tour group with HA e1454972497183 scaled
February 8, 2016 No Comments  

Gay History In Greece

Since I wrote my blog post last week about my gay history explorations, people have been asking me to say something more about gay history in Greece. And this is very much on my mind, as I am leading Oscar Wilde Tours’ gay history and art tour in Greece in only 3 or 4 months (https://www.oscarwildetours.com/gay-greece-travel-tours/)!

Greece is of course one of the great countries for gay history, because some form or forms of same-sex love were customary in the ancient Greek world.  And lots of evidence remains—if you know where to look!

Paris Louvre Antinous Mondragone 1 e1449877728451
December 10, 2015 No Comments  

Gay History and Art in Paris–and the Louvre

Last month I was in Paris to do some research for our gay history and art tour of London and Paris tour in this coming August, and wow did I hit gold. We had always planned on including a tour of the Louvre: several local guides offer a tour of the Louvre following the theme of male beauty through the collection, and we intended to have one of them do that for us.

group photo paestum
October 24, 2015 No Comments  

Gay history and art tour of Italy launched!

For a couple of days, I’ve been thinking I need to write a summary blog post about the first gay history and art tour of Italy. But how to talk about 10 intense days of touring? Should I talk about the people? I’d have to ask for everyone’s permission to tell you about the fascinating cast of characters; but I can tell you that it was a very lively group and gratified me in particular by how well they got along. I remember how happy I was when I passed the bar at our gorgeous hotel overlooking the bay of Sorrento and saw them all having drinks together. It was that way right until the last breakfast. 

Villa Lysis
October 5, 2015 1 Comment  

Gay History on Capri

Our gay history and art tour of Italy is starting in 5 days, so I’m in Italy making a few last-minute arrangements.  And in the meantime, I’m doing a bit of gay history exploration–today an exploration of gay Capri.  I went out to Capri mainly to look into the ruins of Emperor Tiberius’ villa.   Tiberius, Augustus’ stepson and successor, has a miserable reputation.  The main problem seems to be that he hated being Emperor; plus he didn’t have much charisma–and Augustus was a hard act to follow.  In the end, he retired to a villa on Capri for the last ten years of his reign.  Frankly, my suspicion is that like Greta Garbo, he wanted to be alone.  

John William Waterhouse The Remorse of the Emperor Nero after the Murder of his Mother
August 19, 2015 No Comments  

Nero’s Palace and Rome’s Gay History

Who was Rome’s gayest Emperor?  That’s a tough one.  There were rumors about almost every Emperor:  Julius Caesar’s soldiers for instance joshingly called him “the husband of every wife and the wife of every husband.”  One of the top competitors, however, is certainly Nero, who was said among other things to have married two of his male slaves:

Wurzburg515
July 31, 2015 1 Comment  

Gay Heroes of Ancient Greece

Check out my latest blogpost for the Gay and Lesbian Review.  It’s about Harmodius and Aristogeiton.  Along with Achilles and Patroclus in the Iliad (whom the ancient Greeks mostly saw as a couple), Harmodius and Aristogeiton were the biggest gay heroes of ancient Greece .  Harmodius and Aristogeiton were a Greek-style male-male couple, who assassinated Hipparchus, brother of the Athenian tyrant Hippias.  This may have been a private act of revenge, and it happened more than ten years before the end of the tyranny.  But the Athenians thought of them as the founders of the democracy.  Their story shows how different cultural attitudes toward gay love can be.  The Athenians wanted a male-male couple to have founded the democracy, because they considered a certain kind of male-male love the ideal matrix for courage and loyalty to your fellow soldier!

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May 30, 2015  

Gay Italy tour in October 2015!

Here’s a blog post that I wrote last week for the Gay and Lesbian Review about our gay Italy tour. The GLR has decided to recommend our tour to their readers; the Leslie Lohman Museum will also recommend us to their members soon. These are institutions of which I think very highly, so I am thrilled to have won their good opinion!

New York City metropolitan museum of art
February 26, 2015  

LGBT tour of the Metropolitan Museum!

Amazing: it’s only 6 months since we decided to start New York gay history tours, and it’s already happening. Last Friday evening, I gave our first gay history tour on US soil:   a preview of our LGBT tour of the Metropolitan Museum, given for a gay college alumni group.

christopher street west village
January 26, 2015  

First ever gay history tours of New York!

This week Oscar Wilde Tours is announcing its 2015 season, including the first ever gay history tours of New York City.  Who’d have thought?  Until just a few months ago, I was planning to start a series of gay history tours of London and Paris this year.  But people kept asking, When are you going to do New York? So after a while, I thought, Well, New York certainly has a ton of gay history, so let’s see what we can do at home!

Village Stonewall nyc oscar wilde
December 23, 2014  

Gay history in New York

In the last few weeks, I’ve been planning a gay history tour of New York for the spring for Oscar Wilde Tours. New York is truly one of the great gay cities, along with London, Paris, Berlin, Florence, or Athens. Ever since the days before the Civil War, when Walt Whitman hung out with his Bohemian friends at Pfaff’s Beer Cellar at Broadway and Bleecker, it has been a major center of gay life.