Did the closet exist in ancient times?
Did the Closet Exist in Antiquity?
The obvious answer is “Yes.” But one must follow up with, “What were they consigning to the closet?” Or really, the cedar chest. (Ancients didn’t have actual closets.)
As I’ve iterated here and elsewhere, and as has become somewhat common knowledge for those familiar with the ancient world, “sexuality” wasn’t a concept then, so terms like gay, lesbian, or bisexual (much less the rest of the queer alphabet) are anachronistic. This is where the past really is a different country.
We create ways of parsing our reality, some so basic and deep, we literally can’t see over the rim. I call this our “historicity.” We’re EMBEDDED in our world, and frame that world by a given language … so it’s hard to imagine a way of seeing that’s so radically different.
Let’s not talk about “sexuality”—let’s talk about race. There’s another concept the ancients didn’t (and did) have. As SOON as you start talking about race here in the West, our history of the Atlantic slave trade makes it impossible to pull race apart from skin color. Ergo, ancient historians tend to prefer the term “ethnicity.” Skin color was assumed, bundled into ethnicity, and generic distinctions of “white” and “black” are ahistorical. We must seriously question if the ancient Greeks, or Romans, would have called themselves “white.” (Hint: no, they wouldn’t.) But that’s far from saying they weren’t aware of what we call “racial” differences, or that they didn’t assign quite negative views to “barbarians,” or that they didn’t use racial ideas of superiority and inferiority to justify slavery. Thank Aristotle for scientific racism, although he just codified ideas already popular in philosophic and medical thought.
So were the ancient Greeks and Romans racist? You bet your sweet patootie, they were! But it meant something different … even as it didn’t. It’s twisted from what we expect.
Similarly, while they had no concept we’d translate as “sexuality,” they did seem to recognize some people largely preferred one sex … and that was weird.
The ancients viewed sex, marriage, mistresses, flings…all constrained by 1) a person’s status (which included gender), and 2) a person’s age. And to complicate it further, how different societies arranged those pieces according to status and age varied. So what a citizen male in Athens could do without raising eyebrows was different from what a citizen male in Sparta or Thebes could do … never mind a citizen male in Rome.
But, basically, if you acted in a way that didn’t fit the norms for your society—and you didn’t want laughed out of town—then…you pursued your preferences on the down-low. E.g., the closet.
Yet what all these ancient societies held in common was the notion that they could decide how to act. “Orientation” wasn’t some inborn aspect of personality. Ergo, if you behaved outside what was proper to your station, that was a deep moral flaw, because you chose to act so.
You can see why explaining this can feel threatening to the LGBTQI+ community because we work hard to be understood as fundamentally who we are. If we “choose” it, then we can “unchoose” it, which brings up such nasties as conversion therapy, denial of trans identities, etc. If we admit maybe the ancients just didn’t see it the same way we do, it raises the possibility that … we’re wrong.
So I get why this is a deeply uncomfortable question. The best we can do is say, “There were individuals we hear about who seem to fit a description moderns would call ‘gay,’ ‘trans,’ ‘ace,’ etc.”
Take Agathon the Tragedian. He seems to have been gay and possibly genderfluid (or even transfemme). Yet we’re guessing based on accounts of his behavior…some of which were hostile. Aristophanes portrays him as wearing women’s clothes in the Thesmophoriazousai. To dress like a woman was BAD … but did he really do that, and was made fun of for it, or is this Aristophanes way of mocking him?
THERE’S the conundrum: how do we mediate—fairly—the intersection of modern gender discussion versus ancient insults? Have we over-credited such accounts, assuming they reflect actual behavior? Or do we dismiss them too quickly as “clear caricature”?
There’s not an easy answer, and to suggest otherwise just makes you look foolish.
Yet Agathon was talented, wealthy, and famous enough to give the middle finger to convention. At the very least, we know he lived (in exile in Macedonia) with his life-long lover Pausanias. That’d be scandalous enough. But if he were also genderfluid or trans, and occasionally wore a peplos as an expression of it? There’s insufficient (trustworthy) evidence.
Problem: what does it MEAN for a man to wear women’s clothing? After all, we see Dionysos wearing the peplos (a woman’s garment). Yet—of note—Dionsysos was far from the “gay god.” He has almost NO male-male sexual encounters in myth.
No, really. He doesn’t.
So why is he often depicted as quite feminine and wearing women’s clothing?
He spent all his time with women.
Not what you were expecting, right? “You are who you have sex with.” So a strictly heterosexual man who just can’t stay away from the ladies will start to dress and act like them.
THERE’S a twist on modern expectations!
REMEMBER: the past is a foreign country. The most feminine male god in ancient Greece was also one of the most heterosexual.
Think about that a moment.
What IF our modern understandings are as culturally bound as those in the ancient world? What IF our alphabet soup simply serves us currently, and can’t be assumed to be “eternal”?
I know—radical. Anathema. Did I lose my queer card by suggesting it?
But our modern conceptions change, and rapidly. When I was young in the early ‘80s, our terminology was simpler, then came AIDS, but even into the ‘90s, LGBT was the norm, then we got the Q, and it evolved from there. I’ve had to learn new words. I’m okay with that. Because we evolve, and how we talk about ourselves evolves.
My point is that, in the ancient world, there was no clear definition of what “the closet” meant. What was acceptable changed, depending on one’s culture, social status, and the time period. We can’t even be sure what wearing women’s clothes meant. For Dionysos, it meant he was too much like a woman because he mostly spent time with women, and mostly had sex with women. But for Agathon in Aristophanes, wearing women’s clothing seems to have signified that he was still playing the “beloved” (passive partner) long past the age when such became inappropriate...making him "like a woman."
So how can we even pretend to talk about the men, women, and neither/both who weren’t famous and rich enough (like Agathon) to be remembered in our historical record, however confusing that record might be?
(And as I've said elsewhere, somebody really needs to write an historical novel about Agathon. Beautiful One has a semi-Agathon-like main character, and while it's not nearly as anachronistic as some m/m historical romances, it has problems. I'd like to see Agathon and Pausanias done right.)
