Un recueil d'histoires, de poèmes, de légendes et de mythologies rappelant que les identités sexuelles et les identités de genre ne sont pas uniquement des sujets contemporains mais étaient présents dès l'antiquité.
Dans ce livre magnifiquement illustré, les auteurs explorent de nombreux récits de l'antiquité grecque et romaine mettant en avant des amours et des sexualités lgbt. La plupart des textes traitent d'homosexualité masculine mais quelque uns également de lesbianisme et de trans-identité. La sélection est très large et décrit tant des amours romantiques et idéalisés que des pratiques sexuelles bestiales et déshumanisantes, montrant toute l'étendue de l'homosexualité dans l'antiquité.
Mon point préféré de ce livre : les illustrations absolument magnifiques, réalisées pour accompagner les textes et qui remplissent ce travail à merveille !
Mon point négatif : j'aurai aimé des récits d'autres sociétés antiques ! Égyptiennes, perses, indiennes… si tant est que de tels textes existent également.
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It is natural, when we don't see ourselves reflected in the world around us, to look for another world. It is natural, when we feel alone, to seek connection. All of us look for a past, but what happens when, gazing back in time, we see a world without us? That idea of a world without us is a lie, and the gaps in its history are no accident. But history is not the past, only the way it is written. Look closer, look longer, and what might first appear as a black sky suddenly seems to sparkle with a hundred constellations.
An Army of Lovers Cannot Lose: Everyone of us is a world of infinite possibility. We are an army because we have to be. We are an army because we are so powerful. (We have so much to fight for; we are the most precious of endangered species). And we are an army of lovers because it is we who know what love is. Desire and lust, too. We invented them. We come out of the closet, face the rejection of society, face firing squads, just to love each other!
The gods saw them throwing their arms around each other, intertwining them, longing to grow into one another, to form a single living thing. The new humans began to die of hunger, of depression, because none of them wanted to live without the other, or to do anything on their own. Whenever one half of the original whole died, the one that was left went in search of another and wove itself together with that.
Steeped in honey, Juventius,
your golden eyes, and as sweet too
when I press my lips to them -
three hundred thousand kisses
is not close to enough. Even if I plucked
each kiss like an amber grain
from a ripe, sun-warmed field
in late summer - sheaves
and sheaves of them - my love,
it would not be enough.
I have come to ask you something. When you die,
as you will beneath the walls of Troy,
let us be buried together, let us blend -
as we did when we were boys - into one.
Let one urn, the one your mother gave you,
hold us together, our bones and our dust.