Classical Antiquity and Modern Gay Counterculture

This talk explores how the gay underground came into contact with the typically establishmentarian field of classics.

It will investigate the ways in which a series of gay male writers, filmmakers, performance artists, and activists working in the US and UK from the late 1970s to the mid 2000s subverted classical antiquity by presenting it as a dangerous terrain reminiscent of their own physical, economic, and political precarity. In particular, the talk will examine how William S. Burroughs incorporated writings by the ancient Greek and Roman historians into his own form of historiography, which he termed a 'magical theory of history', in his last three novels, the Red Night Trilogy, published at the beginning years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

Tom Sapsford is Visiting Assistant Professor of Classical and Medieval Studies at Bates College, Maine. He has published on dancers in Greco-Roman Egypt, contemporary dance adaptations of Homer’s Odyssey, and gender ambiguity in Powell and Pressburger’s film, The Tales of Hoffmann. Prior to working in academia, he was a professional dancer and choreographer.