GLR July-August 2025

Correspondence

(1869-1939) was one of the few who lived openly as a gay man in his day, and his oils were so powerful as to be nearly transfor mative for me. One of Somov’s paintings sold in 2023 for $13 million. Though alas I must admire a mere copy of TheBoxer as I dress for the day, his painting—and his life—remind me of the need to fight for beauty and truth. Garrett Glaser, La Jolla, CA Why Libera ti on Was So Necessary To the Editor: Regarding the “Origins” issue (March April 2025) on the start of the LGBT liber ation movement, the question is: Just what were LGBT people trying to liberate them selves from? Sexual liberation must be understood in the context of the Judeo Christian culture from which we are fit fully and only partially extricating our selves. That emphatically binary tribal culture prohibited any sexuality not in tended to swell the tribe’s numbers, a cul

ture uncomfortable with nakedness, ashamed of the body as the soul’s baggage. This begins with Judaism and becomes successively adopted by Christianity and Islam, persistent forces in our world. This culture’s representatives now hold national power and international hegemony, so our gains in liberation can’t be taken for granted. Ancient Greek culture was not burdened by any of that. Theirs was a frankly bisex ual culture that acknowledged same-sex at traction and love. Men and boys exercised in the nude and performed athletic games in the same manner. Sappho records her bisex uality in the fragments we have of her work, and historians Thucydides and Xenophon testify to the generals and admirals who went to war with their male lovers. Indeed, the Sacred Theban Band was a respected military force of 300—150 pairs of lovers— sworn to fight to the death rather than shame their lover. They were undefeated until Philip and son Alexander swept

My Life with Boris To the Editor:

I enjoyed Pavel Golubev’s ”Queer Mod ernism in Russia” (May-June 2025) in part because I am infatuated with pugilist Boris Snezhkovsky, immortalized in Konstantin Somov’s 1933 painting TheBoxer , among many paintings of Snezhkovsky. Somov

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