Queering history: Alexander.

ITEM: Entertainment Weekly's lavish cover story for November 19 claims that Oliver Stone's new movie, Alexander, about Alexander the Great, is "an honest, fairly explicit treatment of Alexander's famous bisexuality." "It wasn't like Stone had taken historical liberties," the article continues. "His rendering of Alexander's life is ... more or less in the mainstream of scholarly research. By most accounts Alexander did like men, women, and eunuchs--his best friend Hephaistion was his longtime lover."

ITEM: A New York Times article for November 20 entitled, "Breaking Ground With a Gay Movie Hero," says of Stone's film: "Historians of antiquity say the picture's depiction of Alexander is more or less accurate.... They also note that Alexander's bisexuality was common for his time."

CORRECTION: The straight population is largely unaware that "gay" and lesbian "scholars" have been busily rewriting and "reclaiming" history, in a fevered effort to confer legitimacy on the "unspeakable vice." A major part of this effort involves resurrecting famous historical persons as "gay heroes." According to various homosexual authors and academics, the list of famous sodomites includes Plato, Aristotle, Homer, Achilles, Solon, Cicero, Julius Caesar, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, King Richard the Lionhearted, William Shakespeare, Florence Nightingale, and many more. In 1999, The Times of London reported that a Professor Stephen Knight had uncovered evidence that Robin Hood and his Merry Men actually were a band of homosexuals. The professor's "evidence" was pretty thin: a few lines of troubadour ballads that he claimed showed homoerotic overtones!

The historical claims of the homo-revisionists range from the ludicrous to the blasphemous, the worst case of the latter being their repeated references to a homosexual relationship between Jesus Christ and St. John, the "beloved disciple." Similarly, they find a queer connection in the biblical account of the friendship of David and Jonathan. John Shelby Spong, the retired radical Episcopal Bishop of Newark, claims that St. Paul was a sodomite. Likewise, the Lavender Lobby asserts that virtually all biblical "pairings" are evidence of same-sex relations: Ruth and Naomi, St. Peter and St. Paul, St. Peter and St. Andrew, St. Philip and St. Bartholomew. These claims are usually based on the work of Yale history professor John Boswell, a homosexual activist who died of AIDS in 1994 at age 47.

The point of this revisionist "research," as many of these radical academics admit, is to establish that homosexuality is normal (or even superior to heterosexuality), since so many famous and talented people were "gay." This agenda to legitimize perversion should be borne in mind whenever appeals to antiquity are made on behalf of buggery. Which brings us back to Alexander the Great, one of the names that appears frequently on the homosexual activists' lists of "Famous Queers."

Is Oliver Stone's depiction of Alexander "honest" and in "the mainstream of scholarly research," as Entertainment Weekly asserts, and is there a consensus among historians, as the Times claims, that the movie's "gay" theme is "more or less accurate"? Dr. Craig Johnson, a Fellow of the International Academy in Strasbourg, France, and professor in residence at Chalcedon Academy in Agoura Hills, California, says of the matter:

Aristotle's dictum still stands: "He who asserts must also prove." When you make a claim, the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate that claim. Let's ask some clear, practical questions in light of Oliver Stone's Alexander: Did Alexander ever kiss a man on the mouth? No evidence. Did he ever play a passive or active role in same sex sexual unions? No evidence. Did he have sex of any kind with the eunuch Bagoas? No evidence. Did he ever play footsie with men or boys at a sports bar? No evidence. Did he have sex with Hephaestion or any other man, young or old? No evidence. Was he anything other than a married, heterosexual male with children who chose "power as his supreme mistress"? The answer in concert with all the primary sources is again: no evidence!

Alexander scholar Dr. Jeanne Reames-Zimmerman, professor of history at the University of Nebraska, Omaha, notes that the earliest and most important sources do not describe Hephaistion in terms that support Stone's "gay" treatment:

   Our three Greek historians (Arrian,
   Diodorus, and Plutarch) never term
   [Hephaistion] erastes or eromenos,
   only philos or malista timomenos.
   Alexander himself calls him philalexandros
   (friend of Alexander).
   Curtius and Justin use only amicus,
   never amans. The only implication
   of a sexual relationship or use of the
   term eromenos for Hephaistion occurs
   in late sources or those of dubious
   authorship.

Dr. Reames-Zimmerman says that "while we do have evidence that it was possible, in Macedonian society, for young boys of roughly the same age to form attachments to one another which included a sexual expression, there is no indisputable evidence for such an attachment between Alexander and Hephaistion." (Emphasis in original.) The professor says she personally believes there is circumstantial evidence to support the claim, "but I do think we must acknowledge that we cannot state with certainty that Alexander and Hephaistion were lovers, either as young men, or continuing throughout their lives."

"Like the detractors of ancient times," writes historian Agnes Savill, in her two-volume Alexander the Great and His Time, "some modern writers have tried to explain Alexander's attitude toward women as due to homosexuality. But when Philoxenes told the king that two beautiful boys had been offered for him, Alexander was furious: 'What evil has he seen in me that he should purchase for me such shameful creatures?' he exclaimed. 'Tell the dealer to take his wares to hell.'"

Savill also notes that Alexander "likewise reprimanded young Agnon, for offering to purchase Crobylus for him, whose beauty was famous in Corinth."

Suffice to say, these and many other historians who could be cited belie the claims made by Oliver Stone and his media and academia apologists. Mr. Stone is always more propagandist than historian or storyteller. His most notable films--Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, The People vs. Larry Flynt, Natural Born Killers, Looking for Fidel (a glorification of Fidel Castro)--carry a vicious anti-American and anti-Christian message. "Alexander lived in a more honest time," Stone told Playboy magazine. "We go into his bisexuality. It may offend some people, but sexuality in those days was a different thing. Pre-Christian morality." Or, rather, pre-Christian amorality.

Bill Leap, a professor of anthropology at American University, praises Stone's Alexander as a film that will be "good for the gay civil rights movement." "The more we can talk about how men had sex with men all over the place," Professor Leap told the New York Post, "the stronger the liberation movement is going to become." Sounding a similar note, Sean Lund, national news media coordinator for the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), said: "This is a big-budget epic that is going to move the goal post in terms of what we can expect to see in these movies in the future."

That's what Stone's movie is really about: mainstreaming homosexuality into popular culture, not presenting a historically "mainstream" film depiction of Alexander the Great.