Frank Miller and "300"'s Assault on the Gay Past

300 Lost Opportunities To Do Something Different

300 is an unusual comic book in more ways than one. It is told entirely in double-page spreads with a limited but highly effective use of panels. The art is bold, employing strong silhouettes and complementary decorative details. Lynn Varley's painted colors are beautiful, as they provide depth and weight to Miller's deceptively simple lines. Visually, 300 is a complete success. Psychologically and historically, that's another matter.

Several things are cause for concern in the graphic novel and, if included faithfully, the movie.

The first is the way the Persian king Xerxes is portrayed in the graphic novel. Continuing a shameful tradition of Persians as perverts, Miller gives us a king who's all piercings and useless fashion accessories, his head and faced shaved, combining to create an air of effeminacy. In comparison, Leonidas is hypermasculine and appears to be stereotypically straight, with broad shoulders and a full beard and mustache. Except for a predator's tooth strung on a leather thong around his neck, no jewelry adorns his physique, only weapons and a few pieces of armor.

Judging from stills made available from the film, the movie version looks to be every bit as problematic.

As seen in this photo taken from 300 promotional materials, Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro) is a jewel-clad effete sporting what appear to be manicured nails and plucked eyebrows. His hands, adorned with gold rings on every finger, lie suggestively on the shoulders of King Leonidas (Gerard Butler), a hirsute, rough-hewn man who looks every bit the opposite of Xerxes.

It is hard to envision how Xerxes could even fight, being so encased in gold bracelets, gold chains and gold collars. No, the real fighting is to be left to men like King Leonidas. Without knowing the first thing about 300, it would be easy to guess who played the hero and who played the villain based on this photo alone.

The few known images of the real King Xerxes show a man with little or no jewelry, a full head of hair and a beard and mustache to match King Leonidas'. This Xerxes looks quite capable of defending himself and isn't the least bit effeminate.

Of course, whiffs of effeminacy in villains are nothing new in Hollywood films. Think of the Peter Lorre character in The Maltese Falcon , for example, or the villains in Rope, Diamonds Are Forever, In Cold Blood and The Passion of the Christ, to name only a few. Xerxes is just another in that shameful line of effete villains.

The second problematic issue in the graphic novel version of 300 occurs in the first part of the story. A Persian envoy comes to Sparta to talk to the king, telling him that a simple token of submission from the Spartans to the Persian king would solve the matter. But Leonidas answers that the problem is that the Athenians have already refused, and he can't do less than "those boy-lovers." According to a recent review in Variety, that line is also in the film.

During the original miniseries, a reader took Miller to task for that remark, and the author gave a rather strange answer: "Being a warrior class, the Spartans almost certainly did practice homosexuality. There's also evidence they tended to lie about it. It's not a big leap to postulate that they ridiculed their hedonistic Athenian rivals for something they themselves did. 'Hypocrisy' is, after all, a word we got from the Greek."

Miller is correct in that Spartan society was a militaristic one. Every free male citizen was considered a soldier for life (the exception being the older men who had been elected to political seats), with plots of land given to him to be cultivated by serfs. It is well-known that the Spartans practiced homosexuality (or more precisely, pederasty) as an educational institution. Indeed, the cohesion of the army depended on the bond between lovers. Thus, like the Athenians, Spartans can also be called "boy-lovers."

That being said, the word "boy" must be considered a generic term. Ancient texts state that Spartan soldiers/lovers were dispersed throughout the battlefield, as opposed to side-by-side in the way of other cities, so these "boys" on the battlefield had to be old enough to fight and defend themselves. The relationships were therefore between two (young or not so young) men, with some age gap between the two. "Youth-loving" would probably be a more correct term, as well as a less charged one for modern readers.

What's Included and What Isn't

The issue isn't really that King Leonidas uses "boy-loving" as an insult toward the Greeks. This is a work of fiction, after all (although Miller claims it is historical fiction). It is not even that Miller didn't include any indication of Spartan same-sex practices amongst the soldiers fighting at Thermopylae. This is an action-adventure comic and movie aimed at young straight men, meant to pile up book sales and box-office cash by piling up dead bodies as graphically and artistically as possible. That is an audience not likely shell out $9 to see even a mere implication of same-sex love.

The real issue is that Miller (and apparently Hollywood, in adapting his work) did include homosexuality, but negatively. If neither the effeminacy of Xerxes nor the insult were included, or if by some miracle they were balanced out with the other half of the historical equation, gay viewers would have less reason to feel insulted by yet again more historical inaccuracies.

There is one small reason to hope for something better from 300. Director Zack Snyder added a gay character to his remake of Dawn of the Dead, although that character's most interesting scene wound up on the cutting room floor. Perhaps Snyder will do something to counteract Miller's less than gay-friendly story line. If not, gay viewers can expect yet another historical epic that flunks the accuracy test.

Joe Palmer discovered spandex comics and mythology (at the age of 9) in 1967. This double fascination inspired him to draw and eventually led him to Chicago's Art Institute, where he graduated with a B.F.A. HIV-positive since 1996, Palmer currently divides his time between running Gayleague.com, a website for LGBT comic fans, art, writing, and promoting art-making opportunities for the HIV-positive community.

François Peneaud is a teacher, comics critic and occasional translator who lives in the southwest of France with his partner. He runs the Gaycomicslist.free.fr site, and next spring will see his first published stories in the Best Date Ever anthology from Alyson and in a collection of the Tim Fish-edited Young Bottoms in Love webcomics.

With thanks to Michael Jensen and his uncanny rewriting sixth sense.