Queer history portrait with rainbow light, Priestess® Press

Queer Echoes in the Roman Record

"The ancient world does not map cleanly onto modern categories, yet the sources still preserve attachments that later retellings tried to recast as acceptable friendship or convenient scandal."

Close-up of classical stone statues with detailed hair and facial features.

Those Who Were Always Here

Every period of history decides who is allowed to appear in the record, emperors and patrons stamped into stone while most others slip by unnamed, and desire is handled in much the same way in what survives. The ancient world does not map cleanly onto modern categories, yet the sources still preserve attachments that later retellings tried to recast as acceptable friendship or convenient scandal.

Yet traces remain, because objects remain, a statue commissioned in grief, a poem that keeps its subject in view, a legal text complaining about behaviour it cannot prevent. Reading with any seriousness means tracking those traces as material facts, then allowing the simplest inference: queer lives were present in cities, households, and bath complexes, because people were.

Priestess® lives close to the gap between what was recorded and what was omitted, and a house built on history has to read the archive as a human place with more than one permitted arrangement. The record indicates presence; careful reading keeps it present.

Two Lives Left in the Record

Some stories remain because someone with authority insisted they be carved into the world. Hadrian, emperor of Rome, had Antinous set in stone across the empire after the young man drowned in the Nile, cities took his name, statues preserved his face, and a cult grew around his image. Later centuries softened the language, yet the durable facts remain: a ruler loved a man, grieved him in public, and ordered the grief to be made permanent.

Elsewhere, survival looks smaller but no less clear. Sappho, writing centuries earlier from the island of Lesbos, addressed women directly in her verse. Later editors attempted redirection through commentary, pronouns, and invented addressees, yet enough fragments remain to keep the address legible on the page.

These are not the only examples, only the ones that were difficult to erase entirely. They stand as record proof that love and identification moved in more than one direction, and the archive keeps catching the movement even when later hands tried to tidy it.

Round woven mirror on a wall above a sink with a decorative plant and soap dispenser.

Mirrors, Bodies, and Preparation

If temples and statues were public stages, the bathroom mirror becomes a private one, a surface where a person tests what the day will permit, what can be softened, what has to be stated with precision. For many queer people, that glass has seen more rehearsals than any theatre.

The same room can hold opposite tasks. On some days, the work is to pass unnoticed, choosing clothes, hair, and skin that will not provoke questions in a hostile corridor or family lunch. On others, the work is alignment, a line of kohl, a changed silhouette, a deliberate choice of finish; the products may be the same, and the intention changes.

Seen from this angle, washing the face, applying cream, choosing how much of oneself to reveal is never only getting ready. It is a series of small negotiations with the world outside the door, and a claim to appear in that world with some measure of control over how one is read.

Two people holding hands against a beige background

A House That Assumes They Were Here

A house built on history has to decide what it does with omission, because the record is full of gaps created by power, shame, and editorial preference. Priestess® begins from the position that queer lives were present in the worlds it studies, at the baths, in the villas, in the streets, and the surviving stone and parchment simply vary in how directly they say so.

The formulas on the shelf are not marked for one gender or another; they are built for skin that works, strains, recovers, and wants to be treated with seriousness, regardless of who carries it. The outcome is practical and verifiable, in finish, in comfort, in how the surface behaves after ten minutes.

Domina takes its name from a Roman title of female authority. In this house it marks a stance, not a test of gender, someone who assumes responsibility for their surface, sets their own order, and decides what earns a place on the shelf. Anyone who recognises themselves in that position is already within scope, because the record indicates presence was always broader than later gatekeeping allowed.

When someone stands at a basin with a Domina bottle in hand, they do so in a world that now has language for identities the old sources tried to bend or omit. Antinous and Sappho remain as fragments; those living now can be recorded in full, with the difference sitting in daily actions that leave their own trace.

Continuations

Antiquity & Vanity Bottled: London’s Role→
The past provides the ritual and the present provides the precision. London allows both to coexist without strain, a city comfortable with its own layering.