The film does include references to Alexander's private relationships with his childhood friend Hephaestion, which resulted in a group of 25 Greek lawyers threatening to file a lawsuit against both Stone and the Warner Brothers Film studio for what they claimed was an inaccurate portrayal of history. "We are not saying that we are against gays," said Yannis Varnakos, "but we are saying that the production company should make it clear to the audience that this film is pure fiction and not a true depiction of the life of Alexander".

Of course the ancient Greeks did not conceive of sexual orientation as a social identifier as modern Western societies have done. Greek society did not distinguish sexual desire or behavior by the gender of the participants, but rather by the role that each participant played in the sex act, that of active penetrator or passive penetrated. This active/passive polarisation corresponded with dominant and submissive social roles: the active penetrative role was associated with masculinity, higher social status, and adulthood, while the passive role was associated with femininity, lower social status, and youth.

Reflecting on the choice of male subjects for most of her novels, Mary Renault once said simply, "Men have more fun."

Born Eileen Mary Challans in 1905, Renault was the daughter of a London physician. However, it wasn't her father's career, she later said, that influenced her to train as a nurse after her graduation from Oxford University in 1928. Instead, she was looking for colourful characters and exciting experiences to enrich her creative writing, which was her real passion. As a student, she had written a novel set in medieval times, inspired in part by the lectures of one of her professors, J.R.R. Tolkien. But she thought her finished work lacked authenticity, and she burned the manuscript.

Student Affairs

There were only two short breaks in the very early years they were together, when Mullard twice experimented with dating men. Renault, who was monogamous, battled jealousy when Mullard went on a weeklong trip with the second of these men; the separation brought on "a curious feeling of sudden vacuum," Renault wrote a friend. But Mullard returned to stay, and they remained together until Renault's death 48 years later.

After completing her nursing studies, Renault took several jobs in succession as a school nurse while Mullard worked at a tuberculosis sanitarium. In Renault's free time, she continued to write - her first published novel, Purposes of Love (1939), featured a contemporary hospital setting. Renault's presentation of sexuality was complex, with the main characters, a brother and sister, enamoured of the same man, and the sister intrigued by the advances of a lesbian co-worker. Because of the subject matter, the author adopted the pen name "Mary Renault" to spare her family embarrassment (Renault is the name of a character in a 17th-century play, Venice Preserv'd, by Thomas Otway).

Financial Freedom

The 1950s saw a decisive shift in Renault's writing. In The Charioteer (1953), she switched from lesbian subplots and hospital settings to a novel about a young gay soldier facing a homophobic society. Rejected by Morrow, the American publisher of her first five books, before being picked up by Pantheon, The Charioteer is now considered as pivotal to gay literature as Gore Vidal's City and the Pillar (1948) or James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room (1956).

Homosexual Love

Renault went on to write seven more bestselling novels set in ancient Greece, including two that retold the legend of Theseus, one about Apollo, and a trilogy about Alexander the Great. Among these novels, The Persian Boy (1972), the story of the young eunuch who becomes Alexander's lover, is often considered her career triumph.

In all these works, Renault showed a talent for using passing references to people and events in historical records to create complex characters and plots, and for presenting homosexuality in a positive - and unthreatening - light, as part of the continuum of human sexuality. Her strong grasp of ancient history helped her to depict vivid detail an era that many readers found fascinating but knew little about.

Renault continued writing fiction until shortly before her death from cancer in 1982. The last novel she worked on returned to the medieval themes she had tried to write about as a student at Oxford. But she did not finish the manuscript, and, honouring Renault's wishes, Mullard destroyed it.

Paula Martinac is a Lambda Literary Award-winning author of seven books, including The Queerest Places: A Guide to Gay and Lesbian Historic Sites.

Further Reading

Many of Mary Renault's novels are out-of-print but they can be ordered through Amazon. Click on the covers of Mary Renault's Persian Trilogy for ordering information. Gay author David Sweetman's excellent biography of Mary Renault is also available from Amazon.