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