The Gay Marriages of a Nineteenth-Century Prison Ship
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
I can assume that most of these men were not gay, but rather used gay sex as an outlet for pleasure given the hopeless circumstances they were in.
What struck to me most though, is the eventual development of romantic relations where partners would pamper each other with gifts. To me this shows a deeper need for a human connection beyond just sex.
MSM behavior is on a spectrum, that moreover encompasses both deprivation-based homosexuality (the kind you get in "hopeless" circumstances with no access to heterosexual relationships) and dominance-based homosexuality (MSM sex as a raw exertion of dominance by one participant towards the other). These sorts of practices need not have much to do with "sexual orientation", as understood today.
In ancient Mediterranean cultures, being a dominant participant in MSM encounters was something "anyone" could do, and was not understood as anything unusual. It was only the submissive partner that was considered highly feminized. This same model shows up in other ancient cultures, e.g. in East Asia. The modern Western understanding where MSM practices boil down to a gay "sexual orientation" that's equally shared by both partners is historically novel.
Men who have Sex with Men
It's in general quite astonishing to see how different the view of homosexual relationship is and has been over different cultures. It's not just a binary acceptable/not acceptable difference, but homosexuality has had a different social role in different societies in a way that is difficult to imagine today.
The argument for some ship disaster is not analogous either.
Yikes. Let’s hope they were just stories.
It doesn't seem right to conflate that with Qanon or Pizzagate. It's like comparing critics of a particular Covid-19 policy to flat-earthers.
Yes, but the point is that the two cases can be indistinguishable at a distance. We'll probably never know what stories about Roman emperors were at least somewhat factual, and what were just propaganda.
Nero had a very "peculiar" sexual life, but was also, of course, very powerful, which made him an enemy of the Senate that was very conservative about the image of Roman as soldiers.
So it is possible that the stories were true and they used them to dethrone him and later on the propaganda depicted him as a monster.
There were rumors in history, today believed untrue, that he killed his wife Poppea kicking her in the belly, also killing the baby she was caring.
There are rumors of him killing his mother Agrippina (we don't know if it's true or not).
The story says that Nero after losing the wife married his lover Statilia Messalina, but she was too different from Poppea so he started a search throughout the Empire for a woman looking exactly like his dead wife.
He also decided that the sex of the person wasn't important, so when they found Sporo, Nero castrated him and married him in Greece. Story says Sporo was dressed as an empress, but probably he never wanted that life and the castration was forced upon him.
The marriage with Sporo came after the one with Pitagora, when Nero played the role of the wife.
If all of this is propaganda, Svetonio had a great imagination, or, maybe, as the historians think today, most of it is the truth, romanticized, but mostly true.
Or maybe he just wrote down some of the craziest rumors? Individually I think I could buy most of them individually, but together they just seem too much. He married a guy after castrating him and also got married to a guy with himself dressed as the bride? I guess I would consider it more believable if they seemed more 'congruent'.
Why?
Social norms were very different for regular people, imagine being the emperor, especially Nero, whose family history make GOT look like a family camping...
Another example is Elagabalus, who is considered the first example of a transgender emperor in history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elagabalus
In ancient times homosexuality wasn't a problem at all.
Just look at Greek history
It’s completely off topic for HN.
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
This article did gratify my intellectual curiosity, and I don't think I'd see it on TV news.
Given that it's his site, his forum and his rules, I've always assumed "anything that good hackers would find interesting" loosely correlated to "anything Paul Graham would find interesting."
That said, "good hacker" as a qualifier is as frustratingly elitist as it is maddeningly vague.