On the Beach With Larry Kramer and The American People

"Most history is written by straight people and they don't have gaydar."

~ Larry Kramer

There has been relatively very little written about gay history because there have been few gay historians. Larry Kramer sets out to help change that in his new book, The American People, Volume I: Search for My Heart. 

Kramer is an icon in the gay community and has been for over 35 years. He is considered to be the most prominent gay political writer of our time. Some may know him as the author of the semi-autobiographical play on which the recent movie, The Normal Heart, is based. 

Others may know him as the co-founder of the Gay Men's Health Crisis, one of the first groups to assist gay men who were contracting and dying from AIDS in the early-mid 90's. He also founded ACT UP, a direct protest organization that fought to raise public awareness of HIV and the AIDS crisis and the very little that the US government was doing about it.

I have been reading Kramer's book for several weeks now and am approximately 40% into it. A writer for The New York Times referred to the work as "a rambling history of homosexuality and AIDS in the United States ... [that blends] farce and tragedy, autobiography and fiction." It is technically a novel of sorts, but it is based on solid historical research. Again from the Times piece: "If he had had his way, he would simply have called the book a work of history rather than fiction ... 'I believe [,Kramer said,] everything in the book is true. It may look like fiction, but to me it's not.'"

"Mr. Kramer," continues the NYT piece, "said he was driven to write the book because he had long felt that gays had been excluded from history books, written out or ignored."

When I heard that the book was coming out, I knew I had to read it. As I have written about before, I am very interested in gay history, and in his book, Kramer (in the words of the NY Times review of the book,) "is saying something quite specific: That gay men have always been with us, long before homosexuality had a name, and it is past time we extend to these men our historical sympathy and imagination."

There are parts of the book that make for difficult reading and, frankly, I have skipped through several pages on more than one occasion. But the remainder of the book makes for fascinating reading. For example, Kramer beautifully imagines a group of men in early colonial Jamestown, Virginia who, deprived of female society, form a community based on same-sex love. 

I am sure that a *lot* of people would take issue with this "imagining," but although Kramer's work, being a novel, doesn't contain footnotes to sources he has read and upon which he bases his writing, one definitely senses that there is an extensive amount of research that has gone into Kramer's prose. 

In the end, however, it is the imagining that is important. Kramer sees things that a straight historian would not see or would choose not to see. As he states in the lead quote, above, straight historians don't have gaydar. What does this mean? To me, it means that straight historians are trained (and rightly so) to look for hard evidence in the form, for example, of primary source documents.

A gay historian who is researching gay history, however, is virtually guaranteed never to find a document, e.g., an old letter, that states, "I had sex with Abraham Lincoln" last night. So instead, such historian implements their gaydar, i.e., they look at things, at situations, at men, with a sense of who is gay. They notice things that straight historians generally wouldn't and make inferences therefrom. They read the same source documents in a different way. They read between the lines of history, for this is generally where gay history is found. 

This is essentially was Kramer does in his book. He looks at sources differently from other historians, he sees things other historians don't, and ... he imagines. To me, in the end, this imagining is just as important as "hard evidence history." Why? Because it inserts, quite plausibly, gay men into standard historical tableaus in which they have been noticeably absent. It tells a story of men who were like me - and of millions of other men like me.

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Bus and a Gay Jew

They were on the bus when we got on at 24th and Castro in Noe Valley. But I didn't want to associate the Castro or Noe Valley with these women. So I thought of choosing the name of the street toward the end of the bus ride: the Divisadero Ladies Society. But they weren't ladies. (No, they weren't men in drag, either.) So I settled on the name, the "Sisterhood of the Traveling Bus."

I'm about to describe the one unsavory experience that Mark and I had during our recent trip to San Francisco. There were a lot of people on the bus when we boarded, and - a first - a transit cop was on board. When we stepped on, he motioned for us to wave our pass card in front of the beeper, then turned aside. We had a paper pass, which I made an effort to extract, but he was by then engaged in other matters, clearly not interested in whether we "beeped" or not.

We moved to the back of the bus and sat down. It wasn't long before we realized our mistake, for we were sitting in the midst of a half-dozen or so African-American women - some, like the one in front of us, quite large. Now, ordinarily I wouldn't have thought that a problem at all. But these women immediately started exchanging some of the most vulgar and unbelievably coarse comments I've ever heard (and I don't use the word "vulgar" lightly). 

As soon as the bus moved away from the stop, the conversation - which was very loud - turned to male genitalia ...

Meanwhile, I had gotten out the paperback book I've been reading entitled, An Underground Life, Memoirs of a Gay Jew in Nazi Berlin, by Gad Beck. I'm not sure now how I was led to this book. Considering the subject matter, it is fairly light in tone. I am sure this is due to the nature of the man Gad Beck was. In his memoirs, he writes about how he accepted his homosexuality at a young age as if it was the most natural thing in the world. And despite the time - the 30's - and the environment - Nazi Berlin - he appears to have been pretty open about his sexuality and fairly, shall we say, randy.

Gad Beck (right) and his first love, Manfred Lewin, who perished in a death camp.

But I wonder how many people - heterosexual or homosexual - would have had the courage to do what he did when he was only 18 year old in a detention center on Rosenstrasse in Berlin. He and his father had been rounded up in late winter/early spring of 1943. (Goebbels initiated his Factory Operation to rid Berlin of the last of the Jews as a birthday present to Hitler.) Beck quickly found a young man with whom he was simpatico. But then the boy's father pulled some strings and got himself and his son out. Beck then writes:

"After my young friend and his father had been released, I looked around for someone else I liked. My eye caught a really tall guy! I always managed to get close to him at night. When the lights were turned off, easily, effortlessly, we slid closer together. With so many people in one room the nights were anything but quiet anyway ... I refined my method of making love when there are other people sleeping in the same room. No one should notice, but satisfaction should be possible nevertheless. Affection, gentleness and letting go are the key words ..."

Beck's first love had been Manfred Lewin. He had been taken one day, along with Manfred's parents. Beck writes of an extraordinary scene when he learned what had happened. Manfred's two brothers, Schlomo and Rudi, having been at work during the round up were at the Lewin home and greeted Gad. They told him they planned to voluntarily join their parents in the morning. Beck wrote:

"The atmosphere within the Lewins' four empty walls was strangely mixed. I was in absolute despair, almost panic-stricken ... It was one of many goodbyes, and for me it was without a doubt the hardest of all ... I screamed and cried, and they couldn't calm me down. I hardly even registered that they were there until Schlomo took me in his arms to comfort me. He started to cry, too. What happened then was not all that surprising; we made love ... [H]e was facing an uncertain fate, and this was perhaps his last chance to experience closeness, unguarded and without danger. For me it was like a farewell from Manfred, a goodbye I never had the chance to say ... The graveness of the moment aroused a desperate passion in Schlomo and me."

Extraordinary. Powerful. Moving. And it involves two men.

I had read the above passages before getting on that bus in San Francisco. What I was trying to read while we were graced with the company of the Sisterhood of the Traveling Bus, came a few pages later, as their coarse comments about oral sex and ensuing laughter continued. Once we were actually down in the Castro and approaching Market Street, the subject shifted to gay men, or "little muscle boys" as one woman said. But their other comments were far, far worse, some of which involved "midgets." At length, the transit cop (who was also African American) turned to them and said, "Man, you ladies are vulgar!" (as in VULL-ger). They laughed even harder. Somewhat poignantly, one of the women said, "What do you expect? We don't have a life."

Meanwhile, my eyes bored into my book. The contrast between what I was reading and what I was hearing could not have been more surreal. 

Some time after he lost Manfred, Gad formed a relationship with another Jew in hiding, Zwi Abrahamssohn, pictured left. He too, was eventually rounded up, handed over by Jewish snatchers and tortured for information. Beck explains:

"When Zwi got arrested, I nearly lost my mind ... Little by little the noose was tightening around our necks. We had to find new hideouts, new ways to get food ... Berlin was getting increasingly dangerous for all of us, since the Gestapo was installing more and more Jewish snatchers. [Having read Harry Potter 7, I wondered if this is where J.K. Rowling got the inspiration for the snatchers in her novel.] One of the most notorious was ... Stella Goldschlag ... [who was] blackmailed [by the Gestapo] into working for them by threatening to send her parents ... to a concentration camp ... Stella quickly became a merciless perpetrator ... as she hunted down illegals and had them arrested, usually accompanied by her fellow snatcher Rolf Isaaksohn."

By then, we had crossed Market, gone over the hill and had veered onto Divisadero. I kept hoping that the women would get off the bus. They didn't. I kept hoping they would, frankly, shut up. They didn't. I kept wondering if we should get off and walk. We didn't. I didn't personally dislike those women. I did, however, strongly dislike hearing what they were saying. It wasn't a matter of "disapproval" in any way remotely relating to religion or "morality," though I have to admit that did briefly arise like bile. I felt sorry for them. I felt sorry that they, by their own admission, didn't "have a life." And I felt sorry that everyone else on the bus had to listen to them.

What made that experience more bearable for me was what I was reading. Despite the degrading atmosphere of that bus and the Sisterhood of the Traveling Bus, I felt inspired. I thought of how Gad and his groups of friends, despite the degrading and degraded world in which they lived, found love, courage and hope. They, in spite of everything, "had a life."

New Year's Resolutions: Cooking, Skiing, Gay History and Mark's History

Mark's drawing of me, made this past fall, that he gave me for Christmas

I have never been one for New Year's resolutions. I always pooh-poohed them, and upon reflection I think this was in large part due to the fact that for so many years, my goal was simply to stay on the bucking bull that was my life. This year, however, it's different. I *think* I have finally gotten to a place where I feel I am in a position to actually shape my life through thoughtful resolution, rather than simply reacting to it.

So, I have several things I want to undertake in the coming year, and perhaps going public with these resolves will help me keep mine.

Resolution #1: Cooking

I have never been a cook. For many years of my adult like, I didn't need to because my ex-wife was good at cooking and enjoyed it. Game. Set. Match. Nor was I even inclined to attempt something because I couldn't stand the stress of trying to do so while the kitchen was full of children. Let's say I never experienced the "joy of cooking."

Mark is not really a cook, either, although he's way, way ahead of me. Because neither one of us particularly liked to cook, however, we have relied heavily on Mother Kirkland (Costco) and salads. 

One of the reasons I never even attempted to find the "joy of cooking" was that my mental construct was such that I had programmed myself to accept others' terms when it came to life in the kitchen. Those terms weren't for me. But the idea has only recently dawned upon me that I can, if I want, pursue learning how to cook on my own terms. Isn’t it true in life that so many problems are caused when someone tries to live his or her life according to someone else’s terms?

And so, I have set this resolution and I have started a new blog to chronicle my progress and what I am learning along the way. It is called "Out of the Closet and Into the Kitchen," and can be found at this link below. It's a lengthy name, but I think it's kinda catchy.

Out of the Closet and Into the Kitchen

Resolution #2: Skiing

Little Cottonwood Canyon on Christmas morning

This is the year. This is the year that I learn to both ski and to love it.

I was raised in southern Illinois. There are no mountains there. The first time I skied was my junior year in college when a group of guys in my fraternity went on a ski trip to the northern peninsula of Michigan. Over the next couple of years, I skied a few times then put away my (rented) skis in January of 1982 after skiing at Heavenly Valley at Lake Tahoe.

I didn't ski again until I went with my son and the deacons quorum to the bunny hill at Snowbird. That was approximately 2002. I didn't ski again until February of 2012. That was after I had met Mark - a lifelong skier. I went down the free run at Alta a few times that spring. 2013 wasn't much more promising for me. Then last year, I made a few more runs at Snowbird and had a fantastic day at Jackson Hole this past spring.

Mark gave me a midweek season pass at Alta for Christmas. This is the year. We went up Christmas morning and I knew this is the year. 

Resolution #3: Gay History

Statue of Antinous in the Vatican Museum

"A gay man seeks his history in mythic gradients, random as blocks of stone in the ruins covered in Greek characters, gradually being erased in the summer rain ... "

~ Paul Monette

This past fall, when Mark and I were touring the Vatican Museum, I heard the story of Antinous and Hadrian for the first time. The story of how the emperor of Rome fell in love with a young man. Then, we went to Greek Islands. I was introduced to a whole new world in many ways, and perhaps the most revelatory was learning about the Greek concept of male/male love.

I determined that I was going to learn more about "gay" history. I started by reading a book entitled Homosexuality and Civilization by professor Louis Compton. My eyes were opened to a world I never knew existed. I highly recommend this book.

I'm also reading about modern gay history. I recently started an AIDS memoir entitled Borrowed Time, by Paul Monette and read the other day about Paul and his partner Roger visiting Greece for the first time after the epidemic had begun.

Just recently, I have read some passages in a book I am now reading that spoke of this introduction to classical Greece. It resonated with me and my experience there this past September:

"I realize I'm hardly the first to feel it, any more than Byron was, but the moment we set foot in Greece I was home free. Impossible to measure the symbolic weight of the place for a gay man. We grew up with glints and evasions in school about the homoerotic side [of Greek history/culture], but if you're alone and think you're the only one [queer] in the world, the merest glimpse is enough ... But you find that your first bewildered erotic connection at fourteen stays with you, since most of the rest of gay history lies in shallow bachelors' graves [emphasis added] ...  

"A gay man seeks his history in mythic gradients, random as blocks of stone in the ruins covered in Greek characters, gradually being erased in the summer rain ... [Monette writes of visiting Akrotiri, an archeological site on the southern end of Santorini, a site Mark and I visited in September:] They had ... a gymnasium with an outdoor court at the tip of the bluff where the boys danced naked to Apollo. There are inscriptions along the walls, erotic poems to the boys, though the guidebook wouldn't recite a single line ..."

2015 is my year for learning more about gay history and writing about it.

Resolution #4: Writing Mark's History

I am about to embark on a fabulous journey into the story of my husband's life. From the work I have already done on it, I know that I am in for a metaphysical experience. By the end of 2015, I will have written the story of Mark's life to date, and I will be a changed man.

Bring it on.

Same-Sex Marriage in 16th Century Rome

I have been reading a fascinating book entitled, Homosexuality and Civilization, by Professor Louis Compton. I have previously considered blogging about passages of the book; but I read something yesterday that I decided I had to blog about. In concerns an event that occurred in 1578 in Rome.

During the papacy of Pope Gregory XIII (who reformed the calendar and also hounded and burned "sodomites" with a vengeance), the Venetian ambassador to the papal court wrote in a dispatch in 1578:

"Eleven Portuguese and Spaniards have been captured. They had assembled in a church near Saint John Lateran where they had performed some ceremonies ... which sullied the sacred name of matrimony, marrying each other and being joined together as husband and wife. Twenty-seven or more, it is said, were discovered altogether on other occasions, but at this time they were not able to capture more than this eleven, who were given the fire as they deserved."

Another account was written by French writer Michel de Montaigne upon visiting Rome two-three years later. His Travel Journal confirms, as Compton writes, "that the ceremonies were conducted in full seriousness and were an attempt, however foolhardy, to give dignity to relationships the men took seriously. Montaigne wrote:

" ... [At the Church of] San Gionanni Porta Latina [pictured above], in which church a few years before certain Portugese had entered into a strange brotherhood. They married one another, male to male, at Mass, with the same ceremonies with which we perform our marriage services, the same marriage gospel service, and then went to bed and lived together. The Roman wits said that because in the other conjunction, of male with female, this circumstance alone makes it legitimate, it had seemed to these sharp folk that this other action would become equally legitimate if they authorized it with ceremonies and mysteries of the Church. Eight or nine Portuguese of this fine sect were burned."

The story behind this event would make a fascinating read. Obviously at least one priest was involved to say mass and perform the marriages. These men almost certainly knew that they would - if discovered - be burned. Why did they do it? Did someone betray them?  Herein lies a tale worthy of being written about.

My Chance Encounter With André Gide

Who is André Gide? I had known of him, yet not known him. I had heard of him, but not heard of him. Why? How? Because of quotes from his writings that had been scattered upon my way since coming out. Yet I knew him not; he was just someone whose name was at the end of a quote. 

The other day, however, I chanced upon a website which had as it's banner the following quote by Gide:

"It is only in adventure that some people succeed in knowing themselves - in finding themselves."

I was intrigued. Who was André Gide? Turns out he was a French novelist and essayist, that he was gay, that he was friends with, among others, Oscar Wilde, and that he was the first openly gay man to win the Noble Prize for Literature.

As I poked around the Internet and learned a bit more about him, I came across this quote which in a way summarizes the process of coming out of the closet:

"It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not."

These are very, very powerful words with which I was familiar from my early blogging as Invictus Pilgrim. 

I had also run across this quote:

"Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore."

Now that I knew a little bit about the man who wrote these words, I wanted to learn more. His writing, as I became more exposed to it, reminded me of works of French existentialists that I had read in college. Upon Googling, I see that he was indeed considered a forerunner of existentialist thought.

Then the conundrum: where to start learning more about him. I decided to begin with his work Autumn Leaves. I can tell I'm in for a feast. The following are some of the selected quotes set forth in the introduction to the book:

"Be faithful to that which exists nowhere but in yourself - and thus make yourself indispensable."

"Sin is whatever obscures the soul."

"Dare to be yourself."

"Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it."

"Nothing prevents happiness like the memory of happiness."

"The color of truth is grey."

"The scholar seeks, the artist finds."

"Do not do what someone else could do as well as you. Do not say, do not write what someone else could say, could write as well as you."

I can hardly wait to begin reading, then writing about what I read.

Florence: A Pilgrimage and an Awakening

We left our inn in the via Urbana at 6:45 a.m. and made our way to the taxi stand at the foot of Santa Maria Maggiore. We had flown to Rome from Athens the previous afternoon and were now setting out on a day trip to Florence. The taxi took us to Tiburtina train station where we boarded a fast train to Florence at 7:25. An hour and a half later, after zipping through the Italian countryside at speeds up to 250 kilometers per hour, we arrived at our destination.

I had wanted to return to Florence since the last time I was there - in the spring of 1982. My traveling companion and I had hoped to visit museums there, but we had arrived late on a Sunday afternoon and were leaving 24 hours later on an overnight train to Zurich. To our chagrin, we learned that all museums are closed on Monday. Thus, I missed my opportunity to see Michelangelo's colossal David.

Like viewing the Parthenon and the Acropolis, seeing the David was one of those things I had dreamed about for over 30 years but never expected to experience. Our recent trip provided the opportunity I had been hoping for.

Eliza and Mark

Our guide for the morning, Eliza, met us at the train station. She was a vivacious young woman, Romanian by birth, who is extremely knowledgeable and obviously passionate about art and her adopted city of Firenze (Florence). She was not the sort of guide who rattled over facts and figures, but her deep knowledge of art, history and literature informed everything she showed and told us.

Since the primary reason for our visit to Florence was to see the David, that was our first destination. We hadn't reserved tickets because we thought we'd probably go in the afternoon. Eliza thought the lines would be shorter in the morning, so we went and she was able to get us in fairly quickly.

My first glimpse of the David

When I turned the corner in the Accademia Museum and saw the statue at the end of the gallery, it took my breath away. It was difficult at first for me to listen to Eliza as she talked about Michelangelo and his unfinished "Prisoner" statues that sit on either side of the gallery as one approaches the David. Finally, I had to go take a picture of Michelangelo's masterpiece, then rejoin Eliza and Mark.

Among other things, Eliza spoke about Michelangelo's sexuality, i.e., the fact that he was a lover of men and the male form. I commented that many, many people are either ignorant of this or choose to explain it away or outright deny it. Eliza looked at me in mild astonishment. "But surely everyone knows he loved men. It is widely known and accepted as fact in the art world." Michelangelo was not, so to speak, the man presented in Irving Stone's best-selling novel of a couple of generations ago, The Agony and the Ecstasy.

Not for the first time on our trip, I was inspired to learn more about Michelangelo, about his private life and about his love for particular men in his life. Eliza recommended a book to us, then realized it is written in Italian. She then suggested another book which is currently winging its way to me from Amazon.

So much of what we know today about gay history has been buried under decades and centuries of shame, disgust and distaste. Michelangelo's family, for example, doctored many of his sonnets so that it appeared he had written them to women. Almost three centuries would go by before the sonnets were retranslated and their original intended recipients, men, became known to the world at large. Even then, however, many still argue that Michelangelo's love for and of men was platonic and not sexual.

Beyond this, to the extent that it is acknowledged that certain historical men engaged in sex with other men, it is still not generally perceived and appreciated that men loved other men, i.e., they were in love with other men. In other words, it wasn't and isn't all about sex. Even today, many cannot conceive that there is anything more to homosexual love than sex.

Of course, there is often no way to *prove* this for the simple reason that, with certain exceptions and for obvious reasons, prominent men did not leave behind evidence of their love for other men. But bits and pieces of surviving historical facts and evidence can, in the hands of a skilled and sensitive writer, be woven into a plausible story of the love that can and did exist between two men.

I was fortunate while we were in Rome touring the Vatican Museum to learn more about the love between the Roman emperor Hadrian and his lover, Antinous. For any gay readers of this post, I would highly recommend a well-researched novel that I devoured while we on our cruise, The Hadrian Enigma, by George Gardiner. This book is both a historical whodunit and an exploration of the love between Hadrian and Antinous. While the historicity of Antinous and of Hadrian's love for him is well-established, Gardiner puts "flesh to the bones" of historical fact.

I just finished reading another exploration of the love that existed between men in ancient times. This book, Song of Achilles, an award-winning novel by Madeline Miller about the love between Achilles and Patroclus of Iliad fame. I highly recommend it. I freely admit that I came very close to tears during the climactic chapters and I was deeply impressed by the closing scenes, which were emblematic of what I've been writing about in this post.

Achilles and Patroclus both die outside the walls of Troy. This is well-known by anyone who has read the Iliad. In the novel, a huge monument is erected to Achilles by his young son, but there is no mention of Patroclus, even though their ashes are - at Achilles' request - buried in the same urn. The novelist - I won't say how - causes this to be rectified: eventually, Patroclus' name is inscribed beside that of the love of his life, Achilles.

So much of (gay) history is like that, i.e., the romantic love that existed between men is ignored, lost, buried. Works like the Song of Achilles restore that love to its proper place.

Our trip to Florence was a pilgrimage for me to stand in the presence of Michelangelo's masterpiece, which for me was far more than a work of art. Beyond the perfection of statue's proportions, beyond the vitality that even now after 500 years bursts forth out of the marble, beyond the exquisite beauty of David, beyond all of this and more is what the statue represents to me: the love of one man for another. (Remember that David loved Jonathan with his whole heart.)

This pilgrimage awakened something inside of me that had been stirring since seeing the statue of Antinous in the Vatican Library: a desire to read and write about books that bring to life a history that has been buried for centuries and even millennia, the stories of the love that existed between men.

(BTW: I took all of the pictures in this post except the one of Mark and me.)

Rome: The Vatican, Art and Antinous

Yes, I took the lead photo for this post near the steps of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome of a young Swiss Guard. It serves as a fitting lead-in to the story of our visit to the Vatican yesterday morning.

I am a gay man. There have been gay men (and women) that have existed since time immemorial. Their history, however, has been consigned, generally speaking, to the dust bin of history. Hidden. Unspoken. Just as most gay men's lives have been up until fairly recently.

There are, however, a few exceptions to this rule. One of them is the tale of Antinous and the Emperor Hadrian.

I wouldn't have thought of this but for a casual mention yesterday by our guide, Fabio, an art-historian-turned-guide, who unfolded for us the back stories of the Vatican, the popes and ancient Rome and Greece.

Mark and Fabio.

But I'm getting a bit ahead of my story. 

I had booked a tour with Fabio through "Tours by Locals." I would highly recommend this site / service that we first used during our trip to Japan a year ago. Fabio is an art historian with degrees in art history from universities here in Rome. He speaks perfect English and was able to flawlessly describe for us the historical and artistic background of what we saw at the Vatican yesterday morning. He also appeared to be well-known to the personnel at the Vatican Museum. We were escorted past lines of waiting patrons right into the museum by a uniformed gentleman whose name was probably "Rocky." He kinda looked a little like Sylvester Stallone. And there were other times when fleeting looks of recognition seemed to pass between museum personnel and Fabio.

I found it interesting to watch the various tour groups that were everywhere. Groups of people with identical headsets following their guide who carried a stick with a flag on the end. Obviously, I much preferred our arrangement. We asked Fabio at one point if he found it difficult working with all kinds of people on an almost daily basis. "Sometimes," he frankly replied, "it is difficult. For example, I recently worked with a couple from New York who were like characters out of a Woody Allen movie." We later found out that they had arranged to take a *private* tour of the Vatican Archives. Not only did they have their own guide, but they had paid 2000 Euros to the Vatican for the privilege of taking a tour of the entire museum after hours.

But, again, I get ahead of my story.

We left our inn (marked above at Via Urbana 156) at 8:00 yesterday morning for (what I thought was) the 45-minute walk across Rome to the Cafe Vaticano where we were to meet Fabio at 8:50. It was a beautiful morning. A cloudless, blue sky. Brilliant. On the way, we passed by ruins near the Forum and by the Victor Emmanuel II monument, a tribute to the man who united the Italian states in the 19th century.

We quickened our pace as I kept an eye on my watch. We walked down Corso Vittorio Emanuele II toward a tiny street, Borgo San Spirito, that would lead us across the Pont San Angelo to the other side of the Tiber, in the face of the Castel Sant' Angelo, stronghold of popes.

Castel Sant' Angelo

St. Peter's, looking up the Via della Conciliazione

Somewhere along the Via della Conciliazione, it became apparent that we were likely going to be late. We quickened our pace even more and arrived at the Cafe Vaticano just at 9:00, where we met Fabio. Then across the street to the entrance of the Vatican Museum, being whisked through the entrance by "Sylvester" (described above) and on into the museum.

The "pigna" (pinecone) in the Belvedere Courtyard that dates to the first century. It used to be a fountain and stood near the Pantheon until moved.

The best investment we made in the Rome leg of our trip was hiring Fabio. Neither Mark nor I are "museum people" in that we can quickly tire of the museum experience. This didn't happen yesterday. We were held captivated as Fabio explained the history and context of various works of art, the popes who commissioned them and little background details that he wove into a larger story. He knew - as did we - that we couldn't hope to take in every single work during the 3-1/2 hours that we spent with him. Thus, he guided us through, stopping to answer our questions, pacing the tour.

He also told us things about Vatican City that we wouldn't have known as well as confirmed a rumor that is only known in the United States in a few circles. It was an open secret in Rome, Fabio said, that Pope Benedict is gay and that his German-Archbishop Secretary, Georg Gänswein, who lives with Benedict in his retirement, is his boyfriend.

Archbishop Georg Gänswein 

But I digress ... sort of.

I was grateful for the reading I had done in the past six months that helped give context and texture to what we were seeing. I got about two-thirds of the way through The Agony and the Ecstasy last spring and recently completed Basilica (by R.A. Scotti), a book I recommend about the saga of the building of St. Peter's. This reading, along with watching some episodes of The Borgias (the Showtime series starring Jeremy Irons - which Fabio mentioned during our tour, saying he considered it an accurate portrayal of that period), prepared me well for what I saw and heard yesterday morning.

I had learned, for example, a fair bit about Giuliano della Rovere who became Pope Julius II, the man who began the construction of St. Peter's Basilica and commissioned (ordered) Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. He was a collector of ancient Roman statues, and it was he who brought his collection to the Villa Belvedere, including: the Apollo of Belvedere, pictured above, which was rediscovered in central Italy in the late 15th century; the statue of Laocoön and His Sons, pictured below, which was rediscovered underneath a vineyard outside of Rome in 1506; and the "Belvedere Torso," which is pictured below the Laocoön detail.

Detail of a floor mosaic that had been moved from a Roman bath to what is now the Vatican Museum. Note the three-dimensional perspective of the meander. The ability to create perspective in art was lost until rediscovered in the Renaissance.

Eventually we moved into the Raphael Rooms, two adjoining rooms that feature frescos painted by the Renaissance wonder child, Raphael. I remember visiting these rooms in 1982 with my friend, Joe. He was an architecture student and knew a lot about what we were looking at, and I benefitted from that. Similarly, we benefitted yesterday from Fabio's knowledge.

Of all the frescos, I was most struck by the "Mass at Bolsena," pictured above (Internet photo). From Wikipedia, we learn that the following:

"The Mass at Bolsena depicts the story of a Bohemian priest who in 1263 ceased to doubt the doctrine of Transubstantiation when he saw the bread [host] begin to bleed during its consecration at Mass. The cloth that was stained by the blood was held as a relic at the nearby town of Orvieto; Julius II had visited Orvieto and prayed over the relic in 1506.[3] The Pope is portrayed as a participant in the Mass and a witness to the miracle; he kneels to the right of the altar, with members of the Curia (also portraits) standing behind him. Raphael distinguishes the "real" thirteenth-century witnesses from those who are contemporaries of the pope by their degree of engagement in the event; the latter concentrate calmly on Julius kneeling at his devotions rather than responding to the miracle."

What I found striking about this fresco is that all of the faces are looking at the altar except one, that of a Swiss guard in the lower right-hand corner. Here are a couple of detail photos that I took:

The proportions are a bit off because I was standing on the floor and the fresco is higher up on the wall. Below is a photo I found on the Internet that depicts the scene in better proportion. (Note as well the striking difference in the colors between the pictures I took and the ones from the Internet. I can only assume that the frescos have been restored in the relatively recent past.)

The young Swiss guard, who bears a striking resemblance to the one pictured in the lead photo, seems to be looking directly at the artist or at the viewer. I can only wonder what the story behind that might be ...

It then became time to go to the Sistine Chapel. Before entering (where talking is, strictly speaking, forbidden), Fabio took us aside and explained some things about both the ceiling and the "Last Judgment," each painted by Michelangelo but approximately three decades apart from one another. I had visited the Chapel in 1982, but that was before the frescos were restored. Yesterday, I was able to see them in all their original vivid colors. Of course, the place was crammed with tourists, but just being in that room, where so much history has taken place, was special.

Thence on to the Basilica. Again, my reading stood me in good stead, as it had in the Sistine Chapel. We could have been easily swamped, overwhelmed by all the art and history in the church; but as with the rest of our tour, we took it all in generally, not particularly. When I was here in 1982, my friend Joe had gone into great detail about the building of the dome, what a feat it was, and other aspects of the church's architecture. 

One interesting factoid from yesterday was that only popes who have achieved sainthood are allowed to be buried on the main floor of the basilica. When John Paul II was made a saint, his body was moved up to a side chapel from the crypt below the church. Another factoid was that is believed (by some, apparently) that the body of John XXIII (who called the Second Vatican Council and died in 1963) has remained uncorrupted. It is on display much as an embalmed person might be (e.g., Lenin; see picture from Internet below), but the claim is that no chemicals have been used to preserve the body. 

Now, back to the opening paragraphs of this post and to the subject of gay history.  One of the statues we saw in the same room as the Belvedere Apollo was that of Antinous, pictured below.

Antinous was a youth from Turkey who became the lover of the Roman Emperor Hadrian (think Hadrian's Wall in Britain and the Pantheon in Rome). I had run across this story before, but seeing his statue reminded me of the intensity of the love between Hadrian and Antinous and the deification that evolved after Antinous' untimely drowning in the River Nile. Ancient contemporary sources make it quite clear what kind of relationship they had. Hadrian mourned Antinous' death bitterly and founded a city in Egypt to honor his memory.

The only surviving painted image of Antinous. It is interesting to note the resemblance to the Swiss Guard in Raphael's fresco (discussed above) and - though admittedly a bit of a stretch, to the Swiss Guard whose picture I took outside St. Peter's Basilica.

The story of Hadrian and Antinous is just one of many stories of same-sex love that is little-known in the world today. What we now call homosexuality (a term invented in the 19th century) has always been present in recorded history, but it has rarely been recorded.

Today, it's off to the Forum and Colosseum this afternoon after a lazy morning. Tomorrow, we head for Athens.