A group of Greek lawyers is actually considering suing Oliver Stone over his claim that Alexander was bisexual.
If they wanted to sue him for funky camera shots and heavy handed directing and every motion picture he made in the 1990s I couldn’t really blame them, but Holy Ganymede just how perfect a land is Greece if this ancient news is enough to get worked up over?
Perhaps the state of Georgia will sue for the claims in Ray that Ray Charles was blind and black when it’s very clear just from listening to him that he was just another character of Garth Brooks.
Quote Yanni Varnakos:
“We cannot come out and say that (former U.S.) President John F. Kennedy was a shooting guard for the Los Angeles Lakers basketball team and so Warner cannot come out and say Alexander was gay,” Varnakos said.
:smack: JFK wasn’t a Laker guard?
This from the leader of the lawyer group. I think Stone needs to do a movie about the lawsuit. With this kind of dialogue it would be great entertainment.
This time, he’s right. I haven’t heard anyone in the scholarly world argue that he didn’t have romantic/sexual relationships with men (or, at least, one man).
Well, hot man on man action was part of greek life in different cities at different times in different ways and the historians I’ve read agree that A and his buddy were no exception. But I guess it’s difficult to tell at this historical distance.
And BTW, last Nov. 4 the US State Department announced that now it would start officially referring to FYROM as just plain and simply Republic of Macedonia.
You can imagine the wails and gnashing of teeth from the Greek Foreign Ministry.
But yeah, this is silly. First, everyone in the know seems to agree that Alex-the-high-in-self-esteem and Hephaistion were an item, and that he cared much more about him than about either of his wives. And second, these lawyers have to realize that if someone wanted to write a movie script about JFK being a shooting guard for the Lakers, THEY COULD.
Now, maybe, being generous, it COULD be that, socioanthropologically speaking, the nature of same-sex relationships in Classical Greece is completely different in root, role in the person’s life, ans social significance, from those constituting 21st-Centruy-AD Gay Sexuality, and the only thing they have in common is sexual contact and affection between males. But that still has jack to do with Stone doing his bio-pic the way he sees fit.
How exactly are these Greek lawyers claiming that they’re being damaged by the portrayal?
And yes, it was documented by multiple historians that Alexander had a longtime love relationship with Hephaestion and that he kept the “Persian boy,” Bagoas as a catamite. Male-male sex was the norm in Alexander’s culture even though it was rarely exclusive. It was especially common for soldiers to have a wife and kids at home but to have a male lover in the field. It wasn’t seen as weak or effeminate then but sort of as ultra-macho.
Ironocally, I’ve read that Stone has been getting some flak from some pro-gay activists for not gaying Alexander up enough in the film.
Just in passing, it’s worth remembering that Greece was part of the Ottoman Empire–the Turkish empire, that is–for about 400 years.
Although they managed to retain the Greek language and Christian religion in spite of Turkish attempts to wipe both out, the modern Greeks are largely Turkish in cultural attitudes.
For instance, the Greek male’s treatment of women, of animals, and his own macho self-image is very close to that of the Turkish male.
Alexander of Macedon is a national hero to the modern Greeks…but only if he acts like a modern Greek.
So…how many Americans are a bit bothered that Thomas Jefferson kept a slave concubine and kept his own children in slavery? Many…in spite of the fact that Jefferson was not a modern with modern attitudes.
I can just imagine the sex scenes with Hephaestion and Bagoas:
“Down and to the left, down and OOHHH YEEESSS to the left, down and to the OHMIGOD to the left!”
As I understand it, “gay,” “straight,” and “bi” are not meaningful labels to apply to the Greeks of Alexander’s time.
As I further understand it, if we were to shoehorn one of those labels to fit, it would be “bi,” since Alexander sought out, for pleasure, sex with both men and women. (I exclude any politically-motivated pairings such as marriages).
I’m a little confused at the characterization of this as “gay,” unless it’s the equivalent of “one drop of Negro blood makes you a Negro in this state.”
This is Bagoas in the movie, incidentally. Thousands of cheering Greeks wouldn’t have to ask me to kiss him twice (a Plutarchian anecdote of Alexander).
