Original subtitles

If rocks could talk, oh, what stories they could tell.

Here in the early part of the 21st century, on the small Greek island of

Astapalia, Dr. Andreas Vlahopoulos, a noted archaeologist,

found rocks here that told an ancient story of same sex.

The markings chiseled into the limestone

say that 2,500 years ago, two men were having sex here on this spot.

They memorialized their love the way lovers still do.

Some would say that theirs was an unnatural act. I know that charge

firsthand as I was arrested for soliciting another man to commit an

unnatural act.

It was Boston.

1975.

A jury, dressed up to celebrate an Irish Catholic holiday, convicted me.

Then and now, I never thought my same-sex desires were unnatural.

And neither did they when they proclaimed their love centuries before

the word homosexual was invented.

We know experiences in which people clearly desired same-sex relationships

that went beyond the norm of heterosexual relations.

Lesbians, gays, transvestites, transgenders existed in Asia for

centuries.

And I find so much of same-sex references, etc., in our temples,

depictions.

The how

and

why we were able to rediscover so much ancient same-sex material just recently

is in itself an exciting part of our story.

All of my work in the ancient world is based on archives of an ancient sort

because without preserving this, our lives are totally wiped

out. You know, each fragment, I mean, it depends upon each fragment of

information being saved.

What was it about people like me that so disturbed so many

others?

Was it fear?

Affect?

And what made so many lovers hide?

Was it shame?

Or the despicable acts committed against people like me?

Some material we found is pretty ugly.

It's part of the story.

But I find myself drawn more to the beauty from our past, the heroism, an

ability to struggle, to survive, and even flourish.

To insist, we will be remembered.

There are monuments now to our dead. Berlin has a big concrete vault.

to commemorate the many homosexuals who were murdered by the Nazis.

But what picks me up are the monuments to our cultural artifacts.

This one, across town, preserves the traces of our vivid path.

In Amsterdam, on my way to lecture about gay history,

I lay flowers at another monument to the gay dead.

But suffering is just a part of our history. People are being arrested,

hung, killed and also celebrated all over the world.

And stories are being told and history is being made.

The thing about history being...

circular, is that yes, history repeats itself, but the circles get bigger and

bigger and bigger, and at some point you better be sure that it doesn't go off

the fucking edge.

The Nazis burnt the first gay film ever made.

Some brave soul saved a copy. We found it hidden in Prague.

And so the circle repeats, making, destroying, hiding, and saving.

We started with an old shoebox.

This says René Vivian, 1906, this one here.

I'm teaching in my class how local resistance was organized to fight.

When C.P. Kefafi, the famous Greek poet, wrote Hidden Things in 1908, He must

have expected that someday somebody would find it.

From all I did and all I said, let no one try to find out who I was.

The past, as Qafafi says, is not finished.

Later, in a more perfect society, someone else, made just like me, is

certain to appear and act freely.

During the 60s, like many students, I was involved in the anti-Vietnam War

movement. Free speech and academic free speech here at the university.

For me, it was also a time of the sexual revolution.

Free love was in the air and the Kama Sutra was fast becoming our Bible.

But I knew then that some things had been left out.

They just don't have that chapter. So most people are not aware that that

chapter is there.

Even the glossy coffee table kind of versions of the Kama Sutra that float

around in the West, they're all heterosexualized. You don't have this

stuff in it. So people don't know this about the tradition.

There's a chapter in the Kama Sutra. It divides people into men who desire women

and men who desire other men. And then goes on to give a very detailed

description of oral sex, like sucking a mango and so on. Quite non-judgmental

and even quite playful.

But back in the early 1980s, when three young producers, including myself,

began to make the film before Stonewall, we ran into some obstacles.

We weren't able to do...

Anything earlier than 1920, when we did Before Stonewall, basically

there was hardly any material.

Who gets to define and analyze history?

With the gay revolution of the 1990s in academia and anthropology, all of a

sudden gay folks in these worlds had influence.

That is, they had tenure at universities, grants for research, and

the like.

which meant a new focus on same-sex history.

Anti-gay forces tried to suppress any knowledge of the historical existence of

gay people or gay feelings or any kind of self-expression of those feelings.

So just excavating them and getting them back from under the years of

neglect and censorship was a way of saying...

We are here.

But gay and lesbian academics of the 1990s did more than find and save

material. They also went about reinterpreting some of the classic

stories with a gay sensibility.

Michelangelo's David is a titanic work of art in the Renaissance as an

artistic culture.

Now, what it means to me personally, he is...

David, not only the killer of Goliath, but David, the lover of Jonathan.

David, who says when Jonathan dies, your love to me was more beautiful than that

of women.

Then Jonathan and David made a covenant because he loved him as his own soul.

And Jonathan stripped himself of the robe that was upon him and gave it to

David.

Certain individuals would live those desires out, even in the face of taboos

or laws.

And so we've come with that heritage up to the present time.

that we could have begun before Stonewall thousands of years ago in the

caves of Zimbabwe or under the streets in Prague.

One thing has become very clear.

Genes don't lie.

Our genes have been around for a long time, and so have the gay genes.

If you're talking about Neanderthal men, they probably had gay genes too.

What the research shows is that sexual orientation has a strong genetic basis.

It's the most important single contributor to whether people are

attracted to members of the opposite sex or the same sex or to both sexes. And

since our genes have not changed over the last 50,000 years, we can be sure

that there were gay genes and bisexual genes and lesbian genes long, long, long

before the word homosexual was invented.

Even the scientific community kept from us information about our closest genetic

relative, the fun-loving bonobo.

The bonobo life is the life of the sexual candy store.

When I was invited to do this lecture, I realized many of you don't even know the

difference between a monkey and an ape, let alone a bonobo and a LGBTQ.

They not only use sex for everything, they have sex with everyone.

Male, male, female, female.

I'll show you some footage.

The males will hang from trees and they'll do what's called penis fencing.

They fence.

Bonobos substitute sex for aggression, so do male homos.

Actually, gay men substitute sex for everything.

I mean, it's a lovely thing.

The bonobos are us without repression, religion, and shame.

I think the first thing to say about same-sex relationships in the ancient

world is that they're quite different.

Islamic law prohibited same-sex relationships for men, male

homosexuality explicitly.

In practice, same-sex relations were common cultural practices.

There's a finely nuanced slang vocabulary for all sorts of gay sex

acts, but no word for homosexuals.

The people of Huizhou call it treading on dofu.

The people of Jiangxi call it casting a crucible.

The people of Ningbo call it good, good.

Perhaps the best example of male intimacy, the most controversial

example, is the tomb chapel of Neacnum and Cnumhotep, and comes from around

2400 BC.

On the walls of the tomb chapel, the usual iconographic position that's taken

by the man and his wife isn't taken by a man and a woman in this tomb. It's taken

by the two separate tomb owners, Neacnum and Cnumhotep. And the central images...

in the iconography show these two men embracing and kissing.

We do have a few examples of less formal texts and works of art.

There's also a long so-called erotic papyrus. It's there for a bit of

frivolous filth, I think.

Many of our ancient myths and stories come down to us somewhat embellished.

with bigger-than-life heroes.

These stories tended to downplay same-sex activities.

However, in the 21st century, same-sex myths were being reconstructed,

especially in the world of gay fan art.

First, let me tell you what the story's about.

Stay with me now.

Horace was the god of the sky, Set the god of the desert.

For years they fought for dominance and the throne.

One day Set tells Horace, how lovely is your backside.

And soon the two are locked, penis and thighs, with Set taking the top role.

Now what Set doesn't know, in the clinch, Horace grabs his semen and

throws it in the river.

Then Horace masturbates on some lettuce, which happens to be Set's favorite food.

Later on, Set's bragging to the other gods that Horace submitted to his

seduction. And as proof, Set summons his semen, but it springs forth from the

river.

When Horace summons his semen, it springs from Set's forehead in the form

of a golden disc, proving his dominance.

Thus did Horace become king.

But in ancient Greece, same-sex was very much a part of the culture.

The Greeks were moving in a direction that you might say mainstreamed

sexuality.

In Athens, same-sex relationships between free-born men were sort of

official rite of passage.

Once it's more accepting, more other gay people can express themselves, can be

out, perhaps more likely to come into a position of power.

So this is sort of a classic example of how biology and culture can feed upon

one another.

Amongst the Greeks, who had a homosexual orientation, I'm sure some of them came

into positions of power.

Some say the gays saved democracy.

One pair of lovers was credited with the reestablishment of Athenian

democracy.

Their story is quite unique.

They were lovers.

Aristogiton was the Erastes of Hermodius, and Hermodius was

his Romanos. The younger one, Hermodius, was offended by one of the rulers of

Athens at the time, Hipparchus.

And they decided to kill.

Hipparchus, and they managed to do so, but they died in the process.

Hipparchus' murder was a political event because that was the end of tyranny and

opened the road to democracy, as it were.

The statues were set in the middle of the area.

Until then, this place has had statues only of the frauds. These are the first

statues of men in public places.

What has always impressed me was the Greeks' ability, both for men and women,

by the way, to fold into the pattern of being human as a perfectly normal

and natural thing, same-sex desires.

And then, of course, famously, there's Sappho.

Would you like me to recite a Sappho poem in Greek?

Do you know one? Oh, yeah. Just like that? Oh, yeah.

Her life is shrouded in mystery.

In the Roman period,

there begins to be

condemnation of her life because of the view that she had relations with women.

Now unfortunately, of her six books, only two short

poems have come down to a complete.

Oh, this.

This only stirs the troubled heart in my breath to tremble.

Sweat runs down in rivers. A tremor seizes all my limbs. And paler than

grass in autumn, caught by pains of menacing death, I falter, lost

in the love trance.

A love circle.

But in Rome, different rules apply.

As a Roman, you can sleep with whoever you want.

It doesn't matter who you sleep with, but how you do it.

And it's all about reinforcing dominance.

So you have to be the active, the penetrating partner.

And you can do it with whoever.

But I found, by looking at the Roman world as a whole, that other people knew

that women had relations with other women.

I think there's very little we know about same-sex relationships between

women.

So people didn't assume that it even existed in ancient times.

So I had to establish that there even was such a phenomenon in the Roman

world.

The examples that to me were the clearest were love spells that women

commissioned to attract other women.

The love spell is actually in the category of what are called binding

spells.

So these are very racy love spells.

So you call upon what we would call the soul of a person who has died to go

forth and grab another person and bind the person to you.

So one woman tries to get the person into the bathhouse, make her love her

day and night and desire nothing but her.

Listen and do everything quickly, in no way opposing me in the performance of

this action.

Burn. Set on fire.

Inflame, inflame her soul, heart, liver,

spirit with love.

Drive her, torment her body, night and day.

She surrenders like a slave because this is the will and command of the great

God.

The ancient world was full of highly charged erotic images like the Bourne

Cup. That's a silver cup that was made perhaps in the time of Augustus.

And this cup was bought by the British Museum in 1999.

It was at the time the most expensive single item they had bought.

They'd been offered it in the 1950s, but they couldn't buy it because the

material was too risqué.

On one side, we have the traditional scene of an older man with a young boy.

The older man has a beard, and the young boy is holding onto a sling, and they're

very obviously having sex.

And peeking around a curtain is another young man who may be a slave. We don't

know who he is. Who's watching them?

And we're still watching.

The Roman emperor Hadrian started it all off with his obsessive love for a slave

named Antoninus.

the cult that developed after Antinous' death.

That was unusual.

And they put up statues of Antinous in their villas and in their cities.

And this cult of Antinous continued into the 21st century.

So Memoirs of Hadrian is a novel by Marguerite Yourcenar.

its conceit is that it is the actual memoir of the roman emperor hadrian

i see a head bending under its dark mass of hair

eyes which seemed slanting so long were the lids a

young face broadly formed as if for repose

Yes, the gay liberation movement creates more interest and you can talk about it.

There's a certain danger in looking back at antiquity and seeing these things as

a sort of model or something to aspire to.

Well, I wanted to show that there were highly developed civilizations

apart from Europe.

China hasn't been good because we have lots of records.

迷人的男孩 你的脸

比眉红的曙光云更美丽

你能让烟的女孩羡慕

In the Han Dynasty, you have the infatuation of emperors for various

pretty boys, you know, sort of all sort of done in a warning tone.

These are ten Chinese emperors of the Han Dynasty and the names of their

favorite male companions.

Many love stories have been written about their affairs.

The most famous of these is based on fashion, and it's called The Story of

the Cut Sleeve.

The emperor Ai of the Han dynasty, which was essentially the first

dynasty to rule China, the emperor was

asleep and he rose to attend a meeting, but his lover was asleep on

his sleeve. So he ordered an attendant to shut the sleeve

so that the other man would not be awakened.

And he appeared in this horse then with this cut sleeve.

Other men there imitated this fashion as a way of celebrating the love

affair. So that love between men was very occasionally referred to as

the love of the cut sleeve.

I think contemporary lesbians, they have an interest in Chinese history.

I have an image of two women having sex using a double dildo. Mm-hmm.

They are both smiling, but it's a very genial, very mild, gentle kind of smile.

So, John, this is the tunnel book based on the poem for the... So I'm going to

read you a poem called... It's like this.

You can see the Chinese writing in the moon. Your slender body, your jade and

coral gurgle ornaments chime.

I want to possess the promised heart of a beautiful woman like you.

It is spring.

Bath mists cover the five lakes.

My dear, let me buy a red painted boat and carry you away.

While women were experiencing thousands of... Small deaths.

Thousands of men were literally dying in each other's arms.

So many of our same-sex stories about men are war stories.

Perhaps the most enticing story of men at war was that of the sacred band of

thieves.

And if there were only some way of contriving that a state or an army

should be made up of lovers and their beloved, they would overcome the world.

To honor these sacred bands, the Thebans raise the statue of a lion

on the battlefield.

There is an educational role and therefore same-sex relationships can be

positive and they can reinforce male bonds, especially among soldiers and

warriors.

And Achilles is the greatest of the Greek warriors.

Patroclus is Achilles' friend, companion. The word Homer uses is

heteros, which means comrade or companion or brother in arms.

So, you know, the Greeks have to put forward a hero to fight Hector, who's

the Trojan prince.

But then Patroclus puts on Achilles' armor and goes out and is killed by

Hector.

And this is an absolute catastrophe for Achilles. His grief is described at

length by Homer. He covers himself in ashes. He touches Patroclus' body. He is

in absolute despair.

And it is his terrible grief at the death of his dear companion that drives

him back into battle.

That was the real example of true love.

for the samurai, and very much like we might think in the case of the ancient

Greeks, certainly it was not an equal relationship in the sense that very

often it was between an older man and a younger man.

The older man would instruct the younger man in not only sexual matters, but also

in the responsibilities of samurai.

What is it about the penis?

Even the Greeks had a demigod named Priapus.

Billy McCoy was a boy who could play you bet.

Oh, how they played when he played on his old cornet.

He's got a smile and a cute little style that's all his own.

He'd mute his old cornet and then he'd make it moan.

Do what I do, what I do, what I do.

Codpiece comes from the Middle English cod or scrotum and is described

as a pocket or a flap that is worn over the male genitals as both protection

and modesty.

And it's still worn today in performance costume and in the leather subculture.

And it was taken to its extreme by soldiers.

It became larger and larger and more and more outrageous.

Dressing like a peacock doesn't always signal your sexual desires.

In most societies, for the longest time, how you played your gender role was more

determinative. Hiding was an option.

But effeminate men and masculine women found that harder to do.

And so new roles were created, especially in indigenous cultures, which

offered some safety. I do think that there was a significant number of Native

American cultures, pre-Columbian times.

in North and South America that did exemplify the expression of same-sex

desires, which today we would refer to as two-spirit.

For example, with the Mojave Indians, which is one of the most important well

-documented cases.

A singing circle is prepared involving the whole community.

Everyone gathers around.

and begins to sing the ritual songs.

And the boy, if he is destined to follow the two-spirit road, starts to dance

in the fashion of a woman.

The boy is then declared to be a two-spirit person.

They were not considered outcasts by any means, and which were generally...

accepted into the cultural pattern of their tribal group

the hijra culture is one of the oldest ethnic

groups of the transgenders in the world it's more of a

culture and way of living and it is known to be the third gender they had a

position in the society and and they were trusted they were and they were the

loyal they were the keeper of the herons.

It's not only about having sex, but it's the culture, it's the community,

it's what a one human feels from his own soul.

There was this figure of the mannish woman, women who lived their lives

passing as men. There was a kind of a fascination with them because they were

kind of adventurers in some sort.

To have the freedom of movement, to roam the world, practice medicine, fight in a

revolution, the only way you could do it was as a maid.

So in the case of Miranda Stewart, she becomes Dr.

James Berry.

She's traveling around the empire, has her eye on the ladies, and is getting

involved in brawls over this.

And then you, of course, have Catalina de Arauza, the Basque nun who ran away

from the combat.

Catalina goes into male dress, goes to South America, becomes a muleteer,

a soldier, a soldier of fortune, really, taking female lovers.

She was a real firebrand.

And at one point she was sentenced to death and they were going to execute

her. And then she goes, but I am a virgin.

And a nun.

And she got away with it.

And so the Pope gives her permission to wear male dress.

And so she becomes somewhat of a phenomenon.

So much of our history seems to spotlight the lives and actions of kings

and queens.

However, many of these stories are being reinterpreted by gay historians.

Without the heterosexual mantle, it was always presumed to be present.

I think that's great.

These are stories I missed hearing about in my history class.

Aujourd'hui, nous allons parler d'amour.

De roi, de reine et de prince.

Il y a très longtemps vivait un roi.

Le roi d'Egypte, Sennousret Ier, qui aimait beaucoup les bisous.

Il aimait particulièrement faire des bisous au dieu Ptah, patron de la

construction et des charpentiers.

Kingston Walter I, from around 1900 BC, is shown embracing the god Par.

The king is kissing the god.

To us, it's easy to read a sort of erotic aspect into these scenes.

But I think all it is is a celebration of male intimacy.

Ah, une reine.

Christina de Suède.

Elle adorerait s'habiller.

With women, occasionally you'll get a Christina of Sweden.

She was cross-dressing.

There's reference to her wallowing in bed with other women. You know, very

disapproving records from male observers.

about her sexual life.

And so, you know, she was a real case of a recorded historical lesbian.

My theory is that she had fallen in love with various women and

simply wanted to escape the spotlight, so to speak.

And outside of Sweden, she could live, actually, life.

The two of them decided to try to escape the country when his

father's treatment became too brutal.

Frederick's father wanted them tried and executed.

But there was so much outrage in Europe that he did

not execute his son.

La mort est douce pour un prince si aimable.

Frederick looked out the window and witnessed the execution of his lover.

The idea of gay marriage is not a 21st century concept.

History is full of extraordinary marriages before Thelma.

Nero is said in the sources to have been married to one of his slaves,

a chap called Dory Forrest, and Nero in that ceremony is said took the role of

the bride.

According to the Jewish Bible, the book of Leviticus, sexual relations between

females are not prohibited.

Well, this was somewhat disturbing to the rabbis.

And they found a prohibition for women marrying other women in the

biblical verse, you shall not do as they do in the land of Canaan, you shall not

do as they do in the land of Egypt.

That may seem a little far-fetched. And so the rabbis said, and what did they

do?

The men married other men, and the women married other women. That's what they

did.

What's interesting is that now we understand that they were also sirees,

same-sex sirees.

These were called brotherhood sirees and sisterhood sirees.

The woman who was interested would send a tray with the broker, with sweets to

the beloved, I guess.

Usually there was a dildo in the middle. And the other woman would, if she

accepted the offer, She would take the sweets and then she would throw a white

scarf, the sign of marriage, on the tray and returned it back.

There was an institution in China of female marriage resistors.

And the marriage resistors, some of them actually became deified.

A Chinese sociologist, Pan Guangben, he speculated that the reason for these

marriage customs is same-sex attraction.

They vowed never to marry, to live and die together.

They would go through this ritual of putting up their hair in a bun, okay,

and this ritual was called zi shu, self-calming.

Ironically, monasteries and nunneries seem to be the place.

for sanctuary, and more.

There were groups of lay sisterhoods called the Bagines.

These women freely acknowledged to the inquisitors that they did not regard any

kind of sexual relationships as sinful, including women with women.

Well, they burned 50 of them at the stake, but here's the juicy part.

Not infrequently, some of them prostrated themselves by the exit to the

bathhouse. Naked, right?

one falling over another, where they lay inflaming themselves until they were

exhausted.

And so within the monasteries, of course, it was acceptable to fall in

love with a boy.

This one is really interesting.

This is about a brotherhood vow.

And this caption says, now they perform brotherhood vows, better say they get

married.

It happens all the time in heaven.

Someday it will begin to happen again on earth.

The men and women who are married and the men and men who are lovers

and the women and women who give each other light

often will get down on their knees and while so tenderly holding their

lover's hand

tears in your eyes, listen to Julie speak, saying, my dear, how can I be

more loving to you?

How can I be more kind?

How did the world end up going from a pagan...

sexually fluid one, to Leviticus's, let's put them to death by

torture, beheading, burning up a stake, and hanging.

James Pratt and John Smith were tried and convicted and sentenced to be hanged

here at Old Bailey.

Newgate, November 25th.

1835.

Dear William, the awful period is nearly arrived when the offended laws of

my country demand the forfeit of my life for the crime I have committed.

The grave will soon close over me and my name entirely forgotten.

Your lost friend, John Smith.

A very long time ago, a small sect of Semites formulated what would become the

Old Testament, on which so many religions would justify their horrible

acts toward so-called sodomites.

Thou shalt not lay with mankind as with womankind. It is abomination.

Book of Leviticus, chapter 18, verse 22.

Unfortunately, the Leviticus statute is a simple line.

There's no rationale, no preamble. It stands by itself. In big biblical

times, when the Jews talked about somebody being in the manner of Sodom,

meant what we would call somebody who was unwilling to share, you know,

nothing to do with sexuality.

We do not get a real sense of homosexuality until

about the time of Jesus and St. Paul.

So the Apostle Paul writes in his letter to the Romans, to the Christian

community in Rome.

Therefore God gave them up in the lust of their hearts to impurity, to the

degrading of their bodies among themselves.

Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the

same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed

with passion for one another.

Book of Romans, chapter 1, verses 24 through 26.

Well, that passage in Paul was a test of lesbianism.

First mention of this and male homosexuality is unnatural.

It is a whole new train of thought.

Because the idea of unnatural does not appear in the Old Testament.

So that was really, unfortunately, a disaster for men and women who loved

their own.

And those Christian missionaries, they took their show on the road.

In ancient Hawaii and many other places, the missionaries were particularly

outraged by the same-sex practices.

Colonial authorities and missionaries in particular began to try to stamp out

these ritual practices. They regarded them as heathen.

as pagan as anti-christian and even abhorrently as monsters

before the coming of the british

in in africa

And so they made the people feel that there is something wrong.

And when they left, they forgot to erase that.

The Jesuits come to Japan and they are shocked, simply shocked.

They would be preaching to the daimyo, to the feudal lords of Kyushu, and

saying that sodomy is an abomination, it's a terrible sin.

And they didn't realize that the very men that they were preaching to

were great practitioners of male-male love.

With the spread of Catholicism throughout Europe, the church became

preoccupied with stamping out all heretics. In the 13th century, the Pope

declared a crusade.

There were bodies organized by kinds of fraternities who

devoted themselves to this cause of...

Around this period, sodomites became a favorite scapegoat among many

religious fundamentalists.

Bernardino Siena was a very popular and charismatic Franciscan

preacher. It started with the great plague, the Black Death.

Bernardino certainly blamed the population decline of Florence and

Tuscany and all of Italy on sodomy.

And it was a kind of easy scapegoat.

This blaming the gays for everything bad that happens seems to be a strategy no

matter what century you are in.

Yes, absolutely.

They're saying exactly the same kinds of things that you heard in the Middle

Ages.

The 1730 trial started with custodian of the tower of the cathedral of Jutberg.

He started to tell indeed about all the sodomites actually that came into the

tower and in the area.

Just from his confessions alone, I think they got more than 100 names. All the

other people, when they were found guilty of actual autonomy, actually

found guilty of anal intercourse, they would be executed.

That was the highest number of deaths.

at one time that I'm aware of before his life.

There's all kinds of wood blocks that were being reproduced and reproduced of

the executions of the men, and they had songs that were also printed with the

imagery. And one show had a series of six little paintings that go from had

the gay men meeting, had the gay men leaving their women, being arrested by

the police, put in prison, and then being executed.

So it's a very nice picture of why sodomites should be murdered.

The executions generally in Holland for sodomites were

strangling at a stake, which was typically the kind of death penalty

for women.

It was a pole.

And they put you against the pole and then from behind they strangled you with

a cord.

The authorities gave a message to the public.

You know, these sodomites are like women. We kill them like women.

Near the end of the 16th century, there were more sodomites burned than

heretics.

The reason being, they were running out of heretics.

But there would always be a supply of men who were involved with other men.

Obviously, same-sex didn't end with a garage.

We practitioners of same-sex had to adapt, had to be more creative.

In the Renaissance, ancient Greek myths became a way to portray same-sex

sensibilities.

In the Renaissance, there was a great rediscovery of Greek antiquity, the art,

the literature, the poetry, and a tremendous enthusiasm for everything

Greek. But I think for a lot of people who were homosexual or bisexual in the

Renaissance, they wanted to make images of this.

world from ancient times.

And that included the myths about same-sex love.

So, for instance, we have the story of Zeus, who fell in love with a young man

called Ganymede, or Apollo and the boy Hyacinth, or indeed Alexander

and his companion Hephaestion, which is not mythology, but more like history.

A good example would be the artist Sodoma.

He did a series of frescoes in a villa in Rome for the Pope's banker, a very

high-level member of society. And in the bedroom, there is a fresco of the

marriage of Alexander the Great. And there he is handing over the marriage

crown to this princess. But right next to him on the other side is his male

lover, Hephaestion, who is shown very handsome and idealized like a Greek god.

The 15th century Tuscan poet Poliziano wrote a poem, for instance, enjoining

men to leave their wives and find happiness with young men as the Greeks

did.

Hi, Jove, confirms the truth of what I said, who caught and bound in love's

delightful snare, enjoys in heaven his own bright Ganymede.

Phoebus on earth had Hyacinth the fair.

Hercules! conqueror of the world, was led captive to Hylus by this love so

rare.

Advice for husbands.

Seek divorce and fly far, far away from female company.

Maria, tell me about Ganymede.

Zeus, the king of the Greek Olympian gods, was very prone to falling in love,

which drove his wife here crazy, but he usually fell in love with...

nymphs and mortal maidens. And there's one story we have where Zeus turns

himself into an animal for a boy. And that boy was Ganymede. And he was the

most beautiful boy of his generation.

So Zeus turned himself into a huge golden eagle and came down and swept

Ganymede up in his claws and carried him up to Mount Olympus and made him his

personal cupbearer to pour his wine for him.

It's very clear that that kind of intimacy is also

erotic and that this is a bedfellow and a playmate as well as a servant.

A number of the Isaacs themselves were undoubtedly homosexual.

I wrote, you know, about Michelangelo and the discovery of the letters of

Michelangelo, that they had been deliberately changed from the male

pronoun to the female pronoun.

So the nephew thought he was doing his uncle a favor by rewriting some of these

poems to make them heterosexual, and that was the only form in which the

poems were known for the next 240 years.

And most of what we read in the 15th, 16th, 17th century is men like

Michelangelo, for example, who was in his 50s when he met Tommaso de

Cavalieri, who was in his 20s.

It's no wonder that Michelangelo made a drawing of Ganymede to give to Cavalieri

because it fit their circumstances. The older, mature, established figure

passionately embracing the younger, beautiful figure.

Michelangelo's poetry is the earliest surviving significant group of poems

that are written by one man to other men in the West.

229, new numbering, and it's to Victoria Colonna.

Here's Michelangelo's handwriting.

This is one of my favorite poems by Michelangelo because it's one of the

ones written to Tommaso de Caligari.

He wanted to write a sonnet to his beloved Tommaso Cavalieri.

Where Michelangelo really lets out in the least guarded

way. So this is the poem that you've been obsessed with for so long.

Here's Michelangelo. The kind of fantasies that he's having and the

desires that he has toward Cavalieri.

You can't be there.

So if in the eyes you see one's heart.

Again, the eyes.

The eyes.

If the heart can be seen in the face through the eyes, I have no other more

apparent sign of my flame.

So let these be enough, my dear Lord, to petition for your mercy.

Perhaps your spirit, which sees with greater credence than I dare to believe

the virtuous fire that burns me, will be quick to pity me.

Oh, happy that day when this be sure to happen, so that I might have my sweet

and longed-for Lord in my unworthy yet ready arms forever.

the Greek loophole propagated same-sex sensibilities well into the 20th

century.

With photographers like Van Gluden and Puchow, who in Italy produced thousands

of classical photographs.

The Battle of the Greeks even went to the U.S. Post Office when in the 1950s

it lifted its ban on Bob Meiser's photographs, calling them art.

So there was a lot more knowledge about sodomy. The Florentines just chattered

constantly about sodomy, and this is one of the reasons why they had such a bad

reputation. And it was so prevalent that the Germans invented a verb for

committing homosexuality, which was Florenze, to Florence.

In

Renaissance

Florence, you might have found me here.

under the statue of Donatello St.

George.

It was a notorious sodomite pickup spot.

In fact, that's what they called us back then, sodomites.

And they even wrote poetry about this little place.

So he says, essentially, in this wonderful Italian,

that this boy he knows, which is the statue, will never change.

He will never change his clothes. He'll never change his face. He'll never grow

a beard. And nothing will ever change. In fact, as we see, he's the same as he

was 500 years ago.

And down the street, they kept record of all the sodomites they arrested here in

Florence, thousands of them.

Court records are a good way to reconstruct same-sex history.

One talent for me was just... To sift through all of these thousands of pages

of documents, no one could have dreamed that there were so many people

prosecuted for sodomy.

Something like 17,000 men and boys appeared in the court records

over those 70 years.

There was an immense amount of sexual activity that these records were

documenting.

Among the names appeared Leonardo and also

Botticelli.

Cellini is an interesting case.

He was arrested and placed under house arrest.

So, Bazzi is known as Il Sodoma and at one point he entered a horse race

and he won.

Heralds come over and they say, well, you know, congratulations, Mr. Bazzi,

you won the race. How do you want us to call out your name?

And he says, oh, just say Sodoma.

So the heralds start going to the street saying, this is the horse of the

Sodomite who won the race.

As everyone knows what the Ponte Vecchio is, I believe there were around 50.

different individuals who were working on the bridge and were implicated in

sodomy. There are only a couple of dozen shops there, so they all must have known

who was being arrested, who had recently paid their fine, who was going out with

whom. There was a lot of talk and knowledge.

The core of homosexual networks, and you could call it an embryonic community,

was there.

You could see networks of same-sex people, mainly men, meeting, conversing,

picking each other up, having sex.

And that urban culture of people with sexual minority tastes, shall we

say, kept growing.

Male homosexuality was carved into the fabric of London.

It was on the pavement, it was in the brickwork.

In the 18th century, there was a phenomenon known as the mollyhouses,

which were sort of gay bars.

And we do have historical records of 30 mollyhouses in a relatively short space

of time, where men who wanted to have sex with other men would congregate, and

they'd have rituals, they'd talk in the female dialect, which was a kind of

camp. Polari language.

They'd call each other she.

They'd have names like Black Eyed Susan or Betsy.

You find homosexuality in parks, in public laboratories, in men's clubs,

in the theatre, on the street.

Homosexuality was everywhere in London.

So often we're accustomed to thinking that the history of homosexuality is the

history of...

men hiding in corners and feeling guilty.

And yet these men in early 18th century London were having as much fun amongst

themselves as any drunkard in a female of the prostitution.

But coming out would prove to be much more difficult.

In our film After Stonewall, Reverend Troy Perry actually called coming out

the most important action that gays and lesbians had done in the 20th century.

That revolutionary act for me is the most important thing.

But that revolutionary act actually began in the 19th century.

August 29th, 1867, a very important date here in Munich

at the Odeon Plot.

Before an audience of fellow German jurists, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs made

history when he became the first person to publicly declare his homosexuality.

For the first time in modern history, he came out as a homosexual.

Until my dying day, I will look back with pride when on August 29, 1867, I

found the courage to come face to face in battle with an age-old, wrathful

Hydra.

What gave me strength at the last moment finally to mount the speaker's box was

the distant gaze of comrades of my nature fixed on me.

Ulrichs would later flee in exile to Italy.

In 2001, his grave was found in L'Aquila by gay Italian activists, who each

year celebrate his birthday.

Ulrichs was perhaps one of the most important homosexuals to be rediscovered

by 20th century gay liberationists.

Before his exile, Ulrichs was part of a group of intellectuals looking for new

names to call herself.

Ulrichs looked to Plato's Symposium to find a word for homosexuality.

So he turned the Venus Urania into earning, and that was his word for gay

people. And it was these things that Edward Carpenter and John Isington

Simmons later picked up and disseminated into the English world.

The first time the word homosexual was used was by Austrian novelist Karl Maria

Bankert in 1867.

So it's not surprising that it's in Europe, in Germany and in England in

particular, that you first start having intellectuals like Ulrich or Edward

Carpenter or Magnus Hirschfeld describing same-sex desire, describing a

people, an intermediate type, for example, Carpenter used.

Edward Carpenter was called the gay godfather of the British left and he was

determined to talk.

about homosexuality in the 1890s when it was extremely difficult to do so because

it was illegal.

And so Carpenter becomes a very well-known advocate for same-sex love.

David Carpenter, who certainly as a pioneer socialist, as well as pioneer

feminist and sexual liberationist, spent a large part of his life living with,

working with... politicising working-class men.

Dear Ted, I shall be glad to see thy dear face again, as I have such longings

to kiss those sweet lips of thine.

Fondest love from your dear boy.

Carpenter met Meryl actually on a train coming from Sheffield to the

little village of Totley.

Their eyes met on the train.

And from that time, 1891, they are seeing each other.

New, proud, curved-lipped youth with brown, sensitive face.

Why suddenly did you turn full upon me, those twin black eyes of yours, with

gaze so absorbing, so intense?

I, a strong man, trembled and was faint.

I think that it was this.

sensuous confidence that comes from the contact with Meryl that enabled

Carpenter to really write about sexuality for the first time explicitly.

The records of chivalric love, the feats of an abbot knight for the lady's sake,

are easily paralleled, if not surpassed, by the stories of Greek comrades in

arms.

I falter. Lost!

in the love trance.

You know, what we have is this.

Lesbians at this time also found historical roots in the classical world.

Natalie Clifford Barney, an American expatriate, reinterpreted Sappho's words

for plays performed at her salon in Paris.

And in the late 19th century, with the invention of the photograph, hundreds of

homoerotic and male-male pornographic pictures flooded the homosexual

undergrounds of Paris, Berlin, London.

and Italy.

One of the important contributions of homosexual people themselves at the end

of the 19th century was their contribution to the development of what

we now call sexology, the science of sex.

And what you see through this is gay people themselves entering into a

dialogue with scientists.

Scientific Humanitarian Committee, which is really the first gay rights

organization as we would think of them.

This liberating spirit set forth a wave from Germany to England and

further across the Atlantic to... Here in the United States of America.

America.

Whitman burst out of the closet in 1855, and he just sucked in a lot of fresh

air.

Colonial with the earth, with freedom, law, and

love.

And then in the 1860 edition, in one of the Calamus poems, he says, Oh,

adhesiveness, oh, pulse of my life. Well, adhesiveness was the word that

phrenologists used for a strong affection between members of the same

sex.

Adhesiveness.

I really look upon Leaves of Grass as the opening shot

the call for gay liberation, freedom from homophobia, freedom to do as one

wishes. This poem to me is one of my favorites because in a way it's a call

to arms.

One flitting glimpse caught through an interstice of a crowd of workmen and

drivers in a bar room around the stove late of a winter night and I unremarked

seated in a corner of a youth who loves me.

and whom I love, silently approaching and seating himself near, that he may

hold me by the hand.

It's a gift. The sequence, in effect, is a gift to his gay comrades.

We two boys together clinging, one the other never leaving, air breathing,

water drinking, on the turf or the sea beach dancing, armed and fearless,

eating, drinking, sleeping, loving.

I love this poem, particularly that phrase, armed and fearless.

It's very clear from the context of all the columnist poems that they have their

arms around each other.

So it's a great evocation of gay fraternity, homosexual fraternity.

Whitman had this vision of the manly love, he uses those terms, the manly

love of comrades.

And that appealed to a lot of men who didn't see themselves in the figure of

the fairy, who saw themselves more in this Whitman-esque vision of

a shared love of equals.

In 1893, a wealthy young man called George Ives, who was illegitimate, the

son of a general, set up the Order of Chaeronea.

It was a secret society and its aim was to promote social

and sexual emancipation for Uranian men.

And it's quite likely that Oscar Wilde and Rosie Douglas were in the order.

In the 1890s, Oscar Wilde becomes one of the most successful playwrights of late

Victorian London.

In part, he owed his international success to his outrageous banter and

fabulous camp sensibility.

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and he

will tell you the truth.

Either this wallpaper goes or I do.

I think that sex between men was extremely prevalent in the 19th century,

and many men, particularly from the labouring class, from the working class,

were not even aware that it was a crime.

There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that

is not being talked about.

This is a letter Oscar Wilde wrote to Bosie Douglas, the knight.

before he was going to go back to court and almost certainly be found guilty and

sent to prison with hard labour for at least two years.

My sweet rose, my delicate flower, my lily of lilies, it is perhaps in

prison that I am going to test the power of love.

O sweetest of all boys, most loved of all loves, my soul clings to your soul.

My life is your life, and in all the worlds of pain and pleasure, you are my

ideal of admiration and joy.

In 1895, Oscar Wilde is convicted.

It's an enormous scandal.

There was nothing quite as dramatic as Wilde's case.

The first transatlantic sexual scandal involving same-sex relations.

He was an undoubted genius.

But when he was arrested, the popularity disappeared overnight and the underlying

homophobia, if you like, came straight up and remained

potent for 50 or 60 or 70 years.

He's really become a martyr to the kind of excesses of state power.

Weil said at his trial, quote, the love that dare not speak its name.

It is that deep spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect.

It is the noblest form of affection.

There is nothing unnatural about it.

And Wilde was that great turning point in gay history.

I think the importance of Oscar Wilde... is that he was the

first great gay martyr of the modern age.

Oscar Wilde wrote to George I, yet I have no doubt that we will win,

but the road is long and red with monstrous

martyrdoms.

was vilified, and his works were swept from libraries. The plays of his that

were in production were closed.

Yes, history repeats itself. The circles get bigger and bigger and bigger.

Will the film you've just watched be burned, like Different from the Others?

Will the few remaining lines of the great poet Sappho be preserved for

future generations?

I say someone in another time will remember us.

Will Whitman's call to arms be forever cherished?

I sing the body electric.

The armies of those I love invert me, and I invert them.

Will Qafafi's radical vision of a brigade of pleasure be fully realized

one day?

Don't speak about guilt.

Don't speak about responsibility.

When the brigade of pleasure passes with music and with flags, when the senses

shiver and tremble, it's wrong and disrespectful to stay distant.

All the laws of morality, badly thought out, badly applied, are nothing and

can't stand, even for a second, when the brigade of pleasure passes with music

and with flags.

If history is our guide, then these ups and downs of repression and freedom

shows us that there will be many valleys to cross before we see an end to this

story.

Later,

in a more perfect society, someone else made just like me is certain to appear

and act.

freely.