Considering he's been dead 2300 some years, Alexander the Great is sure generating a lot of press today thanks to Oliver Stone's movie Alexander.
The critics didn't agree in Alex's lifetime and they don't agree now about his historical importance and his sexuality. Robert Elder in the Chicago Tribune ( 11/26 ) tells us that homoeroticism was normal in ancient Greece and in fact was so accepted that ancient writers didn't talk much about Alex's sexuality. It was assumed ( altho' there are plenty of clues as to his bisexuality ) that great men slept with whom they wanted to. Still as this, and other articles, say a group of Greek lawyers are threatening to sue Stone because he has dared, dared to hint Alex was gay ( or at least gayish ) . They later backed down.
Richard Roeper in the Chicago Sun-Times ( 11/23 ) taunts the lawyers by saying Stone shows Alex as '.... absolutely, fabulously gay.' Roger Ebert in the Sun-Times ( 11/24 ) , in one of several articles on the flic, criticizes it of all things, for not being gay enough. He says Hephaistion, Alex's boyhood-and-into-adulthood-lover, should get equal play time with Roxane, Alex's wife. ( One might add ditto to Alex's Persian boy, Bagoas, who doesn't even get a speech, but does get a kiss ) . The NY Times ( 11/20 ) liked the film, calling Alex a 'Gay Movie Hero.' Still history has the last word over movies: an ancient source recorded Alexander and Hephaistion dedicating wreaths at the tombs of lovers, Achilles and Patroclus of the Iliad. ( These two warriors were bowldarized, to being straight in the movie Troy. )
And when they took their fingers off the keyboard for A the G, they put them right back on for Indiana's own Kinsey. Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times ( 11/19 ) gave the movie bio about the American sexologist four stars, but conservative Christian groups are calling the film a '... Hollywood Whitewash' for a man responsible for everything from '.... high divorce rates to AIDS' ( Chicago Tribune- 11/26 ) . Ebert quotes Robert Knight, director of Concerned Women of America's Culture & Family Institute, who compares Kinsey to the Nazi Dr. Josef Mengele. Liam Neeson, the star of the movie, in an interview in The NY Times, reports he had no problems kissing co-star Peter Sarsgaard, who played one of Kinsey's assistants.
Ebert writes, apropos, gay folks: 'The decriminalization of homosexuality was a direct result of Kinsey's work.'
And on a personal note this columnist can tell you how amazed he was at actress Lynn Redgrave's two minutes of material as a late-in-coming-out lesbian who makes the thesis of the movie perfectly clear: it saved her life ( and by extension myriads of people who realized because of Kinsey's work they were perfectly normal ) .
The ancient epic poem Gilgamesh, argues its latest translator, scholar and poet Stephen Mitchell, depicts the first known instance of a same-sex union, according to Advocate.com . Mitchell said that the clearest insight into same-sex love involves the intensity of Gilgamesh's grief after his friend Enkidu dies.
