Hello and welcome to Queer's Fact, the podcast bringing you queer history from around the world and throughout time.

I'm Alice.

And I'm Eli.

And today we're talking about the character of McGillus in the second century dialogues of the courtesans.

Before we begin, I'd like to acknowledge the Bonarong Bunmerang people of the Koolin Nation

as the traditional owners of the land on which we record this podcast, and pay my respects to their

elders past and present. We recognize them as the custodians of an oral history tradition,

far older than this podcast. We have some content warnings for this episode. This episode

will include discussions of sex, discussions of historic queerphobia,

and the use of outdated language for intersex people in a historic context.

If any of that sounds like something you don't want to hear, feel free to skip this episode

and check out our other content.

So today's episode is made up of some content which I originally researched our episode

on Love Between Women in Ancient Rome, but ended up not using in that episode.

So if you'd like some background and context of some of the things we're going to discuss

in today's episode, I'd recommend you listen to that episode first, but this episode can also

stand alone if you'd prefer to just listen to this one.

What we're talking about today is a dialogue

from a work called Dialogues of the Cortisans written in the second century CE by the satirist

Lucian. Lusian was born in Samasata, now in Turkey, but at the time of part of the Roman Empire.

He wrote Dialogues of the Cortisans in Greek, as was quite normal for literature in that

part of the world at the time. Because I came to this work as part of my research into Roman sexuality,

...