Review: The Sacred Band by James Romm
4 out of 5 Stars | #TC103
Welcome to Third Cultured – a foreign policy and LGBTQIA+ politics newsletter – published by yours truly, Kyle Borland. My goal is to highlight the unique role Queer people play in the politics of the United States and the world-at-large.
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This edition:
Opinion Essay
Opinion Essay
Few things merge my loves of foreign policy and homosexuality, but The Sacred Band: Three Hundred Theban Lovers Fighting to Save Greek Freedom by James Romm does just that.
Granted, the 300 gay men at the center of the book are more of a lens to view a very specific point of Greek history when Theban leaders dominated the Greek City-States, before Alexander the Great put out the last flame of their autonomy. Ironically, Philip of Macedon was raised in Thebes as a ward and it was his military expertise that would bring the Age of the Sacred Band to an end.
Thebes created the Band in response to Sparta’s hegemonic overreach following the Peloponnesian War. With Athens subdued and with the full backing of the Great King in Persia, the Spartans wasted no time in dominating all of Greece, including taking the Theban’s storied citadel during their holiest festival.
In retaliation, Thebes would go on a 40-year sprint with the Sacred Band at its core that would see Greece’s traditionally third-ranked power become its hegemon. What makes this achievement relevant today (and to this newsletter) is that the Sacred Band was a 300 gay lovers, or more precisely 150 pairs, trained to protect one another to the death. Thebes believed strongly in eros, particularly in the power of homosexual male love to empower the pairs to their greatest capabilities.
One detail that stuck out to me was the formation’s foundation in charioteering. It was originally believed that two horses made a chariot slower than one horse, but as time went on, it proved the opposite. When there are two horses pulling a chariot, they end up competing with one another to run harder and they pull the chariot faster than either one ever could alone. The Thebans applied this philosophy to the Sacred Band.
Unfortunately, it could be said they were too successful.
After crushing Sparta’s army and securing power over Greece, Thebe’s success quickly spiraled out of control during a time of military innovation and upheaval that would see the treasures of Delphi melted down for ransome and war to retaliate against Thebes.
“Hellenism’s very core had been monetized and dispersed to warlords and thugs.”
I enjoyed the book, but it was haunting how familiar the decline of Classical Greek democracy sounded when compared to the United States today. Mercenaries and militias everywhere with a circus-worthy cast of “strongmen” leaders waiting for their opportunity to cut out a slice of power. These chaotic periods are always painful and temporary…but they’re almost always brought to an end by a tyrant.
If we learn one thing from the era of the Sacred Band, let it be that queerness is pivotal to democracy. Homosexuality is one of the purest expressions of human freedom and that has rang true for millennia, no matter who or what has tried to bury it.
Stay safe and get vaccinated, beautiful people. Thanks for reading.
Roll Tide,
Kyle (@kgborland)
PS – Here are some stories worth your time.
Comment: These people are a menace.
Afghanistan: A forgotten war in a "graveyard of empires" (CBS News)
Amazon workers petition and two quit over anti-LGBTQ book sales (NBC News)
Angela Merkel’s swan song in Washington (Washington Post)
Comment: I remember Merkel’s posters on light poles in 2005 at my bus stop. Merkel’s Germany is soon to be history and that is a strange feeling for me. End of an era.
(Source: GZERO) Anti-LGBT groups attack Pride office in Georgia's Tbilisi (Albawaba)
Beyond the Straight Gaze: The Complexity of Queer Suffering in Lit (Book Riot)
Biden nominated first out lesbian and first out LGBTQ+ person of color in U.S. history to be nominated for an ambassador-level position (Global Equality)
Black LGBTQ Individuals Experience Heightened Levels of Discrimination (CAP)
Boston Pride dissolves amid racial equity concerns (Bay Area Reporter)
California budget includes $3 million to train teachers on LGBTQ issues (NBC News)
Can a Novel Capture the Tensions of Recent Queer History? (The Nation)
China targets LGBT student organisations on social media in new wave of repression (South China Morning Post)
Comment: One of my biggest hesitations with leftism in the US is that communism/socialism have so far been incompatible with LGBTQ+ rights. In that arena, capitalism and social democracy excel. (Related: AP, BBC, CNN, OutRight International, The Verge)
Covid Didn’t Kill Cities. Why Was That Prophecy So Alluring? (NYTimes)
Do Not Intervene in Haiti (Eunomia)
Unless the Haitian government requests security assistance, the U.S. and the U.N. would be well-advised not to send foreign troops into the middle of Haiti’s political turmoil. Even if the Haitian government requested it, the U.S. should be very leery of embarking on yet another open-ended occupation. When outside governments intervene in the name of providing stability, there is tremendous resistance to ending the intervention for fear of undermining that same stability. A supposed short-term fix easily turns into a generational commitment. Even if that doesn’t happen, the U.S. needs to break the habit of assuming that political instability somewhere requires military intervention, whether by the U.S. or others.
EM Forster’s Maurice and the Urgency of Expanding Queer Genealogies (LitHub)
Excerpt from China's Civilian Army: The Making of Wolf Warrior Diplomacy by Peter Martin (Sinocism)
Federal agency moves to support LGBTQ health data collection (Bay Area Reporter)
Georgia Holds Pride March in Defiance of Attacks From Anti-LGBTQ+ Extremists (them.)
Georgian cameraman dies after attack by far-right, anti-LGBTQ mob (The Guardian)
Go to Yourself (Life is a Sacred Text)
Going towards ourselves—and learning to access the intuition that is constantly broadcasting the information we most need about how to make the decisions that we need to make—is how we grow into ourselves. It's the work of discerning between what we might want, (or think we want, or think that we should want) and what we need, about what the deepest part the self and soul demand. That discernment doesn't come easy. And sometimes it’s harder to do that work inside the complicated dance of embedded relationships. Consciously or not, we act the roles that other people expect of us, and their perceptions of who we are and who we can become shape and limit our own expectations of ourselves.
Hate crimes against transgender Californians spiked in 2020 (Bay Area Reporter)
There were 235 incidents of hate crimes motivated by bias on the basis of sexual orientation, compared to 263 in 2019, a decline of 24.2%. These include 182 motivated by bias against gay men, 21 motivated by bias against lesbians, and 28 motivated by bias against "homosexual" people. There were zero reports of hate crimes motivated by bias against heterosexual people, and just four motivated by bias against bisexual people.
But hate crimes motivated by bias against transgender people rose 72.2%, from 36 in 2019 to 62 in 2020. Hate crimes motivated by bias against gender-nonconforming people went from four instances in 2019 to six instances in 2020.
The report found that hate crimes motivated by bias against Black or African American people were the highest of any particular group, with 522 incidents reported, compared to 297 incidents in 2019, a rise of 75.8% in a single year.
This was the highest number of anti-Black hate crimes reported in over a decade at least, Bonta said.
How Beijing's Narrative of US Decline Is Leading to Strategic Overconfidence (CSIS)
How Hercules Became Antiquity's Brawny, Brainless Himbo (Jezebel)
In countries as different as Colombia and Lebanon, LGBTQ advocates are helping lead protests and build peace (Washington Post)
Israel’s high court opens the way for same-sex couples to have children via surrogacy (Washington Post)
LGBT visibility grows in Japan ahead of 'diversity' Olympics (Nikkei Asia)
LGBTQ art shows are lighting up museums from Boston to Berlin (NBC News)
Mj Rodriguez Becomes First Trans Woman Up for Major Acting Emmy (Variety)
Protests in Spain against suspected LGBT hate crime (Reuters)
‘Queer America’: SPLC podcast examines history, contributions of LGBTQ community (SPLCenter)
Queer apps often not found on Apple worldwide (Bay Area Reporter)
Ratchet & Clank's Nearly 20-Year History Started With a Graph Paper Note (Vice)
Red Vs are after China’s queer community (Protocol)
Russian supermarket chain pulls LGBTQ ad (France 24)
San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus dog-piled with death threats by QAnon conspiracy theorists (Pink News)
Study Finds 70% Of Americans Have Less Than $1,000 Saved To Go To Space (The Onion)
The Rustin Times Saved Me: An Anniversary Essay (Rustin Times)
The story behind the iconic Vietnam episode of 'Hey Arnold!' (NBC News)
The Subversive Joy of Lil Nas X’s Gay Pop Stardom (NYTimes)
Nas’s project, though, is to move past the mainstream and publicly acceptable practice of queerness, which is often so divorced from actual sexual pleasure that it can feel neutered. It’s one thing to accept a gay person, as many do, by ignoring what we do behind closed doors. But it’s quite another to embrace gay people as sexual beings, who can also enact an identity — just as straight people so proudly, publicly and lucratively do — in part through sex itself. Unlike many of his predecessors, Nas’s claim to his sexuality is explicit. He does not, say, sing love songs with elided pronouns. This is a man who has sex with other men. Even within the queer community, to have a young, strong, Black man openly identify as a bottom — a feminized position that’s often the target of misogynistic ire — is rare, a subversion of both power structures and social codes. It’s one thing to claim it; it’s another to brag about it: “I might bottom on the low,” he has sung, “but I top shit.”
The World’s Oldest Democracy Is One of Its Worst (Foreign Policy)
It is absolutely true that the legacy of slavery and legalized racism makes the United States different from virtually every other democracy in the world. Yet it is the gross politicization of the U.S. electoral process that allows parties at the state and federal level to reshape the rules to their own benefit. What one might call the United States’ “negative exceptionalism” arises not only from the role of race but from constitutional design—or rather from abuses made possible by that design.
Changing boundary lines to rig an election in your favor is, of course, a venerable U.S. tradition that goes by the name “gerrymandering.” Two features of the U.S. system make this form of backroom conniving possible: the delegation of authority to the states and the weakness of checks on party power at the state level. In A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective, author Steven A. Taylor noted that although a few other countries with federal systems, like Germany, give provincial governments power over local elections, only in the United States do states also set the rules for all federal elections. And politicians exercise virtually total control over electoral rules at the state level.
Three arrested after gay man beaten to death in Galicia, Spain (The Guardian)
US Supreme Court declines review of florist who discriminated against gay couple (Bay Area Reporter)
What’s in Biden’s budget for the police? (Speaking Security)
Wyoming Bar Sells Shirt Promoting the Shooting of Gay People (Advocate)
Xinjiang Denialists Are Only Aiding Imperialism (The Nation)
You Really Need to Quit Twitter (The Atlantic)
I floated downstairs and out to the garden to do some reading. I was excited about this particular book: the last volume of Kevin Starr’s magisterial history of California. I sat down and almost immediately I was returned to myself. For the past few years, I’ve felt a strange restlessness as I read, and the desk in my bedroom is piled with wonderful books I gave up on long before the halfway mark. I had started to wonder if we were in a post-reading age, or if reading loses its pleasure as we age—but I knew that wasn’t really true. Reading that book took me out of my own time and place, and I found myself once again wandering in a created world. I felt the old sensation of trying to slow down, so that the book would last a long time. I had suspected for a while that my reading problems had something to do with Twitter, and several times I’d tried leaving the phone in another room—but it was no good. Twitter didn’t live in the phone. It lived in me.
And that’s when I realized what those bastards in Silicon Valley had done to me. They’d wormed their way into my brain, found the thing that was more important to me than Twitter, and cut the connection.
Comment: I also realized Twitter stole my ability to read. I can dive into a book that really grabs me, but I can’t continuously read the way I did before 2009. I’ve been actively working on making it better, and deleting Twitter from my phone would probably be a great next step.
