MUSEUM OF LONDON: London’s queer history starts much earlier than you might guess. Curator Francis Grew explores how recent scholarship reveals the presence of same-sex love in Roman London, and how different those relationships were from modern LGBTQ+ lifestyles.
2022 will mark the 1900th anniversary of the Roman Emperor Hadrian’s visit to Londinium. When Hadrian visited the city in the year 122 CE, his entourage included young men with whom he was clearly intimate.
He would have been entirely open about it, and many bystanders will have thought his behaviour quite normal, if only because they themselves had same-sex relationships. But it is only recently that scholars have come to accept that such attitudes prevailed in Roman London.
Forty years ago I was a university student, reading Greek and Latin literature. Since then not only have our attitudes to LGBTQ+ issues changed, but so has our understanding of Roman London. In those days many archaeologists believed that metropolitan Roman culture had little impact upon so distant a province as Britain. This may be true for many regions of Britain, but writing tablets discovered during recent digs in London show that society here was organised in much the same way as in Rome itself, for at least the first century of the city’s existence. » | Francis Grew, Senior Curatorof Archaeology | Friday, February 14, 2020
