seventeen years, confesses:

Local people live off them. We live off them. Ten years ago, things were really beautiful. You could make love on the street and nobody would even look, there was freedom. Now they only come here to get a fuck, or to gossip… In the villages, people are still innocent. You will ﬁnd people who have no idea about it and do not accept such things. The town (chóra) is corrupted by money. They [locals] take their [gay men’s] money and in return, they accept them. Children here are raised with more open-mindedness, which is of course a good thing, but still this can be dangerous.

The history of the Western gaze towards modern Greece may have experienced multiple local disapprovals about the presence and role of antiquity in the

© The author(s) 2016. Nations and Nationalism © ASEN/John Wiley & Sons Ltd 2016 Greek nationhood and Greek love 13 modern context. However, in the name of a symbolic return of the contribution of classical Greece to the Western civilization, preoccupation with this gaze has resulted in a counterforce of the ones looked at: performed in the name of financial profit, looking back in this way brings about a series of be- longings to the Western family, realised through the double dynamic logos about Greece. The expectations of visitors are usually met indeed; this is not done through their contact with (gay, straight, handsome or ‘ancient-looking’) Greeks, but through cultivation of the illusion that, on this particular cultural space, grounded both on Greek soil and on Greek mythology, some glimpse of the past may be met around the corner. What appears to be in motion in Mykonos is a two-way dynamic process, in the context of which gay people consume tolerance, visibility and a certain measure of acknowledged social space, while locals accept this necessary evil for profit, providing consensus and sometimes fantasies to the island’s visitors. In traditional anthropological terms, this can be seen as a reciprocal exchange, a gift of some sort, where symbolic and ideological values are translated and negotiated in current market terms. Nonetheless, the existence of a Greek space, which is also strictly addressed as a gay one, results in creating dynamics of reflection and information exchange (between locals and visitors, gay and non-gay, Greek and Western, etc.) that contribute towards a reconciliation of Greekness and homosexuality. This unique handling of homosexuality on Mykonos demonstrates that commercialisation of gay culture may have a variety of impacts: for whatever reasons this may be permissible, on this island, it is possible to see gay men holding hands and kissing in the streets; young Greek mothers who do not declare themselves horrified that their children might grow up to be gay; and even heterosexual men who self-identify as gay (who describe themselves as exclusively heterosexual in their sexual practice yet feel that they have a sexually liberal ‘gay mentality/philosophy’). Evidently, gay people remain othered in Mykonos as anywhere else in Greece, but owing to de facto contact with them, the locals cannot afford to view them/speak of them in the way common throughout the rest of Greece. This may as well be construed as a re-worked homophobia, since being openly homophobic in Mykonos is neither politically correct nor financially wise. The example of Mykonos demonstrates that queering, in the sense of remaining open to (sexual) alterity and tampering with rigid concepts, may be achieved through mechanisms that are at times completely unforeseen.

Eminent Greek homosexuals: the bridging ‘but’

More times than I would have guessed during my ﬁeldwork, I stumbled on the phrase: ‘He is a really nice guy, but he is a homosexual’ or ‘…although he is gay’. More often than not, speakers were not even aware they were using this tiny conjunction in a phrase that was meant to be largely praising for the person under discussion. Once, however, in a casual discussion about the poet

C.P. Cavafy (1863–1933), widely known for his subtle homoerotic poetry and homosexual orientation, a young heterosexual man rose to defend the artist: ‘Yes, he may have been a homosexual but he was a great artist (spoudaíos kallitéchnis)’. The employment of the same conjunction-word in a reversal of meaning indicated for me a striking difference in the valorization of non-normative sexual orientation when related to some sort of ‘greatness’. Focusing a little closer on this aspect, I came to the conclusion that there was indeed a high stake, indeed of national proportions, about the positive associations between Greekness and (a speciﬁc version of) male homosexuality. The two following excerpts indicate how this stake is played out in instances of disclosure. Stelios (26 years old, business owner) narrates how he tried to ‘talk about it’ to his mother in a recent private talk, when she was persistently asking him to get a girlfriend:

She was going on and on about my cousin’s girlfriend who is crazy about him and takes care of him and all that. I know her well, she was doing that to try and ﬁsh something about me, but I was acting cool and wasn’t saying much. I know how to get on her nerves when I want to… When she decided to ask me straightforwardly – she couldn’t hold it anymore, she would burst – I had prepared the answer I would give her. So I said, after a small pause, ‘Mom, do you remember how much you liked the poetry of Cavafy?’ and I looked at her in the eyes with meaning. She didn’t say another word. She turned her head down and then started talking about something else. My mom is not very well-read, but she is a very smart woman. I knew she knew Cavafy, and what Cavafy was, and I knew she was proud to have read some of his poems.

Conforming to the local insinuation canon in questions of sexuality, this man ‘uses’ his mother’s pride in order to express his sexuality. In this way, he avoids uncomfortable self-identiﬁcation terms, while, at the same time, appropriating the prestigious ﬁgure of the eminent poet to inscribe his desire in an environ- ment of nationally celebrated connotations. This incident coincides with a disclosure attempt, described on a web-forum about ‘Great Homosexual Greeks’, where a high-school student is reported to have used the phrase ‘I, too, am a Cavafy’ with the purpose of expressing his sexual orientation during a class on Modern Greek.7 In the case of Takis (30 years old, lawyer), the situation is reversed: He recounts how he was taken completely off-guard, when – again – his mother tried, a few years back, to open a ‘serious discussion’ with him. He had just completed his postgraduate degree and had returned to his home island from France, when this incident occurred.

She had been looking at me very inquisitively (exetastiká) the whole week I was there. One morning I woke up and went to the fridge to get something to drink and I was wearing a rather extreme T-shirt that my lover [in France] had given me. When I sat on the table, she took a very caring look and asked me calmly: ‘Eísai Tsaroúchis, paidí mou (Are you a Tsarouchis, my child)?’ At ﬁrst I didn’t get what she meant, but then, from her concern, I realised she meant to ask if I was gay. I quickly made fun of it

© The author(s) 2016. Nations and Nationalism © ASEN/John Wiley & Sons Ltd 2016 Greek nationhood and Greek love 15 and asked her what sort of silly things she was saying so early in the morning… But, look at what she found to say. Mothers… Bottom line, they know everything.

Again, in this woman’s case, the name of the famous Greek painter Tsarouchis (1910–1989), well-known for his homosexual inclination, provided a language – coded, yet utterable – to confront the issue of her son’s suspected homosexual orientation. These isolated incidents are not representative of the way people speak about male homosexuality at large. Nonetheless, they point to the direction of a possibility, in which Greek identity and homosexuality are legible in the same notional space, namely, that of the nation. Venetia Kantsa (2006) masterfully documents the slow and subtle process that lesbian women in Greece go through in order to acclimate their families with the reality of their (commonly apprehended as) aberrant sexual orientation. The culturally approved strategy of mutual silence, a code shared by mothers and daughters alike (much like sons and mothers) and the selective use of nationally acknowledged figures facilitates the subversion of the shameful connotations of homosexuality. If in Kantsa’s example the socially celebrated role of (lesbian) “motherhood” acts as a buffer for the ‘betrayal’ brought about in the corpus of the female national ideal, in the case of Greek gay men, the evocation of the nation’s glorious representatives (its ‘heroes’) functions in the same reconciliatory way. It may be the case that the Western conceptuali- zation of modern Greece provides constraints on the ways in which male homosexual identity can be realised; however, there is in fact a wide array of performative solutions through which such accommodations can be made. These accommodations not only facilitate the social agents in their communi- cating an unacceptable sexual identity but they also challenge the dominant nationalistic representations, thus curving up a space for alternative narrations about the nation. I argue that this is performed in a form of ‘forgiveness’ of sexual non-conformity, when higher national interests are served, and constitutes an exception to the mutual exclusiveness of Greekness and homoeroticism.8 It is interesting though that this mainstream attitude of ‘forgiving’ homosexuality, or, more commonly, looking the other way, is to be encountered exclusively in relation to the artistic realm. The dominant narrative renders the ‘artistic terrain’ as more open and tolerant of sexual expressions and identifications that do not fall under the heteronormative category. Sexual non-conformity on the part of these artists may be frowned upon, but they are not expected to embody the national emblems and ideals in their life but in their work. Furthermore, we notice an exemption from the national canonising mecha- nism taking place when the work of these men adds to the elevation of the country’s symbolic capital. While ‘lay’ homosexuals are largely considered traitors to the nation, their eminent counterparts are somehow exempt from this criticism, as they manage to make it up to the nation by giving something back, in terms of symbolic capital. In fact, they are placed in a specific position on the Pantheon of personalities that have honoured the country and nation, which is usually reflected in their success abroad. Moreover, most of the

© The author(s) 2016. Nations and Nationalism © ASEN/John Wiley & Sons Ltd 2016 16 Anna Apostolidou aforementioned homosexual artists either lived abroad for many years or, in the case of Cavafy, were members of the Greek diaspora; hence, cultural hybridity both in their personal expression and cultural reception is another parameter that deems them both internal and external to the national corpus. To the extent that they remain on the margins of the notional Greek mainstream, their artistic success ranks them in a margin that lies hierarchi- cally above their fellow Greeks and not below, as is the case with other men-desiring men. In this way, cases like those of Tsarouchis and Cavafy, or even Hadjidakis (a famous twentienth-century composer known for his gay identity), constitute exceptions to the rule of homosexuals-as-exiles from the national discourse; note that Cavafy belongs to the handful of writers that are widely considered our ‘National Poets’ (Ethnikoí Poihtés). As long as they do not injure the country by improper behaviour or speech, and at the same time help re-instate the wealth and signiﬁcance of the topos of Greece through their work, they are deemed useful in creating continuity allusions with direct reference to the past and grandiose illusions with reference to the present. These discursive manipulations manage to leave the ideal of the virile Greek man intact, by masterfully adding symbolic capital to the nation. At the same time, as illustrated by the examples of the Olympic Gaymes and Mykonos, a newly coined cultural agency is at play, where the very traces of a normative resistance form a kind of Greek homonationalism (Puar 2013); ultimately, certain attempts of queer subversion end up reproducing, albeit slightly tampered, national ideas and ideals. Indeed, in the narrative treatment of gifted men whose transgressive desire attributes them traits of eminence and exceptional creativity, the notorious honour-shame bipolar of Greek masculinity is disjointed: on the one hand, we have the usual connotations of shame, which draw from the act of improper sexuality and gender-behaviour. However, on the other hand, we witness the creative urge of eminent homosexual men being reformulated into an essence of sublimity, which is in turn translated into an offer to the motherland’s capital. Moreover, creativity is also construed in terms of procreation. As Fillipos (31, sculptor/shop owner) believes:

While babies are somewhat ordinary and unimportant, great artworks are timeless; they are uncontested and great sources of immediate national pride.

In such discursive managements of creativity and desire, the alleged impotency of gay/homosexual Greeks is effectively counterbalanced by their highly valorized contribution to the Motherland. However, fame alone is not enough for excusing homosexual behaviour in contemporary Greece. Exemption from the rule of gossip, social condemnation and stigmatisation presupposes a ﬁrm acknowledgment of the artist’s value by a circuit of appreciation that reaches up to, and exceeds, the national borders. This legitimization is granted by Western institutions, individuals and media, and returns to the country with

© The author(s) 2016. Nations and Nationalism © ASEN/John Wiley & Sons Ltd 2016 Greek nationhood and Greek love 17 the powerful endowment of this external valorization. Only in this case is homosexuality overshadowed in the social appreciation of a Greek homosexual artist, which returns the present discussion to the performance of Greekness in the light of Western projections, expectations and affirmation. This has a straightforward effect on the way in which Greek gay culture finds legitimation and affinities in a national space of positive connotations to homosexuality. Therefore, we view how the same social practice is differently invested by the reflection of a Western perspective.

Conclusion

The above ethnographic examples illustrate a heightened investment of the ways in which Modern Greeks view themselves through the prism of external evaluation. Contemporary Greek gay culture casts itself in relation to the achievements of internationally acclaimed artists, or seeks to forge ties to an idealised past in order to carve a space of positive connotations in the national imagery. The adoption of a Greek gay/homosexual (or queer) identity is thus shown to presuppose critical engagement with the cornerstones of ‘Greekness’ and often a strategic choice to contest (at least one of) the founding triptych’s components. The examples presented above tend to complicate any neat binary between us/them, East/West constructions of Greek gayness via an appeal to Greek love and the ancient tradition of male homosexuality; or, in other cases, via strategic attempts to come to terms with the internal contradictions of national identity and creatively inscribe same-sex sub-histories to the canonical national stereotyping. Such attempts to challenge the national norm indicate that the equation of nationalism with heterosexual masculinity is neither straightforward nor predictable. The quests of those who have been strategically cast outside the dominant national discourse to ‘queer’ the national narration can be perceived as efforts to create sites of reconciliation between homosexuality and the Greek nation. Such strategies introduce new imaginative ways of transgressing normative nationalism and, at times, ways of enriching global prescriptions of homonormativity.

Notes

1 I should clarify that my analysis follows mainstream literature on desire in antiquity, in which ‘Greek love’ refers to male-to-male homoeroticism; the ﬁeldwork focused exclusively on men-desiring Greek men, and the present article does not touch upon other forms of silenced desire/subjectivity, such as lesbian or transgender one. 2 Star Channel (29 March 2004), Nana Palaitsaki. 3 For more on this, see Time Out vol. 59, 8–15 April 2004: 58. 4 As I have observed elsewhere (Apostolidou 2010), the word poústis (meaning ‘fag’; also devious, untrustworthy) presents itself as a survival of this particular agony, and this is presumably the fundamental reason that makes it one of the worst swearwords in the Greek language.

5 Mrs. Peppa, talk-show ‘Oi pýles tou anexígitou’ (‘The gates of the inexplicable’), hosted by Kostas Hardavellas, April 2007. 6 Disemia, as coined by Herzfeld, refers to the discursive strategy of double semantic content, in which cultural agents address two different audiences – usually a local and an international one – in contrasting and often antithetical ways, usually on politically sensitive issues. Tzanelli’s diforia (literally: ambiguity) is of similar meaning. 7 Anonymous comment (20 February 2008) posted on: .For a detailed account on the complex processes of appropriation of C. P. Cavafy, see Papanikolaou (2014). 8 A certain anxiety to conform to neoliberal economy and present Greek homoeroticism as a marketable and exportable good may well co-exist with such subversive narrations, as there are often more than one sets of forces into play in such cultural processes.

References

Aldrich, R. 1993. Seduction of the Mediterranean: Writing, Art and Homosexual Fantasy. London: Routledge. Anderson, B. 2006 [1983]. Imagined Communities: Reﬂections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London & New York: Verso. Apostolidou, A. 2010. ‘Inscribing gendered and national anxieties on insulting language: linguistic depictions of Greek male homosexuality’ in C. Canakis, V. Kantsa, K. Yannakopoulos (eds.), Language and Sexuality (Through and) Beyond Gender: Anthrolinguistic Perspectives. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Bjelić, D. I. and Cole, L. 2002. ‘Sexualizing the Serb’ in D. I. Bjelić, O. Savić (eds.), Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation. London: The MIT Press. Bousiou, P. 2008. The Nomads of Mykonos: Performing Liminalities in a ‘Queer’ Space. New York & Oxford: Berghahn Books. Bravmann, S. 1994. ‘‘The lesbian and gay past: It’s Greek to whom?’ Gender’, Place and Culture 1, 2: 149–167. Campbell, J. 1964. Honour, Family and Patronage. A Study of Institutions and Moral Values in a Greek Mountain Community. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Davidson, J. N. 1999. One Mykonos: Being Ancient, Being Islands, Being Giants, Being Gay. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Davidson, J. N. 2001. ‘Dover, Foucault and Greek homosexuality: penetration and the truth of sex’, Past & Present 170: 3–51. Davidson, J. N. 2007. The Greeks and Greek Love: A Radical Reappraisal of Homosexuality in Ancient Greece. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Douglas, M. 2002 [1966]. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge. Dover, K. J. 1988. The Greeks and their Legacy: Collected Papers II. Oxford & New York: Basil Blackwell. Dover, K. J. 1992. ‘Introduction’ in K. J. Dover (ed.), Perceptions of the Ancient Greeks. Oxford, UK & Cambridge, USA: Blackwell. Dowling, L. 1994. Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford. Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press. Faubion, J. D. 1993. Modern Greek Lessons: A Primer in Historical Constructivism. New Jersey & West Sussex: Princeton University Press. Foucault, M. 1984. The History of Sexuality II: The Use of Pleasures. London: Penguin Books. Hale, K. 1990. In the Land of Alexander: Gay Travels, with History and Politics, in Hungary, Yugoslavia, Turkey, and Greece. Boston: Alyson Publications. Halperin, D. M. 1990. One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love. New York & London: Routldege.

Halperin, D. M., Winkler, J. J. and Zeitlin, F. I. (eds.) 1990. Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World. New Jersey & Oxford: Princeton University Press. Hamilakis, Y. 2008. The Nation and its Ruins: Antiquity, Archaeology, and National Imagination in Greece. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Herzfeld, M. 1986. Ours Once More: Folklore, Ideology and the Making of Modern Greece. New York: Pella. Herzfeld, M. 1997. Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation State. New York & Oxon: Routledge. Herzfeld, M. 2001. ‘Towards an ethnographic phenomenology of the Greek spirit’, Mediterranean Historical Review 16, 1: 13–26. Kantsa, V. 2006. ‘‘Oikogeneiakes ypotheseis: Mitrotita kai omofyles scheseis sti sygchroni Ellada’ [‘Family matters: Motherhood and same-sex relations in contemporary Greece’]’ in E. Papataxiarchis (ed.), Peripeteies tis Eterotitas: I Paragogi tis Politismikis Diaforas sti Simerini Ellada [Adventures of Otherness: The Production of Cultural Difference in Contemporary Greece]. Athens: Alexandria. Larmour, D. H. J., Miller, P. A. and Platter, C. (eds.) 1998. Rethinking Sexuality: Foucault and Classical Antiquity. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Layoun, M. N. 2001. Wedded to the Land? Gender, Boundaries and Nationalism in Crisis. Durham & London: Duke University Press. Loizos, P. 1993. ‘A broken mirror: masculine sexuality in Greek ethnography’ in A. Cornwall, N. Lindisfarne (eds.), Dislocating Masculinity: Comparative Ethnographies. London & New York: Routledge: 66–81. Mayer, T. 2000. ‘Gender ironies of nationalism: setting the stage’ in T. Meyer (ed.), Gender Ironies of Nationalism: Sexing the Nation. Routledge: London & New York: 1–22. Mosse, G. L. 1993. Confronting the Nation: Jewish and Western Nationalism. Hanover, N. H: Brandeis University Press. Papadopoulos, A. G. 2002. ‘Mapping “Romeic” and “Hellenic” same-sex desire: articulating heteropatriarchy and male homosexuality in contemporary Greece’, Antipode 345: 910–934. Papanikolaou, D. 2014. ‘San ki emena kamomenoi’: O omofyloﬁlos Cavafys kai i poiitiki tis sexualikotitas.[‘Those created like myself’: Homosexual Cavafy and the poetics of sexuality]. Athens: Patakis. Parker, A. et al. (eds.) 1992. Nationalisms and Sexualities. London & New York: Routledge. Puar, J. 2013. ‘Rethinking homonationalism’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 45: 336–339. Roessel, D. E. 2002. In Byron’s Shadow: Modern Greece in the English and American Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tapinc, H. 1992. ‘Masculinity, femininity, and the Turkish male homosexuality’ in K. Plummer (ed.), Modern Homosexualities. London: Routledge: 39–49. Tzanelli, R. 2008. ‘The nation has two voices: diforia and performativity in Athens’, European Journal of Cultural Studies 11, 4: 489–508. Vrissimtzis, N. A. 1995. Love, Sex and Marriage in Ancient Greece: A Guide to the Private Life of the Ancient Greeks. Athens: Polygrama. Yanagisako, S. J. and Delaney, C. (eds.) 1995. Naturalizing Power: Essays in Feminist Cultural Analysis. New York: Routledge. Yannakopoulos, K. 1998. ‘Corps erotique masculin et identites sexuelles au Piree et à Athenes’, Gradhiva – Revue d’Histoire et d’Anthropologie 23: 101–107.