Antinous the Happy Bottom

There’s a whole new pile of content going online today, in the form of The Gospel of Alexander. The process of creating this particular piece was very much modelled on The Isthmian Odes. My starting point was an Epistle of Antinous in progress (Epistle 066 – A Playful Wager), and as it developed I suddenly found myself inspired by the character of Alexander to create an entirely new and detailed conversation between he and Antinous.

This particular sacred text started off as a humble dialogue of no more than five minutes, but it quickly ballooned into an entire one-act play (roughly 30 mintues’ worth) whose theme, when it finally emerged, surprised even me in that it centres around the notion of bottoming. In a world and at a time when homosexual acts had not yet been conflagrated into a Gay Identity, but were simply indulged in as a preferred activity, how did a man psychologically justify the fact that he could occasionally enjoy himself while on the receiving end of anal sex – especially if he was a member of the upper classes, where such receptivity was generally frowned upon? This play attempts to give form and dimension to the thoughts and feelings of Antinous the Willing Bottom. What exactly goes through his mind? How does he make peace with a role that constantly draws scorn from the more conservative enclaves of Roman (and Greek) society?

At the very least, I like to think that the activity of anal sex has been painted with a very poetic brush, and rendered in a rather heroic way by virtue of the fact that it’s championed by Antinous himself. After all, the divinization of sex – making the profane into something sacred – is one of the key objectives of the entire site, and is thus well served by this particular text. I hope you enjoy The Gospel of Alexander, and hope even more to be able to present it soon enough in some kind of staged – or filmed! – performance…