Emperor Hadrian's Male Lover - A Novel

Male Same-Sex Partners and Politics

This novel about the love affair of the emperor Hadrian and Antinous concentrates on the historical and iconic love connection between the two men. My novel is also about men who love another man political power.

To write this novel has been a dream of mine for years. My late husband, Robert N. Kvašnák, EdD., and I spoke about writing something together like this long ago, but it never took place. Finally, he passed on, and we never wrote a novel together. I did it now in homage to him, whom I miss dearly, and also to satisfy my desire to have something out there talking about male lovers and political power. In my novel, which goes back to the Roman Empire, when the emperor was Hadrian, who was the adopted son of Trajan, he became the emperor, and as a powerful man, he could do and have anything he wanted to. In his time, sexual encounters and love affairs between two men were not classified as the same as today. Like the Greeks, the Romans saw the relationship between two males as a common thing. Generally, an older male with a younger male relationship was a common thing in Greece and Rome in antiquity.