Hollywood goes to Ancient Rome!

[ihno]

(...)

 

[gorgik9]

This scene brings back the wonderful doentary "The celluloid closet", which had been posted here a while ago. There is also the gay Hollywood-author Gore Vidal speaking, telling about the Hayes-Code you mention:
http://www.gayheaven.org/showthread.php?t=420935&highlight=celluloid

But I don't think that "modern viewers" of 1960 automatically understood or would have understood the subtext of the scene. Sometimes not even the actors got it.

Gore Vidal described how they made Charlton Heston play a scene with a homosexual subtext. They could not tell him because Heston would have refused. But the other actor knew and according to Vidal the scene came out just wonderful.

So a Hollywood movie of 1960 about Rome tells us more about 1960 or the mind of authors of that time but only little about Rome.

I totally agree about the doentary, which I actually think is better than Vito Russo's book which it's based upon!!!

But there's a couple of slight mistakes in your post:
1) The official name of the code was exactly as I wrote: the Production Code, which was administered through what was popularly called Hays Office, but more formally MPPDA (Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America). This office was founded and opened 1922 with Will Hays - former Postmaster General in Warren Hasting's cabinet - as its first director.

Hays wrote a series of moral rules - informally named Hays Do's-and-Don'ts - which MPPDA administered to the film producers in Hollywood, but it was quite ineffective in changing the moral standards of the movies. This was because Hays accepted almost any amount of smut and immorality in the first four acts of the film, as long as the sinners were punished in the fifth act. And the grandmaster of tricking Hays and MPPDA was Cecil B. DeMille.

But things changed radically when Hays wrote and distributed the Production Code in 1934, with catholic layman Joseph Breen in charge of the actual detail censoring. Some wit described the Production Code as Catholic Theology censoring an industry dominated by Jewish business men, and with a predominantly Protestant audience.

The Production Code wasn't finally repealed until 1966.

2) Gore Vidal wasn't involved in Spartacus (1960), but in Ben-Hur (1959) with Charleton Heston as Judah Ben-Hur.

Weather an audience in 1960 could or couldn't understand the snails-and-oysters dialogue, well, they never got a chance to test their intelligence.

But the censors understood, the movie company executives understood and so on.

 

[ihno]

(...)

 

[garth33]

This thread is making me hungry...

g

 

[gorgik9]

OK, I'll try to post but you never know what's gonna happen since the forum is in such a grumpy mood, but here we go...

First some preliminaries: This post is not about Roman attitudes to homosexuality or sexual orientation in general. It's about Roman sexuality. Even if homosexuality as an adjective talking about actions and desires wouldn't be too problematic, homosexual as a noun denoting a person is the total dead end. Using homosexual (or heterosexual or bisexual) as a noun denoting persons is probably the best way to make sure that you'll never understand Roman sexuality.

The Roman sexual vocabulary is constructed from the point of view of the male roman citizen expressing what scholar Amy Richlin called the Priapic masculinity, baptized after the god Priapus and meaning, that you must always be prepared to sexually penetrate, but you yourself must never let someone else penetrate you. So always penetrate, but never get penetrated - Priapic masculinity.

Roman sexual vocabulary is very rich, much richer not only compared to modern European languages, but also compared to ancient Greek.

The important thing is a) that you distinguish between an insertive and a receptive role in penetration;
and that you distinguish b) between the main three bodily orifices.

So then we get this little tabula :
Insertive Receptive
Vaginal futuere crisare
Anal pedicare cevere
Oral irrumare fellare

The sex of the person you're penetrating is pretty much un-important, the really important thing is, that YOU'RE doing the penetration. So if you're a real pedicator that doesn't necessarily mean that you're into fucking boybutt, just that you're into buttfucking, and just as an irrumator is into mouthfucking.

But what if the unthinkable happens? What if you get penetrated, and probably more important - what if word goes around, what if there's a nasty rumour that you've gotten penetrated?

Well, then you'll probably get smeared with some very nasty words :
Impudicus means that you're a male Roman citizen who has been penetrated by another man, and pathicus could for most practical purposes be considered a synonym.

Cinaedus is something more funamental and complex. If you're habitually into letting other guys penetrate you, it's quite probable that you'll be named a cinaedus - but at rock bottom cinaedus was the name of a person with a fundamental flaw of the male character, of weakness and softness, and you're considered soft, mollis, if you've got a serious lack of self-control. This weakness could be expressed in the desire to letting others penetrate you, but not necessarily. So it's a big misunderstanding when cinaedus is considered a synonym to the modern homosexual.

There'll be a few more points on Roman sexuality in the next post and some comparing of Roman and Greek Sexuality. But let's hope that this post works now...

 

[gorgik9]

Let's do some analysis on a couple of lines of a particular Ancient Latin poem : Gajus Valerius Catullus (84 BCE-54BCE),Carmina no. 16, the first two lines.

Latin : Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo,

English trans: I'll fuck you in ass and mouth,

Note that in the english translation, there's a single verb ("fuck") but two objects ("ass" and "mouth"), while in the latin original we've got two very different verbs - "pedicabo" and "irrumabo". So we immediately encounter this particular richness of the latin sexual vocabulary - pedicabo isn't any old kind of fucking, it's buttfucking and nothing else.

Latin : Aureli pathice et cinaede Furi,

English trans: Aurelius you pathicus and you cinaedus Furius,

If Catullus succeed in butt-and-mouth fucking Aurelius and Furius, he will make them a pathicus and a cinaedus since he then has made them two penetrated male Roman citizen. So this famous/infamous poem by Catullus works precisely according to the particular logics of Roman sexuality I explained in the former post above.

But now it's time to complicate things quite a bit!

If you're a male Roman citizen, the only other Roman citizen you're supposed to have sex with is your wedded wife.

But doesn't that mean that the famous Priapic masculinity goes down the drain? No, it doesn't, since citizens weren't the only socio-political category in Rome. First of all - you've got all the slaves, and as a slave owner no one will ever care what you do with your own slaves, male or female, boy or girl. And to be a slave owner, you don't have to be particularly wealthy; most families had at least one or two household slaves.

And then there's the categories somewhere in between Roman citizens and slaves. As an example we could take freedmen, i.e. former slaves who for one or another reason has been set free by their former masters. Freedmen couldn't become citizens, but children of freedmen could.

Another example could be foreigners living in Rome.

And then of course there was always the brothels - the lupanar - with prostitutes of both sex.

Let's do some comparing between Roman and Greek sexual culture!

We'll start with the visual symbolism of the god Priapus, who was a god of Greek origins, but he didn't become truly important until he emigrated from Greece to Rome. Small statues and painted images of Priapus was very popular and here's a few examples:



But Romans didn't just like images of particular Gods with immense schlong's, the liked to look at pictures of ordinary humans with very big dicks :



Looking at images from archaic and classical period Greece, we see something different : Petite, slender and elegant willies are the model weather you look at young ephebes or mature bearded men.



But if you want to look at really big fat dicks, you'll have to look at subhuman mythological creatures such as silenes and satyrs:



Another important difference between Greece and Rome concerned the Greek ideal of paiderastheia, literally : the love of Boy's, involving a mature lover (erastes) and a young beloved boy (eromenos).

All this should occure in an educational context, and the boys were the sons of Greek citizens - and that's exactly what the Romans couldn't handle. You just don't fuck with the son of another Roman citizen.