The British Museum has just published A Little Gay History by curator R. B. Parkinson. The book draws on around forty objects in the museum’s collection ranging from ancient Egyptian papyri (thick paper made from reeds… useful in the days before Grindr) to works by modern artists like David Hockney to look at same-sex desire across 11,000 years and throughout world cultures. Gay’s The Word’s Uli Lenart reports…
The evidence for same-sex desire has often been overlooked in the past, but Parkinson’s book, A Little Gay History, seeks to redress that bias, showing us that gay love and gay sex have been around since time immemorial. While ‘homosexual’ is a modern European term tht historians avoid using to label behaviors and practices that predate it, the artifacts curated in this book, and in the museum itself, clearly show that same-sex desire is not a modern Western invention (as has sometimes been claimed). So what were our gay forebears like? What did they get up to? What where they in to? And was it really that different to now? Here are six teaser facts from the book:
1) The oldest chat up line in human history is between men. Same-sex desire seems to have been part of human experience from the earliest recorded times. In a poem from ancient Egypt, around 1800 BC, one male god tries to seduce another by saying ‘What a lovely backside you have!’ (neferwi-pehwi-ki). Outside poetry, no male-male couples are known from Ancient Egypt: when two men are buried together, it seems that they are twins not lovers, as in this funerary inscription from 1325 BC.
2) Visitor surveys for a massively popular exhibition on the roman emperor Hadrian in 2008 suggested that surprisingly few people (we’re assuming they were straight) knew that Hadrian was into guys. His grief for his young lover Antinous (who drowned in the Nile in 130 AD) was extreme, and he commemorated his love in huge numbers of statues, making Antinous into a god. They were one of the hottest gay couples in history and Hadrian’s life inspired Marguerite Yourcenar’s novel Memoirs of Hadrian (1951) which is well worth a read.
3)The ‘Warren Cup’ is surprisingly small but shows scenes of men making love. Made in the Roman Empire around 1BC-10 AD, it is now known after its modern owner, the American art collector Edward Perry Warren (1860–1928). He lived with his friend (and probably lover) John Marshall in Lewes in Sussex, and he referred to the cup as the ‘Holy Grail’. In 1999 it was finally acquired by the British Museum, who had not purchased it earlier in the 1950s when ‘homosexuality’ was still illegal in Britain. It has been on public display ever since for everyone to see for free, so if you’ve got half an hour to kill go and check it out (room 70).
4) Many societies in the eastern Pacific or Polynesia accepted same-sex acts, much to the consternation of 18th century European explorers. In Hawaii, young 
masculine men called aikane would have sex with the king. A surgeon on Captain Cook’s ship The Discovery, noted in 1779 with some surprise that ‘it is an office that is esteemed honourable among them & they have frequently asked us on seeing a handsome young fellow if he was not an [aikane] to some of us’. This highly stylised treasure box from New Zealand includes a scene of oral sex.
5) The British Museum has itself been a stage for gay love.Its displays of Greek and Roman statues have helped shaped modern gay identity. In E. M. Forster’s novel Maurice, a Cambridge graduate finds love with a gamekeeper, and the turning point takes place in the galleries of the British Museum. Here the two men finally realise they love each other, as rough trade turns into romance. The book was made into a film in 1987 starring Hugh Grant using the original locations in the galleries: gay romance on a grand scale, and with a happy ending too.
6) The British Museum has objects about modern sexuality as well as ancient. Its collections of badges include ones for LGBT rights, representing over four decades and a wide range of issues. Some are serious, and some wittily caricature stereotypes about gay identity. And the Museum has other historic links with the struggle for equal rights: Lord Wolfenden, whose 1957 recommended the decriminalization of homosexuality, was also a director of the British Museum in the 1970s.
• A Little Gay History has just been published at £9.99 and is available from Gay’s the Word, the British Museum bookshop and other retailers.
• Gay’s the Word will be hosting an event for the book on Thursday 27th June at 7pm (£2) and there will be a lecture at the British Museum on the 28th June at 6.30pm (£5) to celebrate the launch.
