From Ancient Egypt to the Classical era to the Renaissance and the Age of Discovery, non-heteronormativity has long been a fact of nature. But only recently has sexual and gender conformity been so rejected by the mainstream; the earliest societies didn’t have to. As annoying as “wokeness” can be, it’s only undoing the work of the Hebrews — begun in the seventh century BC, and carried on by late Romans and the Holy Roman Empire. Before them, things were quite different.
In any case, there’s nothing marginal about these 10 figures; you just didn’t know they were queer.
10. Hercules
According to Plutarch, the legendary alpha had sex with innumerable men, including Jason, Adonis, and Hermes’ son Abderus. He even slept with Eurystheus, the mythical king for whom he performed the 12 Labors (which another lover, Iolaos, watched).
He had female lovers too, of course, like his first wife Megara (of Disney fame) — but, depending on the myth, he either killed her or gave her to Iolaos. There was also Omphale, Queen of Lydia, who he stayed with for three years — but only as her slave, and dressed as a woman. He even deflowered all 50 of King Thespios’s daughters (49 in a single night), but that was only at their father’s request.
That Hercules was gay is no revelation, it’s just at odds with the stereotype. For thousands of years, the homosexual demigod has cavorted with satyrs, wrestled with “snakes”, and, in one famous statue, had his dick grabbed by the warrior Diomedes. Now he’s set to appear as Marvel’s first gay superhero in The Eternals.
9. Hatshepsut
By Hatshepsut’s day, the species had forgotten its communal, matrilineal origins. Centralized patriarchy based on surplus production, trade, and male inheritance was now the established norm. This is why, when Hatshepsut’s father Thutmose I died, it was her two-year-old nephew who replaced him. It took Hatshepsut seven years as the toddler’s regent to prove herself worthy of the crown — and even then she had to man up.
Throughout her 20-year reign, “his Majesty” Hatshepsut was identified as a king not a queen. In statues, reliefs, and other depictions, her breasts were downplayed, her torso was androgynous, and her chin was corrected with a beard (a manly symbol of the pharaoh in general).
Interestingly, though, Hatshepsut’s sex was never completely erased — far from it. For one thing, the name Hatshepsut literally means “foremost of noblewomen”. She was also referred to as “the King herself”, presumably by choice. More likely she (or they) was what we define as non-binary. This was the view of German physician Magnus Hirschfield who, in 1914, saw Hatshepsut as a 3,000-year-old example of what he termed “sexual intermediacy”.
8. Achilles
In Madeline Miller’s viral bestseller The Song of Achilles, the hero is in love with Patroclus. But, as the author noted herself, this isn’t a new idea. Scholars have long wondered about Achilles’ sexuality. Centuries after his original appearance in Homer’s Iliad, Greeks such as Plato saw Achilles as Patroclus’s eromenos — that is, the young man’s adolescent lover. But this was just more acceptable to Greek sensibilities. In Miller’s novel, as in the Achilleid by the Roman poet Statius, as well as the Iliad itself, the two men are about the same age.
And while they weren’t explicitly presented as lovers in the Iliad, we can see where people got the idea. Achilles and Patroclus are inseparable. Achilles sings to him; they share a tent; and when Patroclus dies in battle Achilles is stricken, overcome with a vengeful fury against Hector, the man who “has slain him whom I loved so dearly”. Achilles also keeps Patroclus’s washed and dressed corpse in his tent. When he finally decides to burn the body, he puts a lock of his hair in its hands. Then, in Homer’s Odyssey, we’re told Achilles’s ashes were mixed with Patroclus’s.
Female lovers do appear in the tales, but Achilles never gets married. There’s even a hint of transgenderism — or transvestitism at least: as a youth he lived and dressed as a girl at the court of Lycomedes in Scyros.
7. Joan of Arc
Joan of Arc (pronouns he, him) isn’t the only transgender ever canonized by the Pope. Hilarion, Marinos, Smaragdos, Athanasios, and others were all assigned female at birth. Despite dying for his gender, though — at the hands of the Catholic Church, no less — Joan is the only one misgendered today.
In life he had short black hair and only ever dressed as a man, yet almost every depiction brings out his feminine features. Some of the best known paintings are completely imagined, portraying Joan in skirts, dresses, or feminized armor with long, strawberry blonde hair and sexualized make-up. The Suffragettes, likewise, seized on the knight as a symbol of the “womanly warrior”, evoking Joan in their fight for the vote (never mind that Joan was a monarchist).
In fact, he’s been used and abused in death just as much as in life. After leading a 10,000-strong army and ending the Hundred Years War (aged just 17), he was betrayed by the Frenchman he put on the throne. Apparently, the restored French nobility saw their young peasant savior, a popular military strategist, as an existential threat. So when the English captured Joan, they refused to pay a ransom, leaving the teenager to the mercy of the English king Henry VI. Being a heteronormative sort (despite his descent from the queer king Richard I), Henry denounced Joan’s cross-dressing and threw him to the Catholics.
At first, the Inquisition’s threat of the stake was enough for Joan to relent. But the “merciful” alternative was worse: life in a dungeon in women’s clothes on a diet of bread and water. Within days he returned to male dress. Defeated, the Inquisition sentenced him to death, urged on by the University of Paris, saying to Joan: “time and again you have relapsed, as a dog that returns to its vomit”.
It wasn’t until the 20th century that his immolators made him a saint — reluctantly, cynically, under pressure from rebelling French Catholics, and even then they made him a woman.
6. Shakespeare
In 2020, researchers analyzing Shakespeare’s sonnets concluded the bard was bisexual. Having arranged his love songs into the order they were written, the scholars — two world renowned authorities on the playwright — were left in no doubt on this point. The sexual content of the sonnets “addressed to a male subject,” they said, shows he had affairs with men as well as women during his 34-year marriage to Anne Hathaway.
In Sonnet 52, for instance, Shakespeare urges his male lover “To make some special instant special-blest,/By new unfolding his imprison’d pride” (an Elizabethan euphemism for “erection”). The men Shakespeare lusted after are mostly referred to as “Fair Lord” or “Fair Youth”, but other pet names do appear. In Sonnet 20, there’s the “master-mistress of my passion”; in Sonnet 26, the “Lord of my love”. There’s also plenty of gay, bisexual, and gender-bending characters in his plays.
Another prominent Shakespeare scholar, however, Brian Vickers, says we can’t infer anything about the playwright’s sexuality from his creative literary works. In other words, separate the art from the artist. But, as Stanley Wells (one of the researchers on the sonnet study) points out, we know Shakespeare was writing about himself because he left us obvious clues. In Sonnet 135, for example, he puns on his first name Will 13 times. Besides, as Shakespeare scholar Arthur Freeman, puts it: “Why on earth would Shakespeare choose so often to impersonate a pathetically ageing, balding, lame and vulnerable bisexual suitor” unless it was “both genuine and cathartic?” After all, gay sex was illegal in England. He couldn’t have been more out of the closet without getting thrown in jail.
5. Zeus
Is God queer? Of course he is! In the Iliad, Zeus is so captivated by the young shepherd Ganymede that he swoops down to steal him away. Known as ‘The Rape of Ganymede’, this mythical scene appears in mosaics, frescoes, pottery, and sculptures from the classical world to the Renaissance.
In Roman versions, Jupiter appears as an eagle grasping the young Phrygian in his talons. As the poet Ovid put it, the king of the gods “snatched away the shepherd of Ilium, who even now … supplies [Jupiter, aka] Jove with nectar, to the annoyance of Juno [Jove’s wife].”
According to some, the abduction wasn’t sexual but purely spiritual in nature. Ganymede’s ascent, they said, represents the journey of the soul. This was clearly a stretch — but it was how gay Renaissance painters got away with their tender depictions. Michelangelo, for example, aged 57, gave a drawing of the scene to his 17-year-old lover Tommaso. By the eighteenth century, the pretense had been dropped; ‘The Rape of Ganymede’ was fully restored as a symbol of homosexuality and “Ganymede” became a name for male prostitutes.
4. Da Vinci
Da Vinci left few details about his personal life. He’d learned the importance of privacy. At the age of 23, amid a government crackdown, he was accused of having sex with a man. It’s unclear whether the artist was jailed but he seems to have turned in on himself (even though homosexuality was so common in Florence that “Florenzer” was slang for “gay man”).
All we really know of Leonardo’s private life comes from gossip and clues. Several decades after his death, for instance, the artist Gian Paolo Lomazzo imagined a meeting between da Vinci and the Greek sculptor Phidias, in which Phidias asks da Vinci about his young male assistant: “Did you perhaps play with him that ‘backside game’ that Florentines love so much?”, to which da Vinci enthuses that he did. Even da Vinci’s own notes (probed by Freud among others) suggest a love triangle with two male assistants: Salaí (“Little Devil”) and Master Francesco — both of whom were models for his paintings. It’s actually the subject of an opera.
Salaí was a working class troublemaker who, despite his crude manners (stealing from guests, eating too much, etc.), stayed with da Vinci for 25 years, from 10 to 35 years old. The Milanese noble Master Francesco joined them halfway through this time aged around 13 or 14. For years the three went everywhere together until, eventually, Salaí left them in France. There may have been a falling out as he wasn’t there at da Vinci’s bedside when he died in 1519; also, Francesco inherited his master’s works while Salaí got only half a vineyard.
3. Caesar
Throughout his life, Julius Caesar was nicknamed the “Queen of Bithynia”. Apparently, at the age of 20 he had sex with Nicomedes IV. He’d only been sent there to secure the king’s help in the Roman army’s siege against Lesbos. But Caesar was so dazzled by the oriental court that he stayed on longer than expected. He also returned to the king just days after leaving, further adding fuel to the rumors.
Of course, bisexuality was normal for the Romans — but it was shameful for a man to be the bottom. Hence the young Caesar’s sexcapades were often brought up by his numerous political rivals. To list just a few: his co-consul Bibulus routinely referred to him as Bithynicam reginam in edicts; the poet Licinius Calvus mocked him in verses; and the politician Memmius publicly accused him of having served as the eastern king’s “cupbearer”. In fact, even his own soldiers jeered him for it.
But Cicero gave the most scathing remarks. A homosexual himself, he wrote a lurid account of Caesar being led to the bedchamber, where, on a golden couch arrayed in purple, “the virginity of the one sprung from Venus was lost in Bithynia.” Another time, in the Senate, while Caesar listed duties to the king, Cicero cried out: “No more of that, pray, for it is well known what he gave you, and what you gave him in turn.”
2. Paul
Was the founder of Christianity a closeted homosexual? Though he’s often portrayed as a gay-bashing misogynist, there seems to have been more to the man — like a passion for equality unusual for his time. In Galatians 3:28, for instance, he wrote: “In Christ there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free man, neither male nor female. In Christ, all of these are one.” Unlike Christ’s brother James, Paul envisioned an all-embracing faith extending far beyond conservative Judaism.
He was also raised in Bithynia, part of ancient Greece, where same-sex love was more free (and where Caesar was “Queen” to Nicomedes). Tellingly, a wife is never mentioned and, despite revisionists grasping at straws, Paul himself said he was single. He seems to have withdrawn into the exclusively male company of Timothy, Silas, and Luke.
According to Bishop John Shelby Spong (the author of Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism and a twice-married straight man himself), Paul was probably a “self-loathing and repressed gay male.” After all, it’s clear he was conflicted, but it’s never clear why. What, for instance, was the “thorn in his flesh”? And why, in his own words, was he such a “wretched man”? For Spong, it was Paul’s desire for sex with men that prompted such outbursts as this. “Nothing else,” said the bishop, “could account for Paul’s self-judging rhetoric, his negative feeling toward his own body and his sense of being controlled by something he had no power to change.”
1. Jesus
Jesus being gay explains a lot, not least why “praying the gay away” doesn’t work. While there’s no direct confirmation in scripture, neither is there any he was straight. There’s actually more to suggest he was gay.
First, there’s his “friendship” with John — who, in John’s own words, was the “disciple whom Jesus loved” (John 13:23). At the Last Supper, he leant “on Jesus’ bosom” in his “inner tunic”. He was also the only one of the twelve disciples present at Christ’s crucifixion, supporting Mary, who, according to Jesus’s dying wishes, would now become John’s mother.
Such a reading isn’t new. All the way back in the Middle Ages, the queer saint Aelred of Rievaulx considered their relationship a “marriage”. Also, the presumably gay King James I (of King James Bible fame) defended his own “friendship” with the Earl of Buckingham by citing Christ’s “friendship” with John. Frederick the Great, meanwhile, the gay King of Prussia, called John Jesus’s “Ganymede” (after the Zeus myth outlined above).
Second, Jesus was an unmarried rabbi. This was unusual, extremely unusual, even indecent. It remains so today. According to scripture, rabbis are practically obliged to get married — to “be fruitful and multiply”. So even if Jesus wasn’t homosexual, he was, by definition, queer: he challenged the hetero norms of his day.
Third, Jesus had no problem healing the young male lover of a Roman centurion. There’s also the mysterious episode in the Gospel of Mark where he “initiates” a young naked boy.
Critics of the idea that Jesus was gay will point to his romance with Mary Magdalene. But this, according to (heterosexual) Anglican priest Paul Oestreicher, is “the stuff of fiction, based on no biblical evidence”. Others say Jesus was beyond such things, “devoid of sexuality” — but, according to the Church itself, this amounts to a heresy: it suggests that Christ wasn’t human.
In the end it doesn’t really matter — except for the countless queer people burned in his name, beaten to death, or shamed by a Church that would shun its own prophet; Jesus’s own words remain the same either way.