Looking Back: Ancient Greek Poetry in the Age of AIDS

This article applies the queer stance of looking back, as proposed by Heather Love and Shane Butler, to examine twentieth-century poetry by Frank Bidart, Thom Gunn, and Joe Brainard in light of classical models and comparisons. It touches on similar but shifting perspectives in Catullus, Homer, Sappho, Theognis, and Plato and argues that the stance of classical study itself, in looking back and remembering the past, echoes the queer melancholic, yet self-constituting, stance of looking back to a lost loved one and to one's own past that we find in both ancient and modern poetry.