from \'Oh My Soho\'

from \'Oh My Soho\'

from \'Oh My Soho\'

II

So who first kilned the homo holy grail? Was it the hunky
Spartans, those man-on-man love missionaries who queered our
leafy Roman outpost? Or did changeling Jove himself, god-talons
sharp for boy flesh, his comely-white feathers, fashion our same-

sex revolution? Was Soho still Fleet-pasture then? Ganymede
dozing on his crook, horned goats swelling the coppery paths?
And who might we salute for imported whips, banishment, sober castration,
point-and-stare-in-the-marketplace marble heavy shame?

See for a man to pierce a man with anything more than just a dick, e.g. AMARE,
was patheticus. Even Hadrian’s bust-worthy boyf, Antinous,
dredged sopping from the Nile, reborn a pink-dwarf constellation,
suffered his queer temples to be sacked and plundered

at the hands of Constantine’s Christian gentrification. And didn’t
Caesar’s bullying become blueprint for our own colonisations?
Filching glittering hoards of conflict minerals, leaving our subjects with leather-
bound copies of Leviticus. Centuries of sodomites caged for what?

An aqueduct, Regency marble? And didn’t we learn the consul’s trick
of bread, circuses, the gruff gladiators’ bloodstained six-pack?
Still, what is Rome tonight to the t-shirted ladz bumming menthols in the disco line
other than Caecilius est in horto? Other than an HBO box set?