As a scholar who researches modern and contemporary visual cultures of sexuality, I was struck by how the heavy presence of sexual imagery in the ruins of Pompeii seems to confound those writing about it for a general audience. A weekly email with evidence-based analysis from Europe's best scholars Rethinking Roman sexuality As a gay man and a researcher on sexuality, I am all too Phone Number List familiar with the ways modern gay men look to ancient Rome in search of evidence that there have always been people like us. It is now clear among the research community that such straightforward readings of homosexuality in classical history are flawed. That is because same-sex relations among Romans were lived and thought about in very different ways from our own. Roman sexuality was not framed in terms of the gender of partners but in terms of power.
The gender of a free man’s sexual partner was less relevant than their social position. A room with walls cultured in colorful frescos of nude men and women. Frescoes from the House of the Vertie. Courtesy of the Archaeological Park of Pompeii, Author provided (no reuse) Socially acceptable Roman sexuality was about power, power was about masculinity – and Roman patriarchal sex cultures were assertions of both. An adult free man could have sex as the penetrating partner with anyone of a lower social status – including women or slaves and sex workers of both genders. Despite this, I understand how politically important and strategic it was for the early homosexual movement to invent its own myth of origin and to populate history with figures that had been – they thought – just like us. The flip side of modern notions of homosexuality being read into Roman history, is the way in which the widespread presence of sex in ancient Roman (including in the graffiti and visual culture preserved in Pompeii) has been disavowed or – at least – purified by mainstream modern culture.