You know about Akhnaten, do you?
No I’m afraid I don’t.
I thought not, otherwise you would have seen the significance of it straight away.
Alan Hollinghurst, The Swimming-Pool Library, 1988.
Behind a dowdy cloth, the aging gay aristocrat Lord Nantwich preserves an ancient and oriental relic: a slender-faced, full-lipped statue of a forlorn Egyptian king, pharaoh Akhenaten. An “object of revelatory significance” in the words of Egyptologist Dominic Montserrat, the stone-cut reference is one of an anachronistic constellation that illuminates Alan Hollinghurst’s seminal gay novel, The Swimming-Pool Library, at times as much a work of charismatic archaeology as it is one of sardonic social critique. Greeks and Romans thus become familiar gateways to a utopic gay past within Hollinghurst’s literary world; yet the Egyptian references – in equal and alive abundance – figure more abstractly, almost occultly, to a contemporary audience, as shrouded from decipherability as a pre-Rosetta hieroglyph or, indeed, as Nantwich’s Akhenaten artefact.
However obscure this trans-historical reference now figures, Hollinghurst wasn’t the only icon of the gay British canon to appropriate the image of the pharaoh in his time. Had Derek Jarman, the truly polymathic creative, had his way, his first feature film, predating The Swimming-Pool Library by a decade, would have been a hallucinogenic, Bataille-esque devotion to king Akhenaten, starring David Bowie as the titular god-as-man. As Montserrat further opines on this cabalistic, interferential mosaic in his tome Akhenaten: History, Fantasy and Ancient Egypt, “Akhenaten [had] acquired the same meaning for many gay men [by that time] as Sappho has for many lesbians.”
Except for those decently versed in the now rather esoteric field of Egyptology, the once-upon-a-time Sapphic universality of Akhenaten has since been buried beneath the unrelenting sands of time, not dissimilar to an Ozymandias statue beneath a tragic, Romantic Sahara. While figures like Sappho or the St Sebastian – the queered Christian martyr who Jarman would eventually make his first feature on instead – might have retained their resonances to a queer Western audience into the present day then, poor Akhenaten has rather fallen out of favour, half sunk, a shattered visage.
Yet, there was formerly a time when the pharaoh was revered as the first documented gay man in history. “Akhenaten was the first historical gay person,” once read the webpage of an Egypt-themed leather club in Minneapolis, Minnesota, “Like the sunrise, Akhenaten sheds the first rays of light on a heritage we can be proud of.” “Akenaten was quite a success,” Jarman further fantasised about his unmade film, one of a rich pantheon of scripts he would never syncopate to the Super 8 screen, “Bowie’s performance was enigmatic […] The dialogue, though rather poetic somehow fitted the subject, it never grew stilted. It was a good first film.”
Contextually, what these figures – Hollinghurst, Jarman, the Minneapolis Egyptological Leather Club for Gay Men – were the benefactors of in this appropriative, hagiographising discourse was a cultural Egyptomania that churned in the late-twentieth century imaginary. Unleashed, in Britain at least, by the arrival of King Tutankhamun’s artefacts (the boy-king, by no way of coincidence, was the son of Akhenaten) to the country for the first time in 1972, an exhibition which remains the most popular in the British Museum’s history, among other symptoms of this general fascination include Richard Burton’s ill-fated film production of Cleopatra in 1963, the opening of Las Vegas’s Tut-themed Luxor Hotel in 1993, and the debut of Philip Glass’s opera Akhnaten in 1984.
What is evident in all this quasi-colonialist fetishisation is that Akhenaten, in gay and non-gay circles alike, represented a Nile-rich source of artistic inspiration for the late century’s ingenues. For Akhenaten’s life was one of a superlative melodrama. Taken by a religious frenzy in which he ousted the established pantheon of ancient gods to give instead his life to the singular metaphysical essence of the sun, the Aten, in a disjointed foreshadow of devotional monotheism, Akhenaten concurrently built an entire new capital for Egypt in just a few years and instituted with it an uncanny artistic vanguard, known as the Amarna style. Rejecting the hypermasculine cues of earlier pharaonic art, Amarna statue-craft preferred in its place an effeminate and androgynous representation of the king: large breasts, large hips, and an elongated, alien-like head, the invention of a new human form. It is undoubtedly such a figure, which aesthetes and historians alike have long cited as “transvestite” or “bisexual”, that ranked in Lord Nantwich’s secretive collection, as if a physiognomic exemplar of the sexual life hidden behind the deep time of its stone.
But it’s the sordid details of Akhenaten’s personal histories that have more interested those like the fictional Nantwich or the very author who wrote him. Much of this is likely to do with where Akhenaten fits into the established matrix of Egyptological icons: husband of Nefertiti, father of the all-revered Tutankhamun, whose reign saw much of his memory destroyed. However, his more intimate relationships have become just as ubiquitous objects of thought as have his family ones, even (and especially) when the two overlap. Jarman’s film-script verges then, like his Sebastiane, on the side of pornography more than it does historiography, salivating on the spectacularised details of incest and buggery in the Egyptian court.
Most sensational of these seedy, horny, and grotesque rapports, though, is that of Akhenaten with his son Smenkhkare, brother to Tutankhamun, who the Bowie-pharaoh takes as lover in Jarman’s filmic world. “I inhale the sweet breeze that comes from your mouth and contemplate your beauty every day,” Akhenaten tells the dismembered corpse of his prince-concubine in the script’s final scene, following his battlefield assassination by a raging Tutankhamun, “Call me by name again and again, for ever, and never will you call without response.”
Except, all this was not only in Jarman’s mind. When the tomb of Tutankhamun was at last rediscovered in the arid guts of the Valley of the Kings by Carter and co in 1922, various relics of his alleged brother were found vaulted in its insides. Among these, steles on which were written in glyphs, “Smenkhkare, beloved of Akhenaten” and, “Akhenaten, beloved of Smenkhkare”. And elsewhere, a limestone carving of Akhenaten and an unknown regent, identified by some as Smenkhkare, in his lap, grasping each other’s chins in a romantic embrace below the billowing rays of the life-giving Aten.
Because of the extreme iconoclasm that followed Akhenaten’s reign, it is not known precisely who the historical Smenkhkare was. It is not known whether he was a son or brother of Akhenaten, or exactly where he fit into the royal blood lineage and all its complex triangles of family love. Yet, traces of him remain. Traces of him and his possible love for Akhenaten, canonised already as a sort of queer, outsider saint for his androgyne statues, his unorthodox life. And if this exegesis is right – that of Hollinghurst, that of Jarman, that of Bowie – Akhenaten may well be a Sappho of another kind; he may well have been history’s first-ever documented queer man.
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