Everyone knows historical figures like Alexander the Great, Liberace, and Eleanor Roosevelt were all gay, right? What if there's more to their stories? Today on This Month in Queer History, we’re talking about how to tell if a historical figure is gay. This episode will set the stage for how we will be discussing historical figures on this podcast.
So, step one of determining whether a historical figure is gay is… to know that that is the wrong question to ask. See, when we say the word gay in 2024, most of us have an understanding that that means a specific thing. For most people who live in the US, gay refers to gay men, which means men who are exclusively attracted to other men. But that's not always what that word meant, and that is why I think that asking whether a historical figure is gay is asking the wrong question. The question we should be asking is, “How did this historical figure understand themself?”
Our ideas about sex, sexuality, and gender have changed significantly over the course of human history, and so the further that we look back, the more we have to work to contextualize the historical figures that we're discussing. And, for the record, this also applies to historical events. When we're discussing historical figures, especially those who lived more than 50 years ago, and who lived outside of the US, where this podcast is based, we need to put aside our modern understanding of sexuality and gender, including our modern terminology, and take in these historical sources on their own terms, in their own time, and within their own culture.
For many people under the age of 25, it can feel like the terms that we use today have been around forever, but many of the terms that we use, like gay, have morphed in their meaning and usage over the past 100 years. Take, for example, the word lesbian. Most people these days understand it as meaning women who are attracted exclusively to women. There are other definitions that are popular, but in modern vernacular, this is the definition that you will see most often. This was not how the term was always understood.
The term lesbian comes from the Greek Island of Lesbos, and when it's capitalized it is in fact referring to people who come from that small island in Greece. The reason it became associated with gay women was because of Sappho, a Greek poet who lived about 2,500 years ago and who is famous for her poetry about loving women. You might recognize her name from the term sapphic. The word lesbian as a way to describe women attracted to other women became a part of common vernacular in the US in the early to mid 1900s, having previously been used as a medical term. The way it was understood at the time referred to any women who are interested in other women. You might notice that there's no exclusivity there, meaning that it would include women who also experience attraction towards men and people of other genders.
Prior to lesbian becoming the preeminent term for women who were attracted to women, other terms like “invert” were being used for both gay men and women. The writer Radclyffe Hall, most famous for her 1928 sapphic novel “The Well of Loneliness,” described herself as a “congenital invert,” a term borrowed from Havelock Ellis, a preeminent sexologist at the turn of the century. At that time, the prevailing view in the fields of medicine and academia was that homosexuality was an inverted sexuality - which is to say, gay women had the sexuality of men, since they were attracted to women, and likewise for gay men. Terms like “invert” reveal a lot about the culture from which they originate.
Going back to Sappho, the woman from whom the lowercase word lesbian originates, you'll see modern discussions of whether Sappho was actually a lesbian or a bisexual woman, and those discussions are missing the point. When we read Sappho's poetry, does it really matter how she would identify? What do we have to gain from slapping a modern label on poetry written thousands of years ago by a woman about her love and affection for other women? If you are a woman who loves other women, Sappho's poetry is for you. If you are not a woman who loves other women, Sappho's poetry is still for you. We can love and appreciate these historical figures and their writing, their art, everything they put into this world, without having to select a modern box to put them in. Also for the record she was from the island of Lesbos so that makes her a capital “L” Lesbian, but that's beside the point.
The point is, if you relate to historical figures, and you see your lived experiences reflected in their stories, I am right with you. There are many historical figures that I myself relate to, like Oscar Wilde and Michael Dillon, both of whom defied the gender norms of their time periods. What I'm suggesting is that we respect historical figures by approaching their lives and works with care and nuance. We can learn so much more about someone by contextualizing them within their time period, within their culture, within their social and economic demographics, and within their immediate community, than we can by isolating them as a figure and asking whether they fit into modern labels like gay or lesbian or transgender.
I understand wanting to be able to point to historical figures and say “They're one of us. They are proof that we have always existed.” But proof that we've always existed is already there - we have entire fields of study dedicated to the immense diversity of sex, sexuality, and gender experience throughout the entire existence of humanity. In fact, the fundamental idea that we as queer people are separate from non queer people, is not a cultural or historical constant. The idea that sexuality is an identity rather than something that you do, is itself a quite recent and quite Western conception of sexuality. And there are countless cultures and time periods across the world in which gender diversity was the norm and need not be differentiated the way we think of cisgender and transgender people today.
I hope this episode can be a stepping stone towards embracing the vast diversity of humanity throughout history. Learning about different ways of being opens up your world to people whose lived experiences defy any labels, whether they were born 2,000 years ago or they share your birth year.
The next time you find yourself wondering whether a historical figure is queer I hope that sparks a desire to find out how that person defined themselves. You could even find that those definitions speak to you more than modern ones do.
Thank you for joining us for the second episode of This Month in Queer History. Take care, and join us next month for our third episode: tracing Pride Month from riots, to marches, to parades.
