The word homoerotic enters most rooms like a spark with nowhere safe to land.It startles, because the syllables sound like a confession: homo + erotic — as if to name it is already to declare allegiance. But before it was fenced inside categories and politics, it belonged to something far older than identity. The ancients used it to describe a current, not a community — the moment when likeness becomes luminous, when the self recognises itself in another body and the air grow

Her body was not offered in intimacy, but in proof. From the harems of the Ottomans to the stages of French court masques, the servant’s presence was curated as spectacle — not for pleasure, but for containment. She was not exposed. She was aligned. Every ribbon, every angle, every breath served the system. And in that exposure, she was not free. She was confirmed.