Greek nationhood and 'Greek love': sexualizing the nation and multiple readings of the glorious Greek past

The paper addresses the ways in which the idea of homosexuality has been expelled from local dominant narrations about the Modern Greek nation and seeks to culturally frame this historical erasure. The ancient past and Ottoman rule are viewed as the two key moments of negotiating (and repeatedly placing in oblivion) any link between 'Greekness' and homoeroticism. Placing this institutional silence in juxtaposition to multiple Western readings of 'Greek love', the study provides ethnographic instances that reveal the appropriations of the Western gaze and moments of breaking the silence about Greek homosexuality. Selected individuals and cultural locales serve as terrains of negotiating the present-day Greek state's facade as cosmopolitan, Western and post-modern. On the one hand, Greece is perpetually re-constituted as a topos, appropriate(d) for projections of varying versions of history-telling from Western and local agents alike; on the other hand, homoeroticism is being negotiated through consecutive articulations of Greekness in past and present tense.