Alex Vicente | Book project

As part of a broader research journey across several European capitals, exploring contemporary homosexual cultures and the historical narratives that shape them, my time in Athens will focus on the uneasy relationship between the classical imaginary of male homosexuality and its present-day realities. Athens occupies a singular place within this history: it has long been invoked as an origin, a model, and at times a fantasy in Western accounts of homosexual desire. Yet this inherited image is deeply constructed – an idealized projection that can also obscure and exclude. Rather than tracing a direct line between antiquity and the present, I am interested in the distance between them: the uses and distortions generated by this powerful imaginary, and the ways in which it may fail to shape contemporary homosexual life.