Insert My Queer Body In Classical Love

From an on-going project,  ‘Setting Up Camp: Queering Now Late Antiquity Spaces’, born out of my Grand Tour residency at British School at Rome.

Why look under the grand façade of Late Antiquity? It is about tracing the roots of a long-lasting intolerance towards queerness. Although religious discourses shaped the state and society well before Late Antiquity, and prejudice towards queer people goes back to when King Josiah (640-609 BC) burned the room of the qadesh (Assyrian priests who conducted same-sex rituals to honour the goddess Ishtar) in the Temple of Jerusalem, it was during the christianisation of the Roman Empire that the fate of queer people got sealed with the Codex Theodosianus. Amongst other dogmatic moves, the code instituted laws against same-sex intercourse. This prejudice first took hold in the Christian domain and then, like a virus, spread to the rest of the world, where to this day it inflicts so much trauma.