LGBT History Month Events : Take The LGBT Trail To Learn About Life In Ancient Egypt

Whilst in countries like the United Kingdom we are able, for the most part,  to live our lives as members of the LGBT community, the sad reality is in many places around the world quite the opposite is true. And what is equally true is that whilst it’s hard to live openly in some places now, it was even harder in the past.

And that is what makes the Beyond Isis and Osiris: Alternative Sexualities in Ancient Egypt exhibtion that is being held at the Petrie Museum something very special.

Put on as part of LGBT History Month, a UK event that runs through February, this looks at lesbian and gay life in Ancient Egypt via 14 artefacts, something that admittedly isn’t a lot but as the organiser John J. Johnson says that is hardly surprising stating:

“That there is an ‘official’ somewhat censorious attitude towards homosexual acts in Pharaonic Egyptian culture is difficult to deny…The twenty-seventh declaration of the Book of the Dead is a confirmation by the deceased that he did not have homosexual relations.”

Acting to suggest this suppression proves that homosexual activity did occur, Johnson has evidence to back up such a claim, whether that be via a stela of Akhenaten and his wife Nefertiti which portrays  the heretic king in  effeminate light which suggests some hermaphroditic aspect to his heretic worship of Aten, the sun-disk and the Tale of Horus and Seth, a papyrus fragment that describes two gods laying down together where “

… At night, Seth let his member become stiff and he inserted it between the thighs of Horus…”

Also exploring the Classical Period, this exhibition looks at the alleged romance of Alexander the Great and Hephaestion, anda supposed affair between Emperor Hadrians and a young man called Antinous.

The LGBT Trail is on at the Petrie Museum at University College London until the end of the month.