The World’s First Gay Love Story?

Thoughts on Gilgamesh and Enkidu by Chris Park

Gilgamesh was a historical king who reigned in the Mesopotamian city of Uruk in about 2750 BCE. He is the basis for the hero of the Epic of Gilgamesh, considered the oldest story in the world, a 1,000 years older than Homer’s Iliad or the Bible.

The first fragments were found in 1853, written in cuneiform on clay tablets found in the ruins of Nineveh, the ancient capital of Assyria. Cuneiform was not deciphered until 1857. In 1872, George Smith, a curator at the British Museum, realised that one of the fragments told the story of a Babylonian Noah. This stirred up a great deal of interest; the Victorians saw it as proof that the Great Flood had actually taken place.

The Epic is set out on 11 clay tablets, only 3 of which are even close to complete. So early translations are full of gaps and speculations. Over the next 120 years or so, more fragments were found and the language better understood, providing more complete and more fluent translations.

The Epic tells of an arrogant king (Gilgamesh) whom the gods decide to tame by providing him with an equal (Enkidu). Some scholars describe him as his servant and others as his ‘beloved friend’. They have various adventures, one of which results in Enkidu dying. To say the least, Gilgamesh’s grief is over the top. He then goes on to try to discover a way to become immortal, as he doesn’t fancy going through the horrors of death, as Enkidu has. He fails. C’est la vie.
According to author Stephen Miller [see Gilgamesh - A New English Version by Stephen Mitchell, Profile Books, 2004.], there may have been more to Gilgamesh and Enkidu’s relationship than at first appears.

In any case, it seems that Gilgamesh let being the son of a goddess and king go to his head:

The city is his possession, he struts

through it, arrogant, his head raised high,

trampling its citizens like a wild bull.

Gilgamesh got a bit unbearable (he really liked to practise his Droit de Seigneur). The people of Uruk turned to Anu, sky god and father of the gods for help. Anu commanded the goddess Aruru to:

“go and create

a double for Gilgamesh, his second self,
a man who equals his strength and courage,
a man who equals his stormy heart.
Create a new hero, let them balance each other
perfectly, so that Uruk has peace.”

Aruru wet her hands, took some clay: and fashioned a man, a warrior, a hero:

Enkidu the brave, as powerful and fierce
as the war god Ninurta. Hair covered his body,
hair grew thick on his head and hung
down to his waist, like a woman’s hair.

Enkidu was a wild man who roamed the wilderness naked, “ate grass with gazelles” and “drank clear water from the waterholes”. A trapper, upset because Enkidu was destroying his traps and therefore his livelihood, reported him to the king. Gilgamesh advised him to seek Shamhat, one of the priestesses of Ishtar, who dedicated their lives to what the Babylonians considered the sacred mysteries of sexual union.

Shamhat accompanied the trapper and used her sexual expertise to lure and calm Enkidu. They then headed back to Uruk.

Along the way, Shamhat told Enkidu of a dream that Gilgamesh had had and which he had asked Ninsun, his goddess mother to interpret. In his dream, Gilgamesh saw a bright star shoot across the morning sky, then fall at his feet. It lay before him, a huge people of Uruk came out to see it. They kissed its feet. Gilgamesh took it in his arms, embraced and caressed it the way a man caresses his wife.

Ninsun said:

Dearest child, this bright star from heaven,
this huge boulder that you could not lift -
it stands for a dear friend, a mighty hero.
You will take him in your arms, embrace and caress him
the way a man caresses his wife.
She also called this person ‘the companion of his heart’.

However, their first meeting didn’t start off well. A young couple had just married and Gilgamesh was on his way to their home to take up his droit de seigneur. However, Enkidu blocked the doorway ‘like a boulder’. Gilgamesh got angry, there was a fight of epic proportions (lots of grappling and limbs intertwined). Although he won, Gilgamesh’s anger left him and he turned away. Enkidu said some nice things about how strong he was and it being right that he was king, then:
They embraced and kissed. They held hands like brothers.
They walked side by side. They became true friends.

The next extracts come after Gilgamesh and Enkidu have killed the monster, Humbaba, guardian of the Cedar Forest, appointed by the god Enlil to protect it by terrifying men away. You don’t kill a god’s appointed guardian without there being a cost. In this case, the cost was Enkidu’s life. He fell ill, took to his bed and then died.

When he heard the death rattle, Gilgamesh moaned
like a dove. His face grew dark. “Beloved,
wait, don’t leave me. Dearest of men,
don’t die, don’t let them take you from me.”

Gilgamesh mourns the death of his ‘beloved friend’ extravagantly:
Hear me, elders, hear me, young men,
my beloved friend is dead, he is dead,
my beloved brother is dead, I will mourn
as long as I breathe, I will sob for him
like a woman who has lost her only child.
[And more…]

But Enkidu did not answer. Gilgamesh
touched his heart, but it did not beat.
Then he veiled Enkidu’s face like a bride’s.

Some of the symbolism used in references to Enkidu is interesting. In his dream of Enkidu’s arrival, Gilgamesh saw a meteorite (the boulder that fell from heaven); the word used for meteorite is similar to the word for a cultic male prostitute involved in the worship of Ishtar. He also refers to him as ‘the axe at my side’; the word for axe is similar to the word for a cultic performer who [and I quote] ‘typically, as a eunuch, took the female role in the sexual act’. Some scholars take this as a two-fold prediction for Gilgamesh of the arrival of a close friend who would also be his lover.

Finally, an extract from Book XII. Not traditionally shown as part of the Epic, it is acknowledged to be connected and Mitchell quotes from it in his notes to the book. It describes the return of Enkidu’s ghost from the underworld. Enkidu says to his friend (although the translation is a bit rough):
“If I am going to tell you the rules of the Netherworld that I saw,
sit you down (and) weep!”
“[(So)] let me sit down and weep!” [Gilgamesh]
“[My friend, the] penis that you touched so your heart rejoiced,
grubs devour [(it) … like an] old garment.
[My friend, the crotch that you] touched so your heart rejoiced,
it is filled with dust [like a crack in the ground.]”

On this basis, while the Epic itself makes no direct reference to a sexual relationship between the two heroes, Mitchell feels that in the excerpt from Book XII ‘the genital sexuality is explicit’.
I know what I think - you can judge for yourself.

A modern clay impression from an ancient cylinder seal showing Enkidu (left) and Gilgamesh (right) slaying the Bull of Heaven. The seal is Neo-Assyrian, 8th/7th century BC.

Gladys Bentley - “America's Greatest Sepia Piano Player”

Gladys Bentley (1907-1960) was an American blues singer during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 30s.
Bentley was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the daughter of American George Bentley and his Trinidadian wife, Mary Mote. By her own account, her childhood in Philadelphia was not a happy one. She was a "problem child," taunted  by her peers for being overweight and a tomboy. In an interview in Ebony magazine late in her life, Bentley remembered having crushes on women in her early childhood; these infatuations apparently alarmed her parents, who may have sought medical help for their daughter.
At 16, Bentley left her parents' home and ran away to New York. At first she made a meagre living in Harlem as a pianist and singer, playing primarily for rent parties. In the 1920s, she appeared at Harry Hansberry's "Clam House", one of New York City's most notorious gay speakeasies, and in the early 30s headlined at Harlem's Ubangi Club, where she was backed by a chorus line of drag queens. She was a 250 pound woman dressed in men's clothes (including a signature tuxedo and top hat), who played a mean piano and sang her own raunchy lyrics to popular tunes of the day in a deep, growling voice while flirting outrageously with women in the audience. She cultivated her image as a "bull dagger", openly flaunting her lesbianism not only in performance but also in public. In a much publicised ceremony, she even married her white lesbian lover.
As the Harlem speakeasies declined with the repeal of Prohibition, she relocated to southern California, where she was billed as "America's Greatest Sepia Piano Player" and the "Brown Bomber of Sophisticated Songs". She was frequently harassed for wearing men's clothing. During .WWII, Bentley increasingly relied on bookings at night spots catering to a homosexual clientele.
From the 1920s on, Bentley was often the subject of gossip columns. She made a huge impression on several writers and memoirists. In 1945 Langston Hughes, in The Big Sea, referred to her as "an amazing exhibition of musical energy - a large, dark, masculine lady, whose feet pounded the floor while her fingers pounded the keyboard - a perfect piece of African sculpture, animated by her own rhythm." She was also probably the model for Sybil, the lesbian piano player in Blair Niles' gay novel Strange Brother (1931).
However in the 1950s the limited tolerance that had been eroding since the Great Depression, finally collapsed. The McCarthy "witch hunts" were particularly vicious towards homosexuals. Although lesbian and gay organisations like The Daughters Of Bilitis and The Mattachine Society were formed at this time, the lives of many homosexuals were ruined. Bentley, who during her early career had been one of THE most open as regards her homosexuality, was of course a sitting duck for persecution. Out of fear for her own survival (particularly with an ageing mother to support) Gladys Bentley started wearing dresses, and sanitising her act. In 1950, Bentley wrote a desperate, largely fabricated article for Ebony entitled "I am Woman Again" in which she claimed to have cured her lesbianism via female hormone treatments and was finally at peace after a "hell as terrible as dope addiction".
She also claimed to have married newspaper columnist JT Gibson (who soon after publicly denied the marriage). In 1952 she does seem to have married a man named Charles Roberts. He was a cook and 16 years her junior.
At about this time, Bentley became an active and devoted member of "The Temple of Love in Christ, Inc.". She was about to become an ordained minister in the church when she died of a flu epidemic in 1960 at the age of 52.

Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gladys_Bentley, http://www.glbtq.com/arts/bentley_g.html and http://www.queerculturalcenter.org/Pages/Bentley/Index.html

Government rejects pardon request for Alan Turing

June 23 marks the centenary of Alan Turing's birth in London

The government has rejected calls for computer pioneer Alan Turing to be granted an official pardon for convictions for homosexuality dating back to the 1950s. The request was made via an online petition of over 23,000 signatures.

Justice Minister Lord McNally dismissed the motion in the House of Lords: "A posthumous pardon was not considered appropriate as Alan Turing was properly convicted of what at the time was a criminal offence."

In 2009 former Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued an official apology to Mr Turing, labelling the treatment he had received as "utterly unfair" and "appalling".

Anniversary
Mr Turing was one of the key members of the staff at Bletchley Park that worked to crack the German's Enigma codes, and Lord McNally acknowledged that in light of this work he had been treated harshly by the authorities.

"It is tragic that Alan Turing was convicted of an offence which now seems both cruel and absurd, particularly... given his outstanding contribution to the war effort," he said. "However, the law at the time required a prosecution and, as such, long-standing policy has been to accept that such convictions took place and, rather than trying to alter the historical context and to put right what cannot be put right, ensure instead that we never again return to those times."

Mr Turing committed suicide in 1954, two years after his conviction.

2012 marks the centenary of his birth. The occasion is being marked by a series of events around the world including a commemorative postage stamp issued by Royal Mail. In addition, LGBT History Month has adopted the theme of Science and Maths for 2013, to mark the centenary.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16919012

The Curious Case of Lady Stella and Miss Fanny

By  Chris Park - No Relation! (That I know of...)

On 28 April 1870 Lady Stella Clinton and Miss Fanny Winifred Park, otherwise known as Ernest Boulton (22) and Frederick William Park (23), attended a performance at the Strand Theatre, London, in full evening frocks. The police had been observing since 1869, and they were arrested, together with another man, while two of their associates escaped.
All of the men lived at separate addresses, but jointly kept a house where they would dress up before going out for the evening and where they sometimes stayed with friends for a day or two at a time.

The police inventory included 16 satin and silk dresses, a dozen petticoats, 10 cloaks or jackets, various hats and other feminine accoutrements. Their landlady described their dresses as "very extreme."

Boulton and Park played female parts in amateur theatricals in legitimate theatres, country houses and elsewhere. Earlier that month Fanny and Stella had attended the Oxford and Cambridge boat race, as women. They also frequented the theatres and Burlington Arcade dressed as men, but wearing make-up, winking at respectable gentleman, which was what had initially attracted the attention of the police.
They were arrested for appearing in public in women's clothes, a misdemeanour, but after a police surgeon examined them they were charged with "conspiracy to commit a felony" (ie. sodomy). Their initial appearance in the dock was startling; Boulton, with wig and plaited chignon, wore a cherry-coloured silk evening dress, trimmed with white lace, and bracelets on his bare arms, while Park, his flaxen hair in curls, wore a dark green satin dress, low necked, trimmed with black lace, and a black lace shawl, and a pair of white kid gloves.
The court was besieged by an enormous crowd through the committal proceedings, and the trial (The Queen v. Boulton, Park and Others) continued throughout most of May the following year.
One person connected with the case was Lord Arthur Pelham Clinton, MP, third son of the Duke of Newcastle. Boulton claimed "I am Lady Clinton, Lord Arthur's wife," and showed the wedding ring on his finger. Lord Arthur lodged near him, paid for Stella's hairdresser who came every morning, and had ordered from the stationers a seal engraved "Stella" and even visiting cards printed "Lady Arthur Clinton".
Lord Arthur's name was on the original indictment, but he died on 18 June 1870, age 29, before the case came to court, reportedly from scarlet fever exacerbated by anxiety (but in fact suicide). One full day during the trial was spent reading out more than a thousand letters by the defendants, most of which still exist in the National Archives. But conviction of conspiracy to commit a felony could not be sustained without proof of the actual commission of the felony; even the prosecution came to feel that all the evidence merely pointed to disgraceful behaviour.
It has been argued that the jury either did not comprehend the existence of the gay subculture (they certainly missed the meaning of the gay slang in the letters), or that they wilfully blinded themselves to the subversive facts of life. All the defendants were acquitted, to loud cheers and cries of "Bravo!" from the gallery.

Source: excerpts from: My Dear Boy: Love Letters through the Centuries (1998), Edited by Rictor Norton

James Barry, Inspector General

James Barry was born some time around 1792-1795 and died in 1865. He was a military surgeon in the British Army. After graduating from the University of Edinburgh, Barry served in India and Cape Town. By the end of his career, he had risen to the rank of Inspector General in charge of military hospitals. In his travels he not only improved conditions for wounded soldiers, but also the conditions of the native inhabitants.
Although Barry lived his adult life as a man, his biological sex is disputed. It is believed that Barry was born female as Margaret Ann Bulkley and chose to live as a man to be accepted as a university student and be able to pursue his chosen career as a surgeon. If so, Barry was the first female Briton to become a qualified medical doctor. It has also been theorised that Barry was intersex.
Evidence indicates that Barry was born in Ireland, the child of Jeremiah and Mary-Ann Bulkley. Her mother was the sister of the celebrated Irish artist and professor of painting at London's Royal Academy, James Barry. Letters suggest a conspiracy between Barry's mother and some of his uncle's influential, liberal-minded friends to get him into and through medical school.
Barry was accepted into the University of Edinburgh as a 'literary and medical student' in 1809. A financial record from the family solicitor shows that Margaret Bulkley travelled with her mother to Edinburgh by sea at the end of November 1809. A letter by James Barry to the same solicitor, sent on 14 December, in which he asks for any letters for him to be forwarded to Mrs Bulkley, mentions that '...it was very usefull [sic] for Mrs Bulkley (my aunt) to have a Gentleman to take care of her on Board Ship and to have one in a strange country...', indicating that this was when the change of gender was made. Although the letter was signed by Barry, the solicitor wrote on the back of the envelope 'Miss Bulkley, 14th December’.
Barry qualified with a Medical Doctorate in 1812, then moved back to London. Here he signed up for the Autumn Course 1812-13 as a pupil of the United Hospitals of Guy’s and St Thomas'. On July 2, he successfully took the examination for the Royal College of Surgeons of England, subsequently qualifying as a Regimental Assistant.
Barry was commissioned as a Hospital Assistant with the British Army on July 6, 1813, taking up posts in Chelsea and then the Royal Military Hospital in Plymouth. He may have served in the Battle of Waterloo. After that he served in India and then in South Africa, arriving in Cape Town between 1815 and 1817.
In a couple of weeks he became the Medical Inspector for the colony. During his stay, he arranged for a better water system for Cape Town and performed one of the first successful Caesarean sections - the boy was christened James Barry Munnik. He also gained enemies by criticising local handling of medical matters. He left Cape Town in 1828.
His next postings included Mauritius in 1828, Trinidad & Tobago and the island of St Helena. In St Helena he got into trouble for leaving for England unannounced. Later he served in Malta, Corfu, the Crimea, Jamaica and in 1831, Canada.
By this time he had reached the rank of Inspector General, HM Army Hospitals. However, during his next posting in Saint Helena he got into trouble with the internal politics of the island, was arrested and sent to home and demoted to Staff Surgeon. His next posting was the West Indies in 1838.
In the West Indies he concentrated on medicine, management and improving the conditions of the troops and was later promoted to Principal Medical Officer. In 1845, Barry contracted yellow fever and left for England for sick leave in October.
Barry was posted to Malta in late 1846. During his stay he had to deal with the threat of a cholera epidemic that eventually arrived in 1850. He left Malta for Corfu in 1851 as a Deputy Inspector-General of Hospitals and in 1857 went to Canada now an Inspector-General. In that position, he fought for better food, sanitation and proper medical care for prisoners and lepers, as well as soldiers and their families.
James Barry retired in 1864, reputedly against his wishes, and returned to England. He died from dysentery in July 1865 and the charwoman who took care of the body, Sophia Bishop, was the first to discover his female body. She revealed the truth after the funeral. Many people claimed to "have known it all along". The British Army sealed all records for 100 years.
He was buried in Kensal Green Cemetery with the only name he was ever known by and with full rank. His manservant, John, subsequently returned to Jamaica.

Barry was not always a pleasant fellow to be around. He could be tactless, impatient, argumentative and opinionated. He reputedly fought a couple of duels when someone commented on his voice, features or professionalism. He was punished many times for insubordination and discourteous behaviour but often received lenient sentences. During the Crimean War, he got into an argument with Florence Nightingale.
He appears to have had a good bedside manner and professional skills. He tried to improve sanitary conditions wherever he went and to better the conditions and diet of the common soldier. He reacted indignantly to unnecessary suffering. These traits annoyed his peers. He was a vegetarian and teetotaller, yet reputedly recommended wine baths for some patients.
Source:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Barry_%28surgeon%29

UPDATED on 21 November 2013:

Jenni Orme, who works in Archives and Records Knowledge at The National Archives and is a member of the LGBT History Project, has put online some documents about James Barry. They include the Letter Patent which appointed him as an Inspector General of Hospitals and some correspondence regarding the question of his gender.

Jenni Orme, Archives and Records Knowledge

http://www.exploreyourarchive.org/explore-your-archive-the-strange-case-of-dr-james-barry.asp

ENDED

But live links include:

http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C2358050 - to access the records regarding Dr Barry, and
https://images.nationalarchives.gov.uk/assetbank-nationalarchives/action/viewAsset?id=54771&index=182&total=1000&categoryId=64&categoryTypeId=3&collection=Army&sortAttributeId=701&sortDescending=false - to see an image of part of a letter in Dr Barry's own hand. 

Knowing Your Own Heart

Reading the diaries of Anne Lister
by Dr Louise Chambers

When researching lesbian history, it’s not always easy to identify same sex desires between women because, firstly (and most obviously), it was not always possible for women to express their desires for each other and, secondly, it is not always easy to differentiate between female friendships that are intimate, but platonic, and others that could nowadays be described as ‘lesbian’.  However, every so often, historians will encounter a woman who makes our research a little easier and one of these women is the remarkable Anne Lister, who had the presence of mind to chronicle her life in a series of journals. Of course, Anne had to be a little careful, so she coded parts of the diary entries but, thanks to sterling work by historian Helena .Whitbread, they were decoded and we are now able to read them in “I Know My Own Heart” and .“No Priest But Love”, both of which are edited by Helena Whitbread herself.

Anne Lister was born on 3 April 1791 at Halifax in West Yorkshire.  She had four brothers, but they were all dead by 1813, and consequently, in 1815, she inherited the family property at Shibden Hall in Halifax.  Anne’s companions at the Hall were her Uncle James and Aunt Anne, both of whom had a very liberal attitude towards what women were permitted to do.  Consequently, Anne Lister had a great deal of freedom and made the most of this by engaging in what would have been considered some very .‘unladylike’ activities, including self-education (she studied Greek, Latin, mathematics and geometry and read Gibbon and Rousseau), shooting and travelling extensively.  Anne was the first woman elected to the committee of the Literary and Philosophical Society (Halifax branch) and took an active interest in schools in the area.  She managed her estates, dealt with the business of farming, and developed coal-mining on her land. Much of her working life was spent out of doors supervising workmen and, at times, tackling some of the physical tasks herself.  Apparently, Anne was known locally as ‘Gentleman Jack’, and her ‘masculine’ appearance did cause some comments which Anne herself notes in some of her diary entries. She wrote, in 1818:
“Sunday 28 June [Halifax] The people generally remark, as I pass along, how much I am like a man.  I think they did it more than usual this evening.  At the top of Cunnery Lane, as I went, three men said, as usual, ‘That’s a man’ and one axed [sic] ‘Does your cock stand?’”(1)
 

Anne was in no doubt about her sexual orientation.  The diaries are full of accounts of her passions for other women – and her frustration when the objects of her desire prefer marriage to a more unconventional life with Anne.  The woman who vexed her most and with whom she had a long and complex relationship, was Marianne Lawton (née Belcombe), referred to as ‘M-’ in the journals.  Anne enjoyed a friendship and sexual liaison for a number of years, before Marianne married a rich, old widower called Charles Lawton.  Anne hoped that the old man would die soon after the marriage (perhaps after impregnating her lover) and the two women would live happily ever after, combining both fortunes and families.  Unfortunately, things did not quite work out that way.  Four years later, he was still alive and Marianne’s ardour (for Anne) seemed to have somewhat cooled.  Although the women continued to have clandestine meetings with each other, in an entry dated 17 July 1822, Anne describes how low and melancholy she feels because Marianne does not even want to conjecture on how much longer the couple would have to wait before her husband’s demise.
 

Matters came to a head to some extent in August 1822, when Anne’s frustration seemed to boil after an unhappy night with Marianne:

“Wednesday 20 August [Halifax]
Soon began on the erotics last night.  Her warmth encouraging…She seemed very affectionate and fond of me.  Said I was her only comfort.  She would be miserable without me…[I said] ‘This is adultery to all extent and purposes.’ ‘No, no, ‘ said she.  Oh, yes, ‘M-.  No casuistry can disguise it.’ ‘Not his then, but the other.’ ‘Well,’ said I, choosing to let the thing turn her way. ‘I always considered your marriage legal prostitution. We were both wrong. You to do it and I to consent to it.’… Mary, you have passion like the rest but your caution cheats the world out of its scandal, & your courage is weak rather than your principal [sic] strong…The time, the manner of her marriage. To sink January, 1815, into oblivion! Oh, how it broke the magic of my faith forever.”(2)
 

Anne’s suspicion that Marianne’s feelings towards her were cooling were not helped by ‘M-’s’ behaviour when they were together in public.  Anne did not have a very ‘feminine’ figure and this, coupled with the clothes she wore, used to attract the stares of others in their circle:

“Tuesday 16 September [Scarborough]
…M- came up to me for a few minutes before dinner…We touched on the subject of my figure. The people staring so on Sunday had made her then feel quite low…She knew well enough that I had staid in the house to avoid her being seen with me. .‘Yet,’ said I, ‘taking me altogether, would you have me changed?’ ‘Yes,’ said she, ‘To give you a feminine figure.’…She had just before observed that I was getting mustaches [sic] & that when she first saw this it made her sick.”(3)
 

Anne is now 32, and realises that she could end up a lonely woman if she does not find a worthy companion:  the dream of a life with Marianne seems no longer viable:
 

“Sunday 28 September [York]
I fancy she would sometimes rather be without me. She too much makes me feel the necessity of cutting a good figure in society & that, if I was in the background, she would not be the one to help me forward. She is not exactly the woman of all hours for me. She suits me best at night. In bed she is excellent.”(4)
 

It took another two years before Anne finally accepted – during an extended visit to Paris – that she and Marianne would never have a life together , but they still continued to see each other, on and off, for at least another 10 years.  However, by 1833, at the age of 41, Anne had renewed an acquaintance with Ann Walker, another heiress whose land neighboured that of Shibden. The women eventually decided to exchange vows and rings, and live together,  and Ann Walker remained Anne’s companion until 1840, when Anne died of fever during a trip to Georgia.
 

Anne Lister’s diaries make absorbing reading for a number of reasons: they describe everyday life in early 19th century Yorkshire in fascinating detail, they chronicle Anne’s travels to various parts of the world, and they also clearly illustrate the passion that Anne felt for other women and the frustration she felt when her passions were not always reciprocated.  It is that final element which ultimately, I think, is the most moving. Anne and Marianne are clearly very much in love with each other but the romance is doomed because one of the women is not prepared to give up her (heterosexual) privileges and so, as Anne herself put it, Marianne ‘cheats the world out of its scandal’ (and Anne out of a life of happiness).  It is a story, I suspect, which still resonates with some lesbians today. Maybe that is why Anne is sometimes described as ‘the first modern lesbian’?

Footnotes
1. Extract from “I Know My Own Heart: the diaries of Anne Lister”, Helena Whitbread (ed), p.48-9.
2. ibid., p.281-2
3. ibid., p295-6
4. ibid., p303-4

NB. Both books, “I Know My Own Heart” and “No Priest But Love”, edited by Helena Whitbread, are still available to purchase – provided you can find them!  You may need to do a bit of surfing on-line.  In 2010, the BBC dramatised the diaries under the rather naff (but predictable) title, “The Secret Diaries of Anne Lister”, which featured Maxine Peake as Anne.

Niankh-khnum & Khnum-hotep

In 1964 in the ancient necropolis of Saqqara, Egyptian archaeologist Mounir Basta discovered a series of rock-cut passages into the escarpment facing the causeway to the pyramid of Unas. Crawling on his hands and knees through the passages, Basta came upon an Old Kingdom offering chamber. He was impressed with its unique scenes of two men in an intimate embrace.

Archaeologists working on the restoration of the causeway discovered that some of the stone blocks that had been used to build the causeway had been appropriated in ancient times from a dismantled mastaba (a type of ancient Egyptian tomb) that had originally served as the entrance to the tomb. The archaeologists reconstructed the mastaba using the blocks found in the substructure of the causeway. It was revealed that this tomb had been built for two men to cohabit and that both shared identical titles under the Pharaoh Niuserre of the Fifth Dynasty: "Overseer of the Manicurists in the Palace of the King."

In April 1997 Greg Reeder presented a paper before the annual meeting of The American Research Center In Egypt held that year in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The paper was entitled "The Tomb of Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep: New Perspectives." In it he compared how husband and wife were portrayed in tombs of the 4th, 5th and 6th Dynasties to how Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep were paired in their tomb. The iconographic evidence indicating that the two manicurists had a very intimate and special relationship with each other that compared most favourably with that of mixed gendered couples. Reeder's presentation was well received.

This interpretation has proved controversial. Some critics argue that, as both men appear to have been married and had children, they were probably brothers rather than loves. However, it is not unknown in some cultures (though, I confess I am unsure if this applies to Ancient Egyptian culture) for men (most history tells us about men rather than women) to marry to continue the family line, while at the same time having loving relationships with other men.

Sources:

http://www.egyptology.com/niankhkhnum_khnumhotep/index.html

http://andrejkoymasky.com/liv/egy/egy1.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khnumhotep_and_Niankhkhnum

http://www.egyptology.com/niankhkhnum_khnumhotep/dallas.html