Dare to Speak Its Name
Pederasty in the Classical Tropes of Call Me by Your Name
When this year’s Oscar nominations were announced, no one seemed surprised to see Luca Guadagnino’s luscious film Call Me by Your Name receive nominations for Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Original Song. Audiences seem to have been keen to read the story of an affair between an American graduate student and his advisor’s teenage son in 1980s Italy, saturated in the imagery of a romantic classical Mediterranean, as a moving gay love story, and to welcome it into mainstream cinema.
I want to suggest that we should pause over this development. Call Me by Your Name’s use of classicizing tropes about homoeroticism and homosexuality — indeed, playing up these tropes to a greater extent than the 2007 novel by André Aciman on which it was based — raises important questions about the relationship of classical reception to contemporary notions of male homosexuality, and about the problems with how classical tropes have historically been used to create familiar, reassuring, or positive depictions of love between men.
To understand how this is the case, we need to go back 150 years to pick up a strand of classical reception that a Victorian poet and classics teacher called William Johnson Cory could be said to have originated, and to explore how the themes taken up by him and his later readers shaped classicized representations of homoeroticism and homosexuality. Johnson Cory is not a household name today, but his poetry about the tantalizing and tragic beauty of youth was part of the context in which members of the English gay canon like Oscar Wilde and E.M. Forster wrote. The artistic and literary works associated with what was known in the nineteenth century as the “Uranian” literary movement helped to mainstream certain forms of homoerotic desire and masculine friendship — which often included the valorization of what we would now consider to be sexual abuse of children.
Guadagnino’s film may be a beautiful piece of cinema, but it also raises important questions about consent, the relationship between erotics and aesthetics, how we use classical tropes in 2018, and the need to think really carefully about the benefits and the disadvantages of associating contemporary queer identities with classical antiquity.
Our story starts in the autumn of 1858, when a slim volume of poetry called Ionica was making a stir in England’s elite educational institutions. Its author was William Johnson, a teacher beloved among his students and colleagues at Eton but little-known beyond the school. Ionica, a mix of original compositions and translations of Greek lyric poetry, ticked a lot of Victorian boxes. Its themes include death and mourning, loss of faith, nature, the celebration of athletic and martial masculinity, and romanticized ideas of childhood and youth. Its overall message is that the poems’ speaker, like all schoolmasters, can only look on wistfully while boys grow up and move on to more exciting lives. It became popular within the particular masculine culture that schools like Eton celebrated in the mid-nineteenth century. A generation of boys and young men became familiar with the book through receiving it as a prize for their own efforts in translation or English verse.
But even as Ionica enjoyed the kind of mainstream success accorded to other Victorian and Edwardian accounts of lost youth, from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to Peter Pan, there was another side to its popularity. For some of the teenagers and young men of the 1850s and ’60s who encountered Johnson, his romanticization of boyhood struck a chord because it gave voice to the longing they felt for friends, classmates, or boys on the street glimpsed in passing. His translations told them where to look for literature whose content placed it outside the bounds of their school curricula, but which their classical educations had given them the tools to decipher.
For example, when in 1858 an eighteen-year-old Oxford student approached his Latin tutor full of questions about where the ancients stood on love between men, the tutor suggested that he read Ionica. Inspired by the poems, the student dashed off a fan letter to Johnson; in reply, he recalled, he received “a long epistle on paiderastia in modern times, defending it and laying down the principle that affection between people of the same sex is no less natural and rational than the ordinary passionate relations.”
That eighteen-year-old was John Addington Symonds, an early theorist of male homosexuality. Johnson spurred Symonds to a life’s work of understanding love between men, which in turn shaped the ideas of other men who found in Johnson’s elegies to lost youth an expression of their innermost longings. A key to what this meant to them lies in that word Symonds used in his recollection: paiderastia; literally, love for boys or children. To Johnson, the purest and noblest vessels for an adult man’s affections were the innocent, brave, and clever adolescent boys whom he encountered in his classroom.
This isn’t to say that Johnson advocated having sex with students (though some of his later readers certainly did). Longing gazes were more his line. But through Johnson’s poetry, many public-school-and-Oxbridge men looking for language with which to express their desires tried, at least at first, to conceptualize them through the “paiderastia” model.
When Symonds was twenty-eight, he fell in love with a seventeen-year-old, and got a job teaching Greek literature at the boy’s school so that he could cultivate a relationship with him. In their twenties, Symonds’ group of friends, all of whom worked in schools or universities, made a performance of falling passionately in love with teenagers, writing Johnson-esque poetry, and dissuading each other from acting on their desires.
Some of these men would, by the end of their lives, identify as “homosexual”; others would marry and display no more interest in beautiful boys. But by the 1870s, the kind of romance of youth in which Johnson luxuriated was becoming suspect. Masculine educational culture preferred the camaraderie of the rugby team to the cultivation of intimate friendships. Symonds’ own headmaster, at Harrow, resigned when love letters he had written to a student came to light. In 1868, Eton’s Classics-loving headmaster Edward Balston was succeeded by the athlete J.J. Hornby, who sought to reorganize the school’s culture around sports and the boarding-house system instead of more informal connections between teachers and students.
In 1872, Hornby fired Johnson. We don’t know the exact reasons, but we can assume they were scandalous, because he left in disgrace. He moved to the country and changed his surname to Cory. Eton kept using the Classics curriculum he’d written, but removed his name from the textbooks. Three years later, Hornby also fired the popular housemaster Oscar Browning, a former student of Johnson’s, in part because of a power struggle — Browning was unwilling to subject his house to Hornby’s athletic regime — but also because Browning was seen to be dangerously close to certain students.
Hornby likely felt he had purged his school of dangerous influences, while to Cory and to Browning, it seemed as if they had been cast out of the Garden of Eden. But out in the world they, and others like them, continued to attract coteries of young men for whom friendship and ideas, Pindar and Praxiteles, mattered more than rugby or rowing.
Few now remember Cory’s name. But through interpreters such as Symonds and Browning, and through their students and their students’ students in England’s elite educational institutions, the ideal of paiderastia played an outsize role in how elite men conceived of same-sex desire well into the twentieth century.
And so we come to a scene fairly early on in Call Me by Your Name, before the protagonists Elio (Timothée Chalamet) and Oliver (Armie Hammer) get together, when, to the viewer, all is silence and glances and sexual tension. In the film, Elio’s father is an archaeologist given to vague disquisitions on the nature of beauty; in this scene, his team have recovered from the ocean a bronze statue, a male nude, said to be after the model of the fourth-century Athenian sculptor Praxiteles. In the look-not-touch mode of Victorian classicized homoeroticism, the purity and noble beauty of Praxiteles’ interpretation of the male form loomed large — so it is no surprise that Call Me by Your Name should feature a larger-than-life bronze lying on a Mediterranean beach. So far, so much homoerotic cliché.
Except that this scene does not appear in André Aciman’s novel, where Elio’s father is a philosopher, not an archaeologist, and the work that he and Oliver do is not so identified with modern British classicized homoerotism. Aciman references classical antiquity, but within a somewhat different intellectual landscape: its authors are Heraclitus, Plotinus, and fictional contemporary Italian literary figures whom Oliver and Elio meet on a trip to Rome.
Though the tension and the passion of the affair between Oliver and Elio is no less tantalizing and compelling in the novel, it’s, in a word, less gay than in the film. Not only are Aciman’s characters clearly identified not to be gay — Elio identifies as bisexual; Oliver is, in the time-honored manner of New England prep-school boys, experimenting — their love affair takes place in a more historically specified setting, including references to the literary culture of 1980s Rome and to the specter of AIDS. Aciman’s is no less a romantic setting than the more abstracted world of Praxitelean beauty imagined by the film’s screenwriter, James Ivory. But the ways in which the film Call Me by Your Name reads — somewhat heavy-handedly — as a gay film, a gay love story, seem largely to have been Ivory’s invention.
Given who Aciman and Ivory are, this makes sense. Reviews and interviews from 2007, when Aciman’s book came out, state that the author has a wife and children, and that his same-sex sex scenes were not based on personal experience. Aciman grew up in the wealthy, cosmopolitan Jewish community of Alexandria, moving first to Rome as a teenager and then to New York, where he still lives. His other work has dealt with themes that are prominent in Call Me by Your Name: growing up, loss, the passage of time, identity, Jewishness.
James Ivory is a generation older than Aciman, a Californian who spent forty-five years in a relationship with his romantic and business partner Ismail Merchant (until Merchant’s death in 2005), and who has been inspired throughout his career by the English homoerotic literary tradition. Merchant and Ivory became world-famous for their luscious 1980s adaptations of, among other things, E.M. Forster’s novels — novels which were born out of a life lived within, and a desire to criticize, the same world that Johnson Cory had inhabited two generations before Forster. Like Cory, Forster attended King’s College, Cambridge and was a member of the secretive Apostles essay society; unlike Cory, Forster denounced the moral duplicity of a culture which revered classical antiquity while condemning and censoring reference to the love between men that he believed it sanctioned.
This is some of the context for Forster’s novel Maurice, the first gay love story with a happy ending. Maurice was written in 1913 but not published until 1971, after sex between men had been decriminalized in England and Wales. It thus brought classicizing homoeroticism to life again for a new generation, as did Merchant and Ivory’s film adaptation of the novel in 1987. Even at the height of the AIDS crisis, moviegoers could watch Maurice and Alec realize their love for each other against the backdrop of the Parthenon friezes in the British Museum. Thirty years later, this scene is echoed in Call Me by Your Name, when Ivory has Elio and Oliver lock eyes over that Praxitelean bronze.
To be sure, there are references to the classical tradition in the novel. Aciman characterizes both seventeen-year-old Elio and twenty-four-year-old Oliver as absurdly well-read. Their idea of low-key fun bonding is to translate the Italian Romantic poet Giacomo Leopardi into ancient Greek. Searching for metaphors with which to characterize his desire for Oliver, the narrator Elio does refer, for example, to images of martial comradeship from Homer. But it’s telling that this highly literate, multilingual teenager, who surely has choices, opts for the Iliad instead of the Symposium. As he expresses throughout the novel, his desire for Oliver is the stuff of bromance as much as romance, of homosociality as much as homosexuality, of identification as much as desire.
The novel is narrated in the past tense, Elio looking back upon that fateful summer from the vantage point of middle age. This allows Elio to emphasize his relative naiveté and inexperience with same-sex desire as a teenager. It’s an authentic depiction of adolescent sexuality — confused and somewhat out of control — which contrasts with Oliver’s knowledge and ingenuity. Of one of their first interactions, Elio says, “We were — and he must have recognized the signs long before I did — flirting.” Later, we see Oliver pushing, testing: touching Elio intimately, standing over him while he sleeps, catching him alone, while the narrator refers to Oliver’s cunning: his skill as a poker player, as a “thoroughly alert, cold, sagacious judge of character.” Elio describes his desire for Oliver as intense and overwhelming, but his characterization of Oliver also allows for the reading that Oliver plotted all along to seduce him.
This atmosphere of seduction is why the novel (and the film’s) most graphic sex scene features an extensive discussion of Ovid, the go-to text for seductive images. (If you would prefer not to read about a graphic sex scene, you might want to skip the next paragraph.)
Elio, alone in his bedroom, fantasizes about having sex with Oliver while he masturbates into a ripe peach. Elio’s thoughts and actions are described in detail, and we follow his stream of consciousness from the humorous teenage transgression of doing something outrageous with a food item to “scann[ing] my mind for images from Ovid.” He imagines that a god has turned a “young girl” into a peach to punish her for rejecting his sexual advances, and then has raped her. It is this image that, we are told, spurs Elio to orgasm. His climax is followed by a particularly graphic and shocking analogy:
The bruised and damaged peach, like a rape victim, lay on its side on my desk, shamed, loyal, aching, and confused, struggling not to spill what I’d left inside. It reminded me that I had probably looked no different on his [Oliver’s] bed last night after he’d come inside me the first time.
Oliver and Elio’s affair exists in a world in which rape can be translated into something sexy, something pornographic — just as, as Emily Wilson has recently observed, there is a long history of classical translation that obscures the violence inherent in the kinds of stories found in classical authors like Ovid where a god rapes a woman who has been transformed into a plant or animal. It is also, therefore, a world in which rape can hide behind, and be entwined with, the romantic love story that readers from James Ivory to the Best Picture nominations committee might want Call Me by Your Name to be.
As a thirty-seven-year-old reader of William Johnson Cory who fell disastrously in love with a twenty-one-year-old undergraduate once wrote, “The truth is rarely pure and never simple.” In Aciman’s novel, Elio’s reaction to Oliver’s attentions is mostly thrilled and anxious silence — he never verbally expresses consent. Yet, in the extended conclusion to the novel that takes place many years after Oliver and Elio’s affair (in contrast to the film, which ends just a few months later), when Elio turns up unexpectedly in Oliver’s small college town, we get the sense that Elio is the well-adjusted one, able to articulate what Oliver meant to him in an overall narrative of his life, while Oliver remains tortured and repressed and unable to explain or contextualize his feelings for Elio.
Both men, though, look back on their summer together as a lost time of golden youth, from which their lives have inevitably fallen: when they are old, Elio says, “We’ll speak about two young men who found much happiness for a few weeks and lived the remainder of their lives dipping cotton swabs into that bowl of happiness, fearing they’d use it up, without daring to drink more than a thimbleful on ritual anniversaries.” William Johnson Cory said much the same thing in letters to his friends after he was exiled from Eton in 1872.
Reading Call Me by Your Name alongside the life and work of William Johnson Cory, and alongside the classical texts with which both are in conversation, reminds us that there are genealogies of male homoeroticism that don’t find their ultimate fulfillment in contemporary, socially acceptable ways of thinking about LGBTQ identities and legal equality. When scholars of queer history and identity grapple with the role that ideas about “paiderastia” have played in the formation of male homosexual identity in particular, we often do so awkwardly and uncomfortably — recognizing, it seems, the ways in which the presence of such troubling ideas in the lives and oeuvres of canonical figures might disrupt, and ruin, the rehearsal of inspirational narratives of liberation.
As a historian, I take some powerful lessons from this dynamic, and from the ways in which it has become endemic to my own research on elite male homoeroticism in Britain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. So often, narratives of progress prove illusory; efforts to sort the past into goodies and baddies will fail; the utility of the past as a guide to the present is at best limited; all of your faves are problematic.
Put differently, James Ivory’s and Luca Guadagnino’s efforts to translate André Aciman’s novel to the screen are steeped in a set of tropes about elite male homoeroticism whose entire point is the seduction of the adolescent pais kalos. So go to see the film, marvel at its luscious beauty, and maybe along the way ask yourself some questions about how it is that, in the course of our present public conversation about gender, sexuality, and the rich and famous, this film has been nominated for a Best Picture Oscar. Perhaps that might be the starting point for a more sophisticated, reflective understanding of how our culture thinks about gender, sex, and sexuality, and of the part that classicists, historians, and other scholars might have to play in unraveling it.
Emily Rutherford is a historian of modern Britain and a graduate student at Columbia University. Her dissertation is about opposition to coeducation at British universities between 1860 and 1930. She also works and has published on elite masculinity, homosociality, and homosexuality in modern Britain. Follow her on Twitter @echomikeromeo.
