Akhenaten полностью

If Akhenaten is the first gay man, then he must have a male lover to confirm his gay identity and incidentally tell the first gay love story in recorded history. Gay renderings of Akhenaten supply him with a lover in the form of the historic­ally elusive Smenkhkare'. In accordance with popular ideas that ancient homo­sexuality depended on who penetrated whom, Smenkhkare' is usually the passive junior partner in the relationship. He is Akhenaten's pretty catamite. This char­acterisation is helped by the appearancc to modern viewers of ancient images supposed to represent Smenkhkare', which show a slight, slender young man, bare-chested and clean-shaven, with delicate features. The fantasy of a reconstructable relationship between Akhenaten and Smenkhkare' certainly has a following today. I once read a version of this chapter to a group of amateur

Egyptology enthusiasts, and pointed out that almost nothing reliable is known about Smenkhkare', not even his or her sex. Images are identified as Smenkh­kare'^ on artistic criteria alone, because not one actually bears Smenkhkare''s name (see Figure 7.1); and it is still uncertain whether Smenkhkare' was identical with Pharaoh Neferneferuaten, who may well have been female. At the question session after my talk a man in the audience reprimanded me sternly for hetero- sexist bias and trying to erase the first gay love story from the history books! These kind of ideas about Akhenaten and Smenkhkare''s affair arc fuelled by popular books aimed at gay readers, such as Cassell's Encyclopaedia of Queer Myth, Symbol and Spirit: Gay Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Lore (1997). This encyclo­paedia is a feel-good book with a strong anti-academic stance, claiming to challenge conventional boundaries of knowledge by reinstating the psychic, emo­tional and paralogical to history. It seems like an essentialist work to me, invoking episodes from history to give a false sense of a coherent lineage and shared past. The entry on Akhenaten is shoddy, recycling the 'first gay man' tropes alongside almost all the elements of the myth this book has tried to dismantle. After stressing Akhenaten's androgyny, it continues:

While he is traditionally spoken of as the spouse of Queen Nefertiti . . . he appears to have shared an intimate relationship with his son-in-law Smenkhare [.hc] . In artworks they are shown in intimate situations, with Akhenaton stroking Smenkhare's chin or as being nude together, depic­tions not common in Egyptian art. . . . Akhenaton made Smenkhare his co-regent and bestowed on him names of endearment normally reserved for a queen.¹⁰

This encyclopaedia entry is an uncomfortable reminder that many gay male versions of the ancient world are ultimately misogynistic. There are no women in them (or if there are, they are safely in their place), and instead it is populated with hot men having sex. In this version, Smenkhkare' actually replaces Nefertiti and takes on her attributes. He becomes a queen in every sense of the word. By writing Nefertiti, Tiye and the royal daughters out of the text, the encyclopaedia relocates Akhenaten and Smenkhkare' in an all-male homosocial Egypt where women arc excluded from the workings of power — even though Akhenaten's reign is one time in ancient history when a few women probably had some real political authority.

Akhenaten appears in a far more sophisticated invocation of the power of historical memory against the forces that repress and deny homosexuality — The Swimming Pool Library (1988), Alan Hollinghurst's ironic and allusive novel of gay life in 1980s London. The novel is, among other things, about writing a gay history. It is full of knowing references to the gay ancient world, which lies like a kind of substratum under the modern gay world that goes on above. Even the swimming pool of the title is located in the basement of the Corinthian Club, a reminder of Corinth's ancient reputation as the sexual playground ne plus ultra.