Rebecca S Buck spoke to author Justine Saracen

Justine Saracen is a former university professor and editor who writes with a self-declared desire to create characters who ‘scare the ignorant.’ This is clearly a technique that works as she was awarded the 2009 Independent Publisher’s Award for Sistine Heresy and the 2011 Golden Crown Award for Best Historical Novel, for the thriller Mephisto Aria . Since the publication of her first novel, the playful 100th Generation (the first of the Ibis Prophecy series) in 2006, she has been drawing on extensive historical and cultural research to ‘repopulate’ the past with lesbian and gay characters and to ask unflinching questions of religion and our established perception of previous centuries and famous figures. Her latest publication, Sarah, Son of God , visits New York during the Stonewall riots, Venice at the time of the Inquisition and Rome at the time of the Crucifixion to explore transgenderism. We caught up with Justine in the less exotic setting of Waterstones...

You claim “a self-declared mission, to repopulate history with ‘the likes of us’”.  Do you mean primarily LGBT characters? Historically, LGBT people might not have had names for ourselves, but we were always there. We stood with Ramses and Caesar and Richard Lionheart and Salah al Din and Napoleon and Ghengis Kahn; we worked in the universities and laboratories and the courts of kings and law. We painted the Sistine Chapel, invented calculus, and broke the Nazi enigma code. That we are largely invisible in the history books is shocking. I want to reclaim humanity’s historical ‘memories’ and add us back to the landscape where prudery and ignorance have taken us out.

Don't you risk falsifying history when you write, for example, a scene of Michelangelo having sex with a man in a stable, or Renaissance women working as painters? Good grief, no. No painter worries about historical accuracy when he commemorates a great battle scene or creates a portrait of a prince or duchess.  I am a fiction writer, producing entertainment, and I re-create what might have happened and that’s good enough.In fact, we don’t know what actually happened, anyhow. You have only to read the hugely differing accounts of the assassination of JFK, or the creation of the state of Israel, to see that history is extremely malleable and subject to the prejudices of the historian. Multiply that prejudice tenfold for events of distant centuries. Regarding Michelangelo, we have no strong evidence for his ever having had a physical relationship with either man or woman. What we DO have is the Sistine chapel ceiling and north wall covered with penises and testicles. It is but a tiny leap to suggest that a man so fond of painting male genitals might have kissed a few.

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