NYP: ALEX THE GAY -- Greeks fuming at 'flaming' film by Oliver Stone

Oliver Stone and the studio releasing his $150 million historical epic "Alexander" should beware of Greeks bearing writs — over the film's depiction of Alexander the Great as Alexander the Fabulous.

The controversial director and Warner Bros. were yesterday threatened with a lawsuit by a group of Greek lawyers who are incensed that the new movie "Alexander" portrays the hero as bisexual.

The group of 25 Athens-based lawyers said they sent a letter to Warner Bros. demanding that it label "Alexander" ... as a work of fiction....

"We are not saying that were are against gays, but we are saying that the production company should make it clear that this film is pure fiction and not a true depiction of the life of Alexander."...

Colin Farrell, who plays Alexander in the 3-hour epic, sports a blond pageboy and mini toga and is seen kissing two different men on the lips.

Though the film includes a steamy wedding-night sex scene between Alexander and his wife Roxane, played by Rosario Dawson, it makes no bones that the true love of the emperor's life was his pal Hephaistion, portrayed by Jared Leto.

Alexander came from northern Greece, which has long been touchy about most historians' belief that like many men of the era, one of the greatest military leaders of all time swung both ways.

Two years ago, hundreds of Greeks stormed an archeological symposium where a speaker presented a paper on Alexander's sexuality and police were called in to restore order.

"We cannot come out and say that President... Kennedy was a shooting guard for the Los Angeles Lakers and so Warner cannot come out and say Alexander was gay," Varnakos said....

According to the film's narration, "It was said . . . that Alexander was never defeated, except by Hephaistion's thighs."

There are ample contemporaneous accounts that reaffirm the social phenomena of homoeroticism amongst the ancient Greeks, and I have no reason to engage in some revisionist interpretation of them. If you assume that all later transcriptions fabricated this material for some inexplicable reason, then yes, you can make very few, if any, firm statements whatsoever about the ancient Greeks. Since I think it's absurd to pretend the Romans just fabricated Greek homoeroticism out of whole cloth, we will have to agree to disagree.

Aeschines Against Timarchus survives from the time of Alexander's father, Phillip II. In fact, that spectacle ultimately involved Demosthenes' attempts to save the Athenian envoys to Macedon from capital charges of treason. The transcript of the trial and the reversal three years later (transcribed in Demosthenes' Against the False Embassy) make the extent of homoeroticism in 340s BC Athens very clear.

The Greek people seem to disagree with this history.

They believe it's been advanced by western, media culture who are trying to advance an agenda.

My sense is that there's more to the story.

As a student of the bible, I know that the bible has thousands of times more attestation than does any of these greek stories. However, it is put under serious scrutiny.

My point, these could be aesop's fables for all we known. They could be anything promulgated by any historic enemy. You simply don't know, nor do I.

But I do know this. One book doesn't tell the story of a culture any more than reading ONLY "It Takes a Village" 4000 years from now, will be the truth of our era.

And imagine if all that was preserved was something from Elton John????

Literacy was by no stretch universal in ancient Greece. You do not have much in the way of trivial, niche scrawlings that distort the record - and what you do have in that sense (e.g., graffiti on potsherds and rocks) was just as likely to be homoerotic as anything else.

The literature that we have falls into four main categories: philosophers, storytellers (inc. playwrights and poets), historians, and administrators. There was some overlap, particularly between the historical tracts and administrative items. The material that they left behind was clearly written for widespread dissemination in the very core of society. It was also clearly directed at the mainstream of their respective societies, even when expressing contrarian or adversarial viewpoints as was not rarely the case.

The literature that was preserved by the Romans was even more clearly the crown of Greek intellectual production ... usually transmitted precisely due to its estimable value in Roman view. Moreover, there is no ambiguity whatsoever about the veracity of Aesop's fables, by example; they are characterized precisely for what they are. It is a rather simple exercise in reason to figure out where a particular work fit into Greek society, and either the Greeks or Romans tended to make a point of referencing that themselves as the side-benefit for the obtuse.

Yes, I think the portrait of ancient Greek and Roman civilization is patently clear and if the equivalent of Elton John wrote something I think that would be rather clear as well. Of course, I can't really think of anything Elton John has written that would transmit a misleading perception of our culture to future generations, but perhaps you can..

Finally, we also have plenty of Christian commentaries that catalogue similar cultural phenomena beginning in the late 1st century AD. I assume you reject the veracity of those as well?

I know that some of this ground has already been covered very eloquently here, but this post basically my thoughts on the release of "Alexander"

This film is art, the artist can do what he wants with his own canvass (and meed condemnation or praise by its consumers). I wonder whether the Greeks that demanded that Warner Bros. and Oliver Stoned add a blurb telling the audience that his movie is a fiction regarding Alexander's sexual behavior (as was done for The Godfather movie) did research confirming that there is no actual first hand documentation made of his homosexuality. Even if that, it strongly looke like a frivolous charge that the lawyers have made. Their demand to add a blurb at the beginning of the film would only remind people that it is possible that Alexander the pagan didn't have gay sexual relations according to what they may or may not know about history... Not a fight worth the effort.

In those times man on man and man and boy sex was seen as more "prestigious" than man and woman sex (yes, at least in those times people understood that your actions were by choice) this film will encourage a look back at history, it will on my part since I don't know that much about this Alexander The Great. Ptolemy, the narrator in the movie, wrote that Alexander was defeated "by Hephaistion's thighs." Hephastion is not a female name.

You don't see sex between the two, but you get dialogue such as "Stay with me tonight, Hephaistion." Oliver Stone says fuck you if you don't get that. I don't. I'm not really into guys cheating on their wives with other guys, even though I might be able to sympathise with the characters in the movie, its hard to sympathise in such perverted soap opera scenarios. And by American standards that is perverted. Also, I read somewhere that Alexander was married to more than one woman... Its worth noting here that in 1890, a good while after the war ending slavery, a huge step in progress, the U.S. Supreme Court stated in a ruling, "The organizatoin of a community for the spread and practice of polygamy is, in a measure, a return to barbarism."

We know that tastes are subjective but not standards. Excuse me if I make that leap as you may see it. Democrats argued that black people were not truly human beings, they thought they had the right to slavery, just as they think they have a right to destroy a human being in the womb today by denying the humanity through certain semantics of diminishing popularity. The danger of the self-confidence in what seems worthy of popularity in "our" day continues to repeat itself; that thinking that the popular things of our era are infallible while the popular of other eras were so obviously foolish and corrupt (guess no one saw Anna Nichole Smith's ludes overdose presentation on national television). The American republic has a critical reliance (based on historical lessons - which in turn are based on the Judeo-Christian perspective) on principles and standards that are inviolable and absolute, that's why though it is wisely not a pure democracy; hence the Amendment process is left to us to remedy unforseen challenges to this civilization. This means of democracy takes more patience and work than simply punching a ballot, or trying to legislate from the bench, during any particular moment in history and it makes long reflection more necessary (this stuff is covered better in The Federalist Papers of Jay Madison and Hamilton).

I hope that this movie will encourage a new generation to reconsider the lessons of history if it is an interesting enough production, I think a big problem is that people keep trying to do revolutions without appreciating and preserving truths that transcend all the generations. Not everything that is old is good and not everything that is old is bad. Some people that I talk with, including the ones I disagree with usually, know that already, but for some others it seriously needs to be told.

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Note: this topic is from 11/20/2004. Blast from the Past. Just adding to the catalog, not sending a general distribution. Thanks OESY. To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list.