2. One way to reconcile celebrations of ancients with homophobia is to recontextualize ancient relationships in way Peg does. Harmodius and Aristogeiton weren't gay, they were just close male friends, liked to do some camping & wrestling, oil each other up, nothing to see here.
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3. Another form of recontextualizing is pseudo-history. I remember an evangelical Christian telling me once that all the gay stuff started only in the late, decadent period decline, that when Rome was a young Republic they were all as straight as a rod.
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4. The conservative cognitive dissonance on this issue allows for sly humor. Guy Davenport, great translator of the Greeks, wasn't a conservative but did write a lot for National Review, & often used classics to make winking allusions to same sex love. This from 1977.pic.twitter.com/neJrAVxElc
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5. The followers of Leo Strauss have the most interesting strategy of containment: Strauss upheld not just that the ancient Greeks philosophers were the wisest of men but replicated Socratic pedagogy of older mentor charming young ephebes.
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6. Straussian pedagogy was homosocial tiptoeing near the homoerotic. Straussian hermeneutics with its sharp distinction between exoteric (myths for the mob) and esoteric (dangerous truths for the philosopher) paralleled the functioning of the closet in homophobic societies.
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7. The career of Harry Jaffa & Allan Bloom, two major Straussians who were once close friends and became bitter foes, shows the different forms Straussian containment of the homoerotic can take.
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Replying to @HeerJeet
this reminds me that one time Jaffa told me that homosexuality being wrong was one of the few things Aquinas and Jefferson agreed on and that it was unlikely they were both wrong.
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Replying to @joshtpm
The weird thing is that he also wanted to argue Aristotle was against homosexuality, which is pushing the point too far.
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Replying to @HeerJeet
yeah, my assumption was always that he name checked Aquinas as the Christian Aristotle because he didn't want some whippersnapper calling him out on that front. so he closed that path.
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I actually remember being a bit stumped by this argument. I think I was 20. It wasn't that I found it persuasive. But it was so outside my framework of reasoning that I wasn't quite sure how to respond.
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Yeah, at the very least it seems like an argument from authority. But its not surprising that a Christian and someone formed by Christianity (Jefferson) would agree. The only people in West in Jefferson's time questioning this were Bentham and his students.
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I find it hard to understand how people generally can joke about homosexual sex in prisons and in the navy but can't fathom homosexual acts in the ancient world.
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Replying to @AF_Superdude
They need to believe that some part of reality is ideal, is some form of Eden or perhaps Arcadia maybe Avalon. In order to process this world. Something must be good in the past instead of messy. And the current mess can be fixed by returning to that good. I can not prove...
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