Neil Laird is a multiple Emmy nominated director of historical films for Discovery, BBC, PBS, History Channel, National Geographic, and many other networks. He has produced over 100 programs around the globe that feature crumbling Egyptian tombs, Lost Mayan Cities, and mysterious shipwrecks at the bottom of the sea. After 30 years of telling other people’s history on television, he wanted to start telling the stories he wished he’d be able to tell all along, inspired by the places he has visited and the forgotten lives he uncovered while making those documentaries. He created the Primetime Travelers Series, which is a series of novels, time traveling adventures that blend archaeology, mythology, humor, and LGBTQ+ characters. His newest book in the series is Prime Time Troy. It just came out everywhere on Amazon, I believe.
Interview with Neil Laird
John Parker:
So Prime Time Troy, in the series, you’ve taken readers to Ancient Egypt and then Pompeii and on your third book to Troy. Tell us a little bit about the story and what readers can expect when they turn to page one.
Neil Laird:
On Primetime Troy or in general? Primetime Troy? He’s the third in the series. And again, they go back. The headline for the first two books was Messing Up History, one episode at a time. So I want to take something that would skewer my day job. I mean, I love television. I’ve been doing it for 30 years. I’ve been to 70-some countries, you said. I’ve seen ancient tombs being opened. But the one thing I never saw was what they look like when they’re bright and shiny and new. And the only way I could do that was to create fiction, coupled with the fact that all the films that I’ve made, almost never did we talk about LGBTQ characters. So I created a story where a time-traveling TV crew, Jared, a young guy who comes out in the first book, to his best friend, who’s lesbian, who’s been out for a long time and shows them the ropes.
And with their sound guy and their rather dimwitted host, Derek, they travel into the past. At first they win the Emmy. Then they realize, well, maybe we can tell some stories about the lost gay people of the past that have been forgotten. So many that I’ve seen. So Primetime Charlie III in the series, they are now celebrities. And Jared is with his boyfriend Carlos on a beach in Mykonos, and they’re approached by two gorgeous Greek men. Drop dead godlike gorgeous. And it turns out they are gods. It’s Achilles and Patroculus who have come and sought them out because now in the underworld, the primetime travelers are superstars and they have a little promise.
They say, “If you go back to Troy, we will give you passes to Troy, shoot with you. You’ll be there when we get on the horse. You will be there when King Prime falls.
All you have to do is tweak the history a little bit and let us live. We are tired of being in Hades, loveless all this time. We want to spend 67 years and embrace as a real gay couple. So if you go back and tweak it a bit, ancient Troy is yours. That’s the setup.
John Parker:
So give us a little bit of insight into, I want to know more about Jared, of course, and his boyfriend Carlos. So tell us about Jared and Carlos.
Neil Laird:
I mean, Jared, I guess in many ways, of course, like all writers is a bit myself though myself 30 years ago. He’s a young producer from the Midwest who is homophobic at first because the host is a jerk and a homophobe. And he eventually comes on and finds himself on the first shoot, which is in ancient Egypt. One thing I realized very early on in shooting my films is that in many ways, ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome were much more open sexually for same-sex unions they are today. People tend to think that history always marches forward, certainly with things like slavery and other kind of horrible things. Yes. But when it comes to love, when it comes to same-sex love, particularly they had us beat. They had us sussed out long before we did, and we took several steps back. And that’s the one thing that brings Jared out.
When he goes in the past, he realizes in ancient Egypt, oh, I’m not some outlier. There are people here that respect queer people.
And the Pharaoh follows them around, and he falls in love with a Nubian guard, and he has all that kind of fun. So it’s really Jared’s journey from a naive kid from Kansas to someone who not only finds himself professionally, but finds his sexuality and realize he is not the first. So after the success of that in primetime Pompeii and Troy, now that he has a bit of cache, he goes back and he wants to focus on those forgotten gay people and make that his mission.
John Parker:
One of the most infamous gay couples and famous of history is Achilles and Patroclus. All the movies erase it. All the Hollywood movies rather erase it. A lot of the historians dismiss it. They really, really don’t like it when you point out that Achilles and Patroclus were beloved and inspirations for Alexander the Great and his lover/partner Haphaestion. So talk to me about writing this famous and infamous couple.
Neil Laird:
Well, that’s the one thing I want to do when rereading the Iliad, and I’ve always been ancient history fan. There were so many things that didn’t make sense. Starting with the stupid horse, no one would believe that bloody horse. That makes sense. And the other thing is the whole, if you recall the Iliad, it’s all hinges upon when they take Brayus, his slave girl away from him, and he sits out the war. But it’s clear all along he loves Patroclus. That clearly is the love. So then it sat right with me.
So I went back and I rewrote it as talking about how this clearly was a same-sex couple, which in many ways was probably very much respected time. I can imagine when Homer was telling the story 500 years later under a tree, there was no question about these two being lovers. It was only later with the rise of morals and Christianity, other stuff that kind of come from the fall of Rome and other rise of all that, where that stuff is swept away and they bring it back to the slaved one.
They bring it back to the original text. Yes. But it never sat right with me because this crucial love affair in the Iliad is between these two men. And yet if you watch Troy, the Brad Pitt thing or anything else, he’s just some pretty cousin. There’s nothing going on beyond that. And it’s just rubbish.
So, I wanted to go back and tell that story. And in the end, I have the primetime travelers tweak that. So it writes the story and you have to read the book to find out how that happens.
John Parker:
What was the question then about Achilles that was driving you? Because I know you’ve said that you read The Iliad, he obviously features very prominently in The Iliad. And was that the question that stayed with you afterwards was about him? Was it his story, his relationship with Patroclus? Or what was it?
Neil Laird:
People might be surprised is they haven’t read The Iliad in a while. It only takes place in the last six weeks of a 10-year war. And it really is a very emotional story about his grief over, first of all, his hubris and his anger about his possession, his slave girl being taken away. But then really the crux of the story is when Patroclus puts that armor on and dies in his place. And that is a very, very emotional thing. And it always kind of rang a bit hollow to me reading the translations because nothing really leads up to that.
So yes, I wanted to go back there and I’ve seen so many stories in my films. The one before on Primetime Pompeii, it focuses on these thing called the Embracing Lovers, which are the plaster cast that you can see when you walk in to Pompeii if you’ve been there. The hollowed odd bodies are the people who didn’t make it out in time. And there’s one that’s very affecting and very emotional. They called it the two maidens for centuries. They found it in 1790, and they’ve always assumed it was a mother and a child. It was only the last 10 years they were able to do some DNA and CAT scan research and found out it was two men who were not related. And they’re between 30 and 40 years old. So we don’t know. We can’t document sexuality and love. But I look at these embracing lovers, which are now
In the gift shop, sadly, as you walk in the main gate where you can buy mouse pads of exploding Vesuvius, rather in bad taste, I think. But all these stories have been swept away. In the first book, I talk about the place called The Tomb of the Brothers in Ancient Egypt, where when archaeologists found it in 1964, they assumed these two men buried together in embracing nose to nose, which is kissing. They had to have been brothers, or someone even said Siamese twins, which is why they couldn’t get away from one another.
It’s the homophobia that runs rushshod through the modern era, not the ancient, but the modern era where these stories are whitewashed.
All three of these stories needed to be retold again. And that’s why I have my time traveling crew go back. I mean, yes, it’s an adventure and it’s fun and I want to steward television.
It’s very comedic, but I also want to bring to light how much of the ancient past with same-sex love has been erased or just completely buried so would never be found again.
John Parker:
What was it like being in these sites and knowing that this queer history has been suppressed? I mean, to be walking around in Egypt and with all the places that you’ve been, I mean, what was it like as a queer person in the 21st century and the 20th century walking around in these sites and knowing there was a lot of queer stuff that happened here and we’re not getting told these stories?
Neil Laird:
Well, it’s again, when it taught me to write the books and things I couldn’t bring to television. Now again, National Geographic, Discovery, BBC, they’re all very forward-thinking, very liberal organizations, but they have to appeal to the masses. So when you make a film, you can’t talk about that. So sometimes I’ll say, let’s talk about the tune of the brothers. Let’s talk about the embracing lovers of Pompeii. And they say, nah, nah, nah. It may offend some people. It’s better just to walk the straight line. So working in a corporate environment like that, of course I had to toe the line. With my books so published, I’m writing the books I want to based on the experiences I want to. And it’s been very liberating. And I think I do that because look, we don’t have to retell the story and make them any queerer than they are.
I’m not saying we need to hide the other stories and all the heterosexual love that went on, but let’s talk about the fact that what we consider as an aberration was very much the norm back then. And the fact that we tend to think that history, as I say, always marches forward is just a bunch of BS.
Often it’s one step forward, three steps back. That was the impetus.
John Parker:
I was reading through reader reviews on Amazon, and I noticed how folks were praising how you navigated this massive war, right? The Trojan War, which it was massive. It took forever. It was super complicated. And most people basically just know about the horse, right? Yes. And unfortunately, the Brad Pitt movie. But readers loved how you made it accessible.
So you’ve got your documentary crew in there. How did you decide what you were going to show to readers and navigate this messy war?
Neil Laird:
Well, I think that’s probably one thing I learned from all those years of television, the years name drop, because one thing that I think I became very adept at over a thousand hours of television is to distill a lot of information down to bite-sized palatable pieces where you can understand it quickly. And I realized early on, people are sort of intimidated by the Ilit. Even the Iliad name sounds like it’s homework. And yet when you get into it, it’s a very emotional story. As I mentioned earlier, the core story is really just between four or five people. You have pages and pages of entire Hittite armies being destroyed, and they’re named and everything at great lengths. But at the end of the day, it’s about Achilles and it’s about Agamemnon and Two Proud Men, and it very much is an intimate story. So I tried to strip that down and very, very easily put that up front in a bite-sized way.
One thing is great when you have modern characters. Kara, who is often many people’s favorite characters, she’s the camerawoman, and she suffers no fools. She also doesn’t read. She doesn’t care about anything. She goes, “Reading makes me sleepy. Tell me what it’s about again.” So at the very beginning over drinks in Hollywood, they had to say, “Okay, this is what it is. Oh, okay. I get it now.” But there’s another device to tell you the audience, whether you don’t know the story or whether you forgot about it or you relied on the God Awful Brad Pitt movie for your information, that here is the simple story. I don’t want it to be arcane. I don’t want people to be put off by this. People think of ancient history. They think of Pompeii and the Underworld of Egypt. Oh, that’s homework. That’s stuff that I would sign.
No, to me, I love this stuff. And at the end of the day, we talk about Pompeii because it’s a disaster. We talk about the Illiad because it’s drama and war and it’s a love story. And all you think about Egypt is jackoheaded gods and all this weird fantasy stuff. There’s a reason we start talking about all these cultures, and it’s not the history as much, it’s what they represent. So I try to bring that enthusiasm and that playfulness to all the books that I write.
John Parker:
I love how you mentioned that back then in the ancient world, they were much better about queer life. And then we went through this horrible period, and now we’re sort of trying to emerge from the dark ages, if you will, for queer folks. And when I’ve talked to a lot of historians on this show, they’ve talked about how it’s necessary to. You’re dealing with fragments of information, but you have to do a little bit of imaginative work because you have to infer. So you have all these data points, but you don’t have the full record. So you have to infer and imagine how all of these pieces came together. And so I’m curious for you, as you’re taking your documentary crew around, what comes up for you as you’re using these historical records and you’re not just making things up like,
“Hey, this thing happened.” You’re inferring of what happened there based off of the historical record, and you’re bringing in the mythology and the archaeology.
Talk to me about that process of writing that way and using historical imagination to bring life to these stories that have been suppressed.
Neil Laird:
So you’re talking about the novels or the documentaries?
John Parker:
The novels.
Neil Laird:
The novels. The novel is great. After 30 years of footnoting something to death for a National Geographic with 16 sources, now I can make some crap up.
But the good thing is I think if people read my books, you can believe that the Trojan War unfolds more or less as I talk about, that those 48 hours of Pompeii follows the history because I love the history. So I bring that very similar to it. But I can be playful and make stuff up. I wouldn’t do that stuff. I could never do the things I’m doing in Primetime Troy or the other two books for a documentary because you’re inferring too much.
Once again, I can’t say that the embracing lovers in Pompeii were gay. There’s no archaeological record of behavior. We can’t prove that. No one wrote it down. They didn’t have a word for it in many cases because it was just something you did on a Saturday when you were done down at the Tannery. Go home. Go off with Marcus. Come back on Monday. Don’t be late again. It’s like, hey, whatever. There were no gay bars. They didn’t have to.
They went and drank the same Grog down the street. So yeah, I’ll see you at the Grog Bar. But with fiction, I can play with that stuff. And I think if you read the books, I do lean into the comedy because the outrageousness of it. I don’t believe in time travel. I don’t believe in the kind of fantasy. So the whole idea is a bit of a farce, yet I treat it seriously. But when I’m going back to Troy, I talked to many experts. First thing I do is I talk to my friend’s Egyptologist. I talked to a Bronze Age expert in the collapse of 12th century Bronze Age in Greece before I wrote the book, and then I messed with it all. So I had the foundations. How to get my figures in there and throw things around. And some of them are reading it now and they say, “Oh, it’s great. It’s fantasy, but it definitely follows. I want to paint a picture what Bronze Age Greece, what Pompeii on the Eve of the Destruction in 79, and what New Kingdom Egypt was like if you go back there. Hopefully, even though you know it’s time travel, you can rely on Neil there, the documentary filmmaker, keeping that part grounded.
John Parker:
I love that. Is there a fourth book coming?
Neil Laird:
It’s a good, good question. I don’t know. I think it’s exhausting to get this one out. I’m proud of it. We’ll see how it does. Hopefully some readers will pick it up and spread the word and review it. When you self-publish, it’s all about getting that word out and doing all this sort of grassroots stuff yourself. I certainly have places I want to go. I got a long list of places I love I’d love to bring back. So tentatively, yes.
John Parker:
I’m keeping my fingers crossed for Alexander and Haphaestion, but I’m just going to plant that seed.
Neil Laird:
He’s on the short list. You better believe it. You don’t get any gayer than that. Hadrian too. I mean, Hadrian’s on there too.
John Parker:
I just learned about, within the last year or something, I’ve learned about Hadrian. I had no idea about him.
Neil Laird:
He didn’t hide it. Yeah, he didn’t hide it. He has an entire village.
John Parker:
Well, someone was hiding it because I had no idea.
Neil Laird:
You need to read more history, young man.
You can connect with Neil and buy the book at neillaird.com.
