Famous gree people who were gay
Home / gay topics / Famous gree people who were gay
Ancient Greece, of course. And in the nearby Kerameikos excavation (ancient Athens’ main cemetery) you can see where the couple carried out their great deed, and where they were buried—and worshipped by later Athenians with cult sacrifices.
There are LGBTQ+ stories to follow in the major archaeological sites outside Athens as well.
It is a little piece of a memorial to a gay couple who were, in effect, the Uncle Sam of the Athenian democracy. Why?
Because when he died—he drowned, mysteriously, in the Nile, when he and the Emperor were making a royal progress through that richest of Rome’s provinces—Hadrian had him declared a god. And the Greeks were aware of that.
But nonetheless, the fact that the king of the gods had this kind of relationship gave them a certain cachet, so the Greeks loved to depict Zeus with Ganymede.
Male-male relations occupied a key role in their culture: they were thought of as the way that young men learned the best and most masculine virtues and skills from older men. You can just make out the letters HARMODI. And, of course, there are LGBTQ+ people in Greece today. And he was worshipped throughout the Roman empire for centuries!
Finally, here is one you can see in Athens.
Sappho was a couple of centuries earlier than the other people in our list, and there is nothing specific on Lesbos connected to her—but you still might want to go to the island where she lived. There is a lesbian community in the beach town of Skala Eressos, where many people believe that Sappho was born.
I want to add that there was also a category of people in ancient Greece called kinaidoi (singular kinaidos) who may have been trans or gender-queer people.
In our culture, we have traditionally hidden the LGBTQ+ side of stories. Especially courage in battle!
And there is also a little evidence that female-female relationships were important too, but is mostly in the poetry of their greatest (by their standards, and ours) lyric poet, Sappho of Lesbos, who wrote about her lesbian loves.
But in ancient Greece, the opposite was true: this statue was on the peak of the façade of the Temple of Zeus in archaic times—kind of like the statue of Armed Liberty on the US Capitol. Many people are nervous about Lesbos, because waves of refugees from Syria have arrived there, but that situation is largely under control now (for better or worse).
Theatrical plays, manuscripts of orations in the Agora, sculptures, statues and amphorae (yes, those graphic ones) all remain as testament to the freedom of thought, speech and choice in classical Athens.
The Olympian Immortals were no less liberated about choosing a sexual partner. Even in the largest LGBTQ+ legal cases today, someone will generally invoke the Greeks.
Greece, The Land Of LGBTQ+ Gods, Heroes, Poets, Philosophers, And More
LGBTQ+ relationships and/or people have been accepted in many cultures through history—different parts of the spectrum in different times and places—but only one culture I know of has considered some LGBTQ+ relationships *better* than heterosexual ones. And that is ancient Greece, where relationships between older and younger men that combined mentoring with romance were widely considered the very best kind of romantic relationship—and the basis for the education of young men in virtue and excellence, particularly (so different from the modern world!) courage in battle.
They were among the great models of the courage that the ancient Greeks thought young men learned from their male lovers—part of an amazing culture and an amazing survival from almost 3000 years ago!
Check out our Gay Greece 2025 Tour Itinerary
click the link https://www.oscarwildetours.com/gay-greece-tour-2021
A Look Into The Art History of Nordic Gays
The Fascinating LGBTQ+ History of Paris
Milestones to an Open-Minded Athens
This liberalism carried into all aspects of everyday life in ancient Athens.
In Delphi, for instance, one of the main sights in the museum is a beautiful statue of the divine Antinous—the Roman Emperor Hadrian’s Greek lover, who was declared a god after he died. There are about 150 statues and busts of Antinous in the world’s museums, but I think this is the most beautiful one (and he was a good-looking guy!).
Myths about Hercules, Achilles, the Amazons, gay lovers in the Trojan and Spartan wars, the writings and life of Sappho, the list goes on and on; building an undeniable narrative. Above all, love was raised on an idealistic pedestal and worshipped as the truest form of human connection—regardless of gender and sexual preference.
One of the places you will see them together is in Olympia, where a painted ceramic statue of Zeus carrying Ganymede crowned the apex of the façade of early version of the temple of Zeus—and is now in the museum.
Another statue of a beloved young man is in the museum in Delphi—which you absolutely must not miss when you are in Greece, as it is probably the most spectacular of all Greece’s many ruins.
They were memorialized in many ways, but one of the principal ones was a paired statue smack in the middle of the Agora (town square). But we don’t have enough other evidence to generalize confidently.
Male-male love, on the other hand, is everywhere in ancient Greek culture, and there are still artworks and monuments in Greece where you can see evidence for this culture.
In fact, he is one of the four most represented people from the Roman Empire, along with Julius Caesar, Augustus, and Hadrian.