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March '98:
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Vol 1. No 6. March, 1998
Queer of the Month
It was through Plato's Symposium and Phaedrus that Socrates has exercised his most potent influenceon the gay imagination. In these two dialogues, Socrates examines how love begins in the erotic passion of an older man for a beautiful boy. The passion of a man for a boy is a kind of divine madness - in its grip, we neglect our material needs, we act generously, without regard for mercenary calculation.
Although philosophers have - even to this day - studiously attempted to ignore the forthright homosexual love that is the basis of the Phaedrus and Symposium, gay readers have always found their way to these texts. What they have discovered there has often struck them with the force of revelation.
Socrates was born in 469 B.C. in the Greek city-state of Athens. In 399 B.C. he was tried on charges of corrupting the morals of Athenian youth and for religious heresies. He steadfastly denied guilt and was executed by poisoning.
I rank Socrates as the most influential gay person in history because of the essential philosophic underpinnings he provided - and has continued to provide - for gay men and women's search for identity and self-knowledge. Who we are began, in a sense, with him.
- The Gay 100, Paul Russell
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