Join us for a fascinating talk that looks at the rites of Dionysus as employed in two Californian contexts: the first, a filmed act of sparagmos (the ritual rending apart of a sacrificial victim) in Los Angeles in Kenneth Anger's Inauguration of the Pleasuredome (1954); the second, a series of Bacchic revels enacted by Arthur Evans and his Faery Circle in San Francisco and its environs in the mid-1970s, which prefigured and inspired the Radical Faeries Movement that later became a fully-fledged queer spiritual pathway. Both Anger and Evans somewhat misread the god Dionysus and the particularities of his rites in ancient Greece. Yet both individuals forged new ritual practices and communities through their rereadings that were dependent on a higher degree of non-conformity and that engaged with a wider trend of the second half of the 20th-century - the quest for sexual liberation.
Followed by a Q&A and light refreshments.
Organized by USC Dornsife Religion, ONE Archives at the USC Libraries, and USC Fisher Museum of Art. Co-sponsored by USC Classics.
About the speaker:
Tom Sapsford's research interests include performance, gender, and sexuality in both ancient Greek and Roman contexts. He is the author of Performing the Kinaidos: Unmanly Men in Ancient Mediterranean Cultures, (OUP 2022), and is currently working on a new book project, entitled Classics and the Gay Counterculture, that looks at how a group of writers, artists, and activists from the 1950s onward used Greco-Roman culture in their work when facing criminalization, liberation in the wake of the Stonewall riots, the AIDS epidemic, and its aftermath.
