2024
Our army of lovers

Νοva Melancholia, Sebastian, 2024, PLYFA Space.
Courtesy of the artists.
“It is that thing whose first experience you fear.
A thing too hard to handle. A thing too hard to face.
It is that thing that, when you finally give in,
becomes a life essential that changes everything.”
From the song “Sex” by Giorgos Marinos, 1984
I am not of the generation that experienced first-hand the outbreak of HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus), which can lead to AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome).1 As I came of age, however, I bore witness to the lingering stigma and fear that simmered beneath its every mention – in chats with friends, for instance, or conversations with gynaecologists, or reports in the media. The collective trauma inflicted by the epidemic is still fresh in the minds of my generation. How can anyone forget such statements as the ones made by Pat Buchanan – White House Communications Director under President Reagan – that AIDS was nature taking its revenge on homosexuals,2 or by Sir Alfred Sherman in a letter to the Times stressing that AIDS was a problem of “undesirable minorities… mainly sodomites and drug-abusers, together with numbers of women who voluntarily associate with this sexual underworld”.3 According to Charitini Karakostaki, “Though the virus never reached the levels of a true epidemic in Greece, it was still a marked threat that reduced the resonance of an emerging discourse centred around sexual liberation and gave precedence to a discourse centred around healthcare and the control of sexual behaviour”.4 The virus began to draw extensive attention in the Greek press from 1985 onwards.5 The disease, which the media dubbed a “foreign invasion”, was particularly distressing for the Greek LGBTQI+ community, which had just managed to block legislation that would, on the pretext of preventing sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), have criminalised public displays of their sexuality at a time when the public realm was the primary space in which they met, interacted, and – in many cases – engaged in sexual encounters. The bill “on venereal disease and other related issues” drafted by the Georgios Rallis-led government in 1981 sought to eradicate and limit the spread of STDs, but, in essence, would have legalised the systematic record, policing, and criminalisation of homosexual and trans sex lives, and authorised the breach of patient confidentiality. The Greek Homosexual Liberation Movement (AKOE), who was first to spot and draw attention to the authoritarian nature of the bill, publicly argued that the Greek government had no real interest in treating STDs when it was actively targeting their communities, along with the places and spaces where they socialised, cruised, and had sex (such as parks and bars), and imprisoning homosexual couples and trans sex workers on public health grounds.
The virus was given various names – such as “gay cancer” and “gay plague” – that sought to demarcate it and cordon it off. The LGBTQI+ community, as the main target group of these misnomers, lost the fragile freedoms it had just begun to secure and, moreover, found its very existence to be under threat. Those diagnosed HIV-positive found themselves socially excluded, fired from their jobs, unable to access public services, evicted from their homes, and denied treatment by doctors. The shift in the assignation of HIV from just another sexually transmitted infection to a disease with social aspects activated a punitive societal imaginary that read the virus as a warranted comeuppance for guilty, marginal pleasures and errant behaviours (such as non-heteronormative sex, drug use, and sex work), irreparably stigmatising LGBTQI+ persons and sex workers through the coerced internalisation of unjust condemnation. Forced to cope with changes to their bodies and impending death, their physical impairment and pain were coupled with feelings of shame and despair. Michel Foucault set out similar concerns with regard to how bio-power “endeavours to administer, optimise, and multiply [life], subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations” that spring not from disease management but from the moralistic management of each individual and their desires, forcing them to conform to the moral codes of the bourgeoisie.6

David Wojnarowicz, Peter Hujar Dreaming/Yukio Mishima: St. Sebastian, 1982. Acrylic and spray paint on masonite, 48 x 48 in. (121.9 x 121.9 cm). Copyright Estate of David Wojnarowicz, Courtesy of the Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P·P·O·W, New York.
In their battle against the forces of death and against the mistrust levelled at them within their social setting, some ended up not just victims but warriors too. The scaremongering of “experts” disinformation in the media, and prejudice shown by the authorities all contextualised the act of love as some deadly activity. This suppression of desire provided yet another cause for resistance, calling for solidarity between persecuted sexual identities and the mobilisation of an “army of lovers” comprising bodies that each cared for the other, that shielded one another, that offered protection and defence in the face of threatening and distressing functions of society itself and of dominant media narratives, in the face of ignorance and taboos, and of cultural, legal, moral, and religious restrictions. The “weapons” at this army’s disposal were actions: filing lawsuits against police officers, attending academic conferences, articulating opposition to political and medical terminology, for example, replacing the term “high-risk groups” with “high-risk practices”, protesting outside newspaper offices, writing open letters, organising sex-worker rallies, drafting articles, talking with political parties and groups, presenting petitions signed by supporters, and more. Oddly enough, the battles that arose out of the HIV crisis ended up sparking not only an open discussion of physical love but also the implementation of key changes in public policy that centre on practices relating to sexual health.
According to Douglas Crimp,7 since the reality of the virus is subjective, its true experience can be identified in artistic practices that “conceptualise it, represent it, and respond to” our pressing need to know it and wrest it from its flawed frame of reference. The 1980s in Europe and the US were a most critical time in which the arts community articulated a discourse that rose against the invisibility of HIV/AIDS and spotlit the epidemic as an issue afflicting specific groups of people. Artists sought to frame the spread of the virus in social terms, as they thought it important for there to be a rational response at a time when deaths were on the rise, communities were being decimated, and entire groups of people were being demonised. Later a response came from institutions that organised exhibitions and tributes on the subject. In Greece, an overarching history surveying artistic practices and exhibitions linked to HIV/AIDS is still in the process of being researched as the voices of those affected were systematically side-lined, and forces intent on excluding and silencing the issue held great sway over cultural output.
Taking, as my point of departure, the idea that the history of HIV can also be considered the history of a battle for love, I will be attempting here to study two separate works as responses to what transpired, and as (re)negotiations of trauma. These works were created in different periods – one in the 1980s and the other in the present day. Both draw on love, death, marginality, sexuality, spirituality, mourning, memory, and community, bringing to the fore all that has been silenced, censored, missing, and erased from collective memory and art history. What dominates this text, then, is the distinction made between a historic “before now” and a living “here and now”, as well as a desire to trace the dynamism of love as a crucible of daring, acceptance, and liberation.
Costas Evangelatos and the Memorial for Youths Who Died Too Soon

Costas Evangelatos, Memorial for Youths Who Died Too Soon, 1987. Ιnstallation, DADA Gallery.
Courtesy of the artist.
Standing quite distinctly apart from the prevailing circumstances of the 1980s is a characteristic example of a performance that drew on the fluid atmosphere of the times occasioned by the scourge of the virus. It is the 1987 performance Memorial for Youths Who Died Too Soon of Costas Evangelatos – the first attempt to present a work of art on this subject matter in Greece. The moment Greek society realised that the realities of the virus concerned it too came in 1987, when it mourned its first famous victims: the modern art collector Alexander Iolas and the fashion designer Vassilis Kourkoumelis (Billy Bo). That same year, at the Dada Gallery in Athens, the visual artist Costas Evangelatos created a tableau vivant, installing the actor Takis Loukatos as a dying naked youth draped across a square niche in the wall of the gallery’s basement space. In front of him lay flowers, the kind one might encounter inside a cemetery. On his body was placed a roll of teletype paper imprinted with the photographic portrait of the artist that recurs in a way reminiscent of film stock. This live yet lifeless sculpture alluded to the well-known Tomb of the Unknown Soldier (1930), sculpted by Phocion Roque, that sits in front of the Greek parliament, as well as to the subject of the Christian pietà and to archetypal motifs of sacrifice. The position in which Loukatos’ body was placed highlighted the young man’s tragic fate, entwined as it is with death, and imbued him with elements of vulnerability and sensitivity that subverted his masculinity, combining measured composition with a curve in the body that sets our gaze into motion. The elegiac dramaturgy applied to this male body, freed of all rigidity, seems to have been steered by a tenderness and a romanticism that intensified the emotional charge of the work.

Documentation of several Costas Evangelatos performances, Paris Expo 2010, La maison de la Grèce.
Courtesy of the artist.
During the course of his development, but particularly in the taking of his first steps as an artist, the work of Costas Evangelatos was instilled with a more existential dimension, systematically exploring movements made by the nude body in space as a vehicle for eroticism and lust, purity and softness that drew inspiration from Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden and Robert Mapplethorpe.8 Armed with his personal memories of the HIV outbreak from when he was a student in the US back in 1984, he wanted to reflect upon these experiences and create a contemporary funerary eulogy for the anonymous bodies of those who were lost and left to moulder in obscurity. The body, in this instance, does not symbolise sickness, mutilation, misery, decay, or brutality. On the contrary, we are here presented with an immaculate, youthful body linked to the universality of a memorial object that channels mourning, innocence, passion, and earthly beauty. The aesthetic classicism and harmony with which it was elaborated invites associations both to an image of apotheosis and to bidding a dead lover farewell.
In an article on the piece from the time, and quite at odds with the take on the work set forth here, the art historian Stelios Lydakis decodes the work without linking it directly to the HIV. According to Lydakis, the deeper meaning of the work lies in youth that is lost too soon,9 due not so much to physical causes as to spiritual ones – a fact that confirms the tendency to evade highlighting the virus as a topic, even within the realm of artistic creation. By placing the work within the aesthetic safety of a closet, Lydakis manages to make it more palatable and drain it of the emotion entailed by the inclusive representation of the HIV issue.
Before he gets the chance to properly bloom, he wilts upon contact with a reality that is brutal and anything but benevolent. Today, a young man must come of age before his time! And this is an early passing of his youth. He must taste, as soon as possible, the forbidden fruit and be cast out in order to face down the world in which he is called upon to live. But it is a bumpy landing, more often than not. Most youths are not yet ready when forced to adapt, and so fall victim to all those avenues that promise them escape and redemption. And this is a premature death.10
A historical survey of artworks and exhibitions on the theme of HIV that came after this work by Costas Evangelatos – that is, during the 1990s – is yet to be produced. The silence widely seen in the public discourse when it came to the epidemic was perhaps intensified by the appearance of the first drug treatments in 1996, which gave the false impression that the crisis was over, that this blighted past could be put behind us once and for all, and this perhaps also helped prolong the silencing of this tract of art history. From the year 2000 onwards, there were, of course, a smattering of initiatives, such as the following exhibitions: AIDS: Depictions of AIDS Through Art (Athens, 2003),11 Suffering Body (Crete & Athens, 2004), 12 About AIDS (Athens , 2005), 28 ASFA Students – 55 Posters on AIDS (Athens, 2011),13 and To Whom It May Concern (Thessaloniki, 2018).14 The latter was an art installation on the theme of HIV – the outcome of a project produced over many months through the collective work of HIV-positive persons, and of those working in facilities supporting them.

Νοva Melancholia, Sebastian, 2024, PLYFA Space.
Courtesy of the artists.
Sebastian of Nova Melancholia
“But rejection knows
There is no villain
Just the hand
That turns the light out at night”
From the song “Handshake / Gay Anthem for the New Millennium” by Kore Ydro, 2006
Today, if diagnosed early, HIV is managed like a chronic illness – indeed, the term AIDS is no longer current in the vernacular. Prejudice and intolerance are at lower levels than in the past but have not been eradicated. The battle against discrimination, denigration, and unequal treatment continues, as does the struggle to spotlight instances of oppression, institutional violence, and homophobic rhetoric.
One only needs to look at the 2012 naming-and-shaming of HIV-positive women sex workers. The year is 2012, one month before Greece’s 6 May general election. On 1 April 2012, the Greek Minister of Health Andreas Loverdos and the Greek Minister for Citizen Protection Michalis Chrisochoidis gave a joint press conference presenting new rules and regulations ostensibly for the protection of public health and for keeping people safe from the HIV. The law they set forth reflected the broader political rhetoric of that pre-election period, was medico-disciplinary in nature, and drew a line between “clean” Greek bodies that must be protected and foreign bodies that pose a threat and need to be expelled. The law was founded on a legislative decree dating to 1940, elements of which can be traced to a royal decree made back in 1840. It was used as a tool for implementing a sweeping and indiscriminate “clean-up” operation aimed at HIV-positive women with substance use disorder. Police officers raided drug haunts and public squares in central Athens, taking 96 women with substance use disorder into custody in order to submit them to forced health checks. Twenty-nine of those women were found to be HIV-positive. The authorities used knowledge of their HIV-positive status not to protect and treat these women but rather as evidence for their criminal prosecution.15 Their photographs and personal details were released to the press. Some of these women were even imprisoned for up to eleven months – with one committing suicide during detention – only to be fully acquitted in 2016.16
Moreover, the 2018 murder of Zak Kostopoulos17 and how this incident was presented across much of the media and in opinion polls, and to the 2019 arson attack on the “Checkpoint” Prevention & Testing Centre in Athens,18 together with other instances of prejudice and violence, sparked a new wave of engagement with the issue that went hand-in-hand with an escalation in the development of queer culture, the tackling of such issues as identity, gender, and sexuality outside the bounds of heteronormative notions, the questioning of established norms, paradigms, and cultural conventions, and an expansion of limits when it comes to what is considered normal, natural, and common in Greece.
It is in this context that Nova Melancholia created in 2023 the performance Sebastian that took the murder of Zak and the ensuing mobilisation of the LGBTQI+ community as its point of departure.19 Sebastian was the first part of a performance double-bill, while the second part, Vanitas, was based on texts by Andy Warhol. The two parts were distinct, complemented one another, and drew upon a shared set of art history and pop culture references. Sebastian sought to function as a springboard for new ways of viewing, thinking about, producing, and giving meaning to the cultural past connected to the HIV. It mirrored the social experience of the virus through a series of reflections on Saint Sebastian and the notions that surround him. The work was first presented at the PLYFA performance space in Athens.
Many major artists, from the Renaissance right through to the present day, have taken the image of Saint Sebastian as their theme, usually portraying him tied to a tree or pilaster, his body pierced through with arrows. Linked in medieval times to the Black Death, his figure was already being reinterpreted in terms of homoerotic iconography by the late 19th century. In Nova Melacholia’s Sebastian, Saint Sebastian parades through the performance in all the plurality of his artistic manifestations, including those of the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, who posed as the saint in photographs, and of Derek Jarman, taken from his 1976 film Sebastiane. Another characteristic example is an excerpt from the biographical drama film Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters directed by Paul Schrader, in which the 12-year-old Yukio Mishima first catches sight of Saint Sebastian in a painting by Guido Reni reproduced in a book brought to him from Europe, a painting that triggers the discovery of his sexuality. Allusions to the iconography surrounding the saint are also encountered at a point during the performance when oversized banners printed with similar depictions by the painters Andrea Mantegna and Sandro Botticelli are rolled out across the floor. These uses generate a plethora of symbols and archetypes that imbue the performance with a multi-faceted quality – dark yet also colourful, pleasurable yet agonising, dynamic yet fragile, youthful yet debilitated, sacred yet profane, painful yet purifying – that touches on a wide range of the LGBTQI+ community’s lived experiences.

Νοva Melancholia, Sebastian, 2024, PLYFA Space.
Courtesy of the artists.
The young performers Harry Doumouras, Christina Karagianni, Pierre Magendie, Nick Ntasis, and Christina Reinhardt were a troupe suffused with a freedom of movement and playful eroticism capable of meeting the varied demands of their multiple roles and of rising to the challenge posed by the fragmentary proliferation of significations, sounds, and images layered into the work, drawn from literature, avant-garde cinema,20 music, dance, and sports. As audiences entered the performance space, they were welcomed by recitals of poems and texts written by Greek and international poets and authors in Greek, French, German, and English.21 Poems that made both direct and indirect references to Saint Sebastian were also heard during the course of the performance, paying homage to persons who were martyred for what they believed in. The performers played with javelins and skulls, sang and danced like young children,22 and parodied the film Suddenly Last Summer – the lead character of which was named Sebastian – by dubbing the lines of its leads and reversing their gender roles. They stripped off, put on make-up, and got dressed again. They posed like bound Saint Sebastians. Used the plasticity of their bodies to pass themselves off as genitalia. Pole danced. And, in the end, read out a list of famous Greek and international names (in the main of artists) in what felt like a love letter to those who lost their lives due to AIDS-related complications – an attempt to rehabilitate, destigmatise, and celebrate the wounded bodies of this community, and to reverse the lingering silence and forgetting they face, leaving the audience with a bittersweet sense of joyous sorrow.
The predominance of death as a grotesque element and the comforting childishness and innocence of play encapsulate the very history and realities of HIV and intimate that generation of young people who were lost in their prime. The vigorous bodies that move through the space are transformed into living records. The directorial approach presents these bodies not hollowed out by sorrow. Still, it focuses instead on their determination, their striving for action, life, and love as part of a group – as a potential community in a time of mental overload. One might also argue that the performance takes the form of a non-standard exhibition of an emotional, personal, archival puzzle that appropriates works from a broad swathe of the arts created by past generations, one that slips free of the integrality of cis gay aesthetics, and the commercialisation of art institutions,23 to include trailblazing constructs, gender neutralities, and kitsch poetics in an attempt to incorporate its every piece into the realm of queer expression. Αs Giorgos Sampatakakis notes: “Queer performativities emerged from a point of disconnect and deep-rooted schism from traditional (gay) codes and aesthetics, but this ‘emotive turn’ was only made possible once artists adopted irony, volatility, and ‘monstrosity’ as tools for overturning older ‘incarnations’ and aesthetic performances of the body”.24 Furthermore, as a camp amalgam of influences and information, the work moved decisively towards reinstating queer love as a perspective,25 thus acting to counterbalance complacently reassuring and inherently puritanical forms of sensuality.

Νοva Melancholia, Sebastian, 2024, PLYFA Space.
Courtesy of the artists.
Rallying an army of lovers
Political strategies for the “normalisation” of lesbian and gay lives in accordance with prevailing heteronormative values (monogamy, marriage, family) constitute a move away from the “freer” queer biopolitics of the 1980s and ’90s, delineating a powerful line of resistance between the “diseased” past and the “healthy” present of a new existential mode within “heteronormative tyranny” that seeks to present homosexuals as normal persons integrated into the “realm of dominant ideology”.26
The works considered here unapologetically defend the value of love – mainly through physical experience – as a foundational category of articulated aesthetic expression. Whether by creating an idealised memorial monument or by fashioning a self-satirising, queer, anti-memorialising necrology they hold out against a conservatism that erodes the libido, and against the artistic “castration” that follows in the wake of being silenced. They serve to remind us of self-evident things: that our bodies were made to forge new places, which is to say they were built for love and creation. Can it be, in such fluid times, that we still need such reminders when it comes to issues concerning love and HIV? Or that we still need to rally an army of lovers? Even as more modes of sexual co-existence are noted around us, transparency and visibility seem more incongruous than ever. In Greece, we continue to face obstacles in social, carnal, emotional, and artistic struggles for our sexual liberation and insist on perpetuating a culture of deeply contradictory traditions and distortions as to what is acceptable. We are bombarded with sexual images on social media and dating apps that serve to whet our cynicism as a symptom of a globalised, capitalistic, voyeuristic love devoid of emotional investment. Sex education is non-existent in Greek schools, while the sway of porn practices over the way many people construe love cannot be denied. As a result, many of us – irrespective of gender or sexuality – continue to inherit and learn to live with wrong norms, to experience feelings of fear, shame, stress, confusion, and denial, and to be made victims or even potential abusers. The revolutionary inspection and mobilisation of an “army” fighting against thanatopolitics and for love is equally imperative today – for the deconstruction of heteronormative, patriarchal, and neoliberal realities that lie all around us and for the re-formulation of a condition that is potentially more democratic, in which bodies are not displaced and derided but rather liberated and loved.
“Ghost boy bops on the dance floor
Among just girls
Who want boys who once were girls
Who wanted boys and wanted girls
Who are not boys and nor are girls
Dancing solo to drive the drowsy away
Slipping guns into belts as they bop
Life’s a killer”
From the song “Jolt Me Like a Bolt on the Dance Floor” by Pan Pan, 2021
The title of this piece – inspired by the documentary Armee der Liebenden oder Revolte der Perversen (Army of Lovers or Revolt of the Perverts, 1979) directed by the German LGBTQI+ activist Rosa von Praunheim – alludes to the Sacred Band of Thebes, an elite military force active in ancient Greece, formed by 150 pairs of male lovers, all of them Theban hoplites. The Swedish pop group Army of Lovers, who scored a number of hits during the 1990s, also took their name from the title of this documentary.
“The poor homosexuals – they have declared war on nature, and now nature is exacting an awful retribution.”, New York Post, 4 February 1983.
Simon Garfield, “Saying the unsayable”, Independent, 11 November 1995, https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/saying-the-unsayable-1581427.html, accessed November 2024.
Charitini Karakostaki, “AIDS: Epidemic as Threat – Inadequate Responses”, in Panayis Panayotopoulos and Vassilis Vamvakas (eds), Greece in the 1980s: Social, political and cultural dictionary, Athens: Epikentro Publishers, 2014 (in Greek).
Ibid.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality – Volume 1: An Introduction (1976), transl. Robert Hurley, New York: Pantheon Books, 1978, p. 137.
Douglas Crimp, 1987. «Aids: cultural analysis, cultural activism», in October, τ. 43, winter 1987, p. 107-110
Cf. https://www.kallitexnes.gr/arts/ikastikes-fotografikes-sillipsis-tou-kosta-evangelatou/, accessed November 2024 (in Greek).
https://kefalonianews.gr/%CE%B1%CF%81%CE%B8%CF%81%CE%BF-%CF%84%CE%BF%CF%85-%CE%BA%CE%B1%CE%B8%CE%B7%CE%B3%CE%B7%CF%84%CE%B7-%CE%B9%CF%83%CF%84%CE%BF%CF%81%CE%B9%CE%B1%CF%83-%CF%84%CE%B7%CF%83-%CF%84%CE%B5%CF%87%CE%BD%CE%B7/, accessed November 2024 (in Greek).
Ibid.
https://www.artemispotamianou.com/curatorials/curatorial-aids-depictions-of-aids-through-art/?fbclid=IwAR1DgXwopLU1VH2_nOWEyZMj4p9Miek4-_TUZzKsN4rg0Rl8GL1iGp0JCrw, accessed November 2024 (in Greek).
https://www.cca.gr/archeio-ektheseon/articles/paschon-soma-athina.html, accessed November 2024 (in Greek).
https://www.artandlife.gr/athens/events/ekthesi_poster_28_foitites_tis_askt_55_afises_gia_to_aids, accessed November 2024 (in Greek).
https://sarothron.gr/whom-it-may-concern-alexandros-mixail/?fbclid=IwAR1TWOPKQ8938y7n9tDGLTSHIE0JKpYr121NJZqAK3_029FpZMy_Um5uKEo, accessed November 2024 (in Greek).
A few months later, in the photographic installation RAWMANTISM, Maria Tzanakou photographs fellow artists, reproducing the shaming aesthetics of police mugshots distributed to the press. The work was presented in the exhibition WOMAN | OBJECT | CORPSE, curated by Meghna Singh, in Cape Town, April-May 2013 and in the exhibition What I was about to be deprived of, in the Empros Theatre, curated by Theophilos Tramboulis, May 2013. (Note of the eidtor)
Cf: Christina Margioti. 2022. “Who Remembers the Naming and Shaming of HIV-Positive Women in 2012?”, Documento, 3 June 2022, http://documentonews.gr/article/poios-thymatai-tin-diapompeysi-ton-orothetikon-gynaikon-to-2012, accessed November 2024 (in Greek).
https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/the-killing-of-zak-kostopoulos, accessed November 2024.
Here is the announcement made by the Greek National Public Health Organisation (EODY) on the attack: “EODY President Theofilos Rosenberg unreservedly condemns the homophobic arson attack made against the ‘Checkpoint’ Prevention & Testing Centre’s facilities in Athens. ‘Checkpoint’ have conducted more than 100,000 free checks and each year diagnose around 30% of all new HIV infections in Greece. They play a leading role in eradicating the discrimination, stigma, and prejudice that drive entire social groups to the margins and that threaten societal cohesion. It is a sad state of affairs, that anyone would try to silence such voices championing human rights and human values.” (https://eody.gov.gr/katadiki-tis-empristikis-epithesis-sto-kentro-prolipsis-kai-exetasis-checkpoint/, accessed November 2024. in Greek).
The approach taken for the creation of Sebastian was fuelled by personal discussions between company members.
With footage by Alexis Bistikas, Jean Cocteau, Jean Genet, Derek Jarman, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Sergei Parajanov, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Paul Schrader, Jack Smith, Andy Warhol, and John Waters, as well as by Kenneth Anger (who happened to pass away during the production’s first run of performances).
Such writers as Andreas Angelakis, Nikos-Alexis Aslanoglou, Alexis Bistikas, Dinos Christianopoulous, Jean Cocteau, Jean Genet, Allen Ginsberg, Derek Jarman, Bernard-Marie Koltès, Zak Kostopoulos, Yukio Mishima, Frank O’Hara, Sergei Parajanov, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Georg Trakl, Paul Verlaine, and Tennessee Williams.
To music by the Greek composers K. BHTA and Lena Platonos, as well as by Madonna, George Michael, Queen, and others.
In recent years, arts institutions have shown an – admittedly self-serving – interest in queer arts and thematics.
Giorgos Sampatakakis, HIV/AIDS: Theatre and Trauma in Greece, Athens: Sokolis Publications, 2021, p. 35 (in Greek).
“Ideally, a queer gaze would create a world completely free from binary notions of desire and storytelling, creating space for plural identities and possibilities.” Molly Moss, “Thoughts on a Queer Gaze”, 3:AM Magazine, 3 April 2019, http://3ammagazine.com/3am/thoughts-on-a-queer- gaze, accessed November 2024.
Sampatakakis, op.cit., p. 123
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mare Spanoudaki is a researcher and curator. Her main interests revolve around the intersections among material, intangible, digital culture, and contemporary art by carrying out projects and exhibitions that examine current and/or past cultural and social conditions and memories, acting as points for dialogue. Her education includes a BA in Communication, Media & Culture, an MA in Cultural Policy & Management, and an MRes in Exhibition Studies. In the past, Mare has worked for various cultural institutions and art spaces and has organised intercultural and community projects, as well as contemporary art shows in Greece, the UK, and Germany. She has been a fellow of the Start-Create Cultural Change programme (2017/2018). In the last few years, she has been focusing on highlighting Greek and international artistic practices, exhibition histories, and social movements and exploring issues of institutional critique as well as identity politics. She is also part of the team “This is not a feminist project”.