Eternal Rome

Just because it is calumny doesn't mean it's not true.

Of course the Emperor Elagabalus could have had boy-lovers and sexual relations with his favourite chariot-driver. Who would have minded, if he had otherwise behaved like a Roman? Look at the revered Hadrian and his catamite, Antinoos: the emperor even deified the boy (pictured left) after his early death from drowning in the Nile in 130 AD.

Anyway, the boy-love tradition is alive and well in Rome. Yesterday, the city held the first ever gay kiss-in at the Colosseum. At least 1,000 gay and lesbian couples kissed-in in this amorous in-your-face demonstration called to protest the arrest of two young men recently caught kissing (or perhaps something more) in the 2 AM moonlight just outside the Colosseum.

Said one of the boys, "Who wouldn't want to kiss in the moonlight by the Colosseum?"

"That was no kiss!" said the cops.

All the details, all the scandal at Direland.

The Colosseum kiss-in occurred on the same evening that a 500-yard (metre) portion of the Via San Giovanni in Laterano was re-baptised 'Gay Street'.

After the baptism, hundreds of gays and three government Ministers (Equal Opportunity, Social Unity, and Health) marched from the new Gay Street and the Coming Out bar to the near-by Colosseum to join the kiss-in. It is not known if the Ministers kissed.

The government has not yet fallen. Elagabalus should have been so lucky