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LGBT History Month Introduction · Lambda: the LGBT in Antiquity Podcast

• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: Hello everybody, and welcome to Lambda, the LGBT and Antiquity Podcast.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, Dominica Raven.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: October is LGBT History Month, and this is an LGBT history podcast.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: Therefore, throughout the month of October, we're planning a series of special episodes that are break from the usual formula to talk about LGBT history and antiquity.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: We hope you tune in for some of our episodes and join us for some of our discussions.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: This podcast started with a series of episodes diving into the Olympian gods throughout the Pantheon who can be interpreted through a queer lens.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: The idea was to work through these stories and different identities and see the way they're reflected in the gods themselves.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: You may have noticed that we didn't stop at gay and lesbian and bisexual, but work through the entire acronym.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: Well, last week we talked about Phanes, the agender, and that's kind of the end of the standard acronym.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: So now it is time to move on.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: Discussing the gods and divinities of the Greek and Roman world was an excellent way to begin the podcast.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: It allowed us to describe and engage with the ways that the Greeks and Romans understood and represented queer identities.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: Some of them were fairly obvious, like how Apollo has girlfriends and boyfriends, so Apollo clearly represents a bisexual orientation.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: Others required a bit of discussion to understand the deity outside of conventional interpretations of the identity, such as Hestia being an asexual, not out of filial piety, but because she was asexual and chose to live it out.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: Some examples were a bit more difficult as we could have interpreted Fanis as any number of queer identities, but used agender as the most accurate way to think about sex and gender before they were meaningful concepts in the universe.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: Throughout our discussion we've made it clear that we are perfectly capable of seeing these deities through a queer lens, and using that as a means of analyzing their position in the Pantheon.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: At no point has queer been a catch-all, one size fits all kind of category, so it makes sense to try to use these identities as part of an analytic method to better interpret each deity.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: Next Monday, the plan is actually to do a long-form reflection on this and that early phase of the show, and what we've learned and what we've described by engaging the gods in this way.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: Looking across the pantheon and exploring so many examples is actually beneficial because we are better able to understand their role when they reflect these identities.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: But then the rest of October is designed to shift to LGBT history, not necessarily the divine entities and religious abstractions, but the people living in antiquity.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: We hope to explore a few examples of the highs and lows that make studying the queer experience in antiquity very difficult, but very rewarding.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: These are not going to be deep dives into individual identities, but rather each episode is designed to explore individuals, groups, and institutions.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: Through these we can better understand the joy and love, as well as the pain and challenges that queer people faced.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: On International Lesbian Day, we're going to be discussing what exactly is Sapphic love in the context of antiquity.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: Sappho of Lesbos was renowned for writing poetry relating to the love between women, but that's not the entire story.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: Sappho references all sorts of love, including with her own brother and daughter.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: The lesbian poet definitely does reflect strong romantic affection for women, but sometimes surviving pieces of poetry describe affection for men as well.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: However, this is not necessarily all there is to it.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: Like many poets in the ancient world, Sappho was hired to write some works on commission for all sorts of events.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: For example, Sappho developed a reputation for writing excellent wedding songs.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: In the ancient tradition, all weddings would have had choruses of young women singing songs for the celebration.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: Some of these were simple praises of the bride and the groom, and some were actually ritual choral songs composed for this particular occasion.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: So when the poetic voice describes affection for a male, it may be somebody else's romance that is the subject of the poem.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: When Sappho does sing of male beauty, it's rarely the kind of conventional heteronormative praise of physical strength or masculine features.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: So what exactly is Sapphic love?
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: Spirit Day is a day to reflect on violence and bullying of queer individuals.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: For this episode, we're planning to describe the Senatus Consultium de Bacchanalebus in 186 BC.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: We've seen numerous times that Dionysus is anything except heteronormative.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: Their rituals are often encouragements to go and explore one's own gender and sexual identities.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: We can see this in the Euripides play about the first time Bacchus shows up in Thebes.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: Women are shown sunting aside their gendered roles, going up into the hills, and engaging in all sorts of activities they never would have normally been allowed to participate in.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: Meanwhile, Pentheus, the king of Thebes, accuses them of hunting Aphrodite, the implication being that the women went up into the hills so they can forsake conventional gender roles and engage in duplicitous desires with one another.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: This theatrical representation is essentially what happened in the actual history during the events of the Bacchanalia at Rome.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: The festivals appeared in Rome and spread, and eventually the Roman Senate met and levied an outrageous assault upon these people.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: Their only real evidence for doing so was a single person's hysterical account about the festivals focusing on sexuality.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: He claimed that men preferred other men and women other women, and this whole religion of Dionysus posed a fundamental threat to Roman security and tradition.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: Beyond this, the whole religion was led by a foreign woman from the east.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: If what this one person said was true, then the whole Roman way was at stake.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: If what this one man said was not, then it represents the Senate going out of its way to assault queer minorities.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: The whole episode ended in a bloodbath.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: The Bacchanalia affair was used as justification for political and religious sanctions against this religious minority, and it continued to be a morality tale in Roman history into the Christian age.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: This is an instance where the government stepped up and became the leading purveyor of injustice, violence, and bullying against queer Romans.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: On International Pronouns Day, we're going to dive into some of the phrases and words used by Greeks and Romans to describe sexuality.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: You'll notice pretty quickly that many of the words are very ambiguous as they can mean a bunch of different things in different contexts.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: Some of the words are basically only ever used as insults, and yet, because conservative philosophers, conservative politicians, conservative religious authorities, and conservative lawyers all use the word an awful lot, we actually get a great cross-section of ways to insult queer people.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: But there are also words that seem to reflect terms of endearment or affection as well.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: We want to take a minute and actually look about how these words shape the way ancient people discussed their loves and thought about their own sexuality.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: We're going to cap off the month with a Halloween-themed episode.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: Dionysus was first and foremost a deity of agriculture.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: Bacchus was the inventor of wine and grapes, which means they were the god who manifested them for human beings.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: Bacchus is a deity of all the fruit trees like pomegranates and apples.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: Dionysus is generally a deity who oversees the wet, juicy fruits.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: Dionysus is also the first human being to tame a wild auroch and turn it into a bull.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: As you can see, Dionysus is probably the single most important agricultural deity, along with Demeter.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: So naturally, Dionysus has a lot of festivals in the fall time around harvest.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: These festivals include invitations to explore gender nonconformity and sexuality in ways definitely not permissible in daily society.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: So that's the plan for this month.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: We're going to try to have at least one episode per week and place them around the queer festivals going on this month.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: There may be a few special topics we dive into, but these are the main plans at the moment.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: When we get back to our regular scheduled programming then in December, we're not actually going to be returning to the gods and goddesses of Olympus anymore.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: That phase of the podcast is ending.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: As I mentioned a few times, there will always be more to talk about in this realm, especially because of the way we chose to describe deities.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: That is not the only way we could have described them.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: Dionysus could be thought about as a bisexual or a pansexual, but we chose to focus on Dionysus as a demisexual because whether male, female, or satyr, Dionysus takes a while to form relationships, and when they do, they last forever.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: So the way we described Dionysus a few episodes ago is not the only way to think about the character.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: We also talked about how Athena was non-binary, able to combine masculinity and femininity without strong representations of either, but we could have just as easily talked about Athena as asexual, and we'd have been right.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: We could have talked about Athena as aromantic, and we'd have been right there too.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: We chose the non-binary aspects which allowed Athena to become a mentor to young men like Telemachus, young women like Nausicaa, and young gender queer witches like Medea.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_00: But that's not the only way we could have interpreted Athena.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: When discussing Iakos a few weeks ago, we described their role in leading processions, and that it was precisely the gender-fluid nature of the character which allowed them to best impact the rituals they were tasked with overseeing.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: By moving between masculinity and femininity, everyone in Athens was able to see themselves in Iakos.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: Similarly, when we discussed Hestia as an asexual, we noticed how asexual people like the Vestal Virgins were able to see Hestia as their ritual role model.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: This idea that the gods form a ritual role model is one way of approaching ritual queerness.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: People are acting in a certain way because that's how their patron deity acts.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: The god can sometimes look like a woman dancing around in the mountains or a triumphal parince leading a parade, but there's space for both manifestations, and that's just one approach to ritual queerness.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: So when we do start our episodes again, they're going to be deep dives into these types of rituals, festivals, and parades, which provided spaces for people to act out their queerness in acceptable ways, even if it was only acceptable during the period of the ritual themselves.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: We can interpret these rituals as safe spaces to experience or explore your own sexuality, or a way of making visible the sexuality that is already latent in the people themselves.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't really matter which way, since these are manifestation of a queerness which is allowable in the ritual environment.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: You may notice that many of them do center around gods we've discussed already.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: If a deity is gender nonconforming, there's a good chance that ritualized gender non-conformity is part of the religion centered around them.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: I hope you enjoy the specials we have planned throughout the month of October.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: I hope we're able to provide some meaningful commentary on queer history and antiquity.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: Join us next week for a retrospective of the Olympian phase of the podcast and our discussion on Sappho and Sophic Love.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: Quick Notes.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_00: This is because I actually had purchased a new microphone for these recordings.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: For the first twenty episodes or so, I was actually using an old condenser mic which I had from years ago when I did some voiceover and voice acting.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: It worked fine in its day and is well used, but the audio quality is not quite up to snuff for what I would expect today.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_00: Additionally, that old microphone is a little sticky after a completely unavoidable Merlot accident a few years ago.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: The new microphone works well and provides the significantly superior audio quality to what we used before.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: However, as I've noted before, I am a contract archaeologist, that's my day job, and I'm traveling around a lot.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: The fall is kind of our crazy period, at least in the northern hemisphere, because that's when a lot of project deadlines start creeping up and we get a whole bunch of can you get this done before the end of the year in our industry.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_00: As such, these next couple of months are going to be absolutely crazy for me in terms of where I'm going to be working and the variety of projects I'm going to be deployed to.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: I will be taking that old sticky microphone for those projects, so you may notice there's a little inconsistency in audio quality going forward.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: One meek may be excellent sounding with the new microphone, and the next might sound a bit older.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for understanding.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: When I was writing this episode, I used the voice to text input.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: I used words like sapphic love a fair number of times, and the vocal recognition software just couldn't get it right.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: I actually got a chuckle out of it because most of the time sapphic love was heard as softball love.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_00: Bearing in mind that we're talking about lesbians, I kinda wonder if the AI isn't having a little joke at us.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_00: I thought it was pretty silly and I wanted to share that with you.