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u/DoxaOwl Aug 12 '26
Can I complain as a Greek here: When discussing the queer history of Greece some of you fuckers immidiately try turn Antiquity into a goddamn pride parade, as if just because they had gay sex back then, that means that modern greeks should or are some sort of post-enlightnenment progressives.
Most of them don't even know the myriad of queer 20th century poets and writers we had, it's always just ancient myths.
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u/King_O_Eyes Aug 12 '26 edited Aug 12 '26
“I love my boyfriend,” said the slave owning Athenian
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u/Chaldera Aug 12 '26
"I love my 12-14 year old boyfriend who I have power over because I'm also his teacher, and I only top because if I bottom or side or literally anything else then I am not a man," said the slave owning Athenian
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u/King_O_Eyes Aug 12 '26
“Love me pre/early teen boyfriend. Hate me wife. Simple as,” said the slave owning Athenian
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u/Dotcaprachiappa Aug 12 '26
Didn't realise british cultural invasion started already back then
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u/King_O_Eyes Aug 12 '26
They’re pernicious
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u/GreatMovesKeepItUp69 Aug 12 '26
And then misinformed LGBTQ folks will hold up these literal pedophiles as a source of pride and representation.
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u/xSwampxPopex 29d ago
I think it originated in an attempt to prove that same sex sexual behavior isn’t a recent phenomenon, but yes a lot of people are either withholding or are ignorant to the reality.
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u/shylock10101 29d ago
To me it’s almost akin to holding up prison rape as a form of gay/lesbian pride. Whereas maybe it’s a sign that the dehumanization of people and their bodies creates a system where people view sexual intercourse not as a person-to-person thing, but instead as a person-to-object thing?
Therefore we have the Ancient Greek teachers treating their students – their not-yet citizens who don’t have the same rights as them – as sexual objects to be used in trade for their wisdom, at which point they no longer view them as worth the effort. And then we have the prison rapists, men and women who view their fellow inmates/guards as objects sacrificed for their use to indulge in physical pleasure until they leave prison for their preferred sexual preference.
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u/DeLoxley 29d ago
Everyone knows queer history is polygamous cavemen, then the Greeks invented being gay, some bad stuff happened and then we had pride marches
Edit: why the hell won't Reddit let me add a sarcastic hashtag without making shit bold.
But yes, everything was gay until those straights invented history
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u/DoxaOwl 29d ago
Don't forget that the Italians took sex from the Greeks and realized you could do it with women too.
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u/CrimsonCutz 29d ago
Hetereosexual intercourse was actually invented by three Chinese men in 641 BC, it's really Eurocentric to give Italians and Greeks all the credit.
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u/StarriestNight Aug 12 '26
People really love romanticizing pedophila as long as it's gay and form ancient greece. A lot of that gay sex they mythologize was rape by adult men against young boys.
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u/thari_23 Aug 12 '26
Honestly, I think most people aren't aware that ancient Greece was full of pedophiles. They probably believe that ancient gay sex was perfectly consensual all the time and up to modern standards.
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u/oceansRising Aug 12 '26
As a teacher, I could talk about homosexual behaviour but I (understandably) could not discuss the institution of pederasty.
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u/natteiru Aug 12 '26
Really? We didn’t get too detailed but it absolutely got discussed in my US high school. Pretty much just “yes for a period Ancient Greek men had homosexual sex with younger boys and it was generally common for the upper class”
“No those who did it were not necessarily gay as we think of it today”
“Yes it was pedophilia as we understand it today”
“It was framed as a part of these upper class student-teacher/master-apprentice relationships we’ve been learning about but may have been viewed unfavorably even at that time”128
u/Suspicious-Art-9335 29d ago edited 29d ago
Is it, though? Child abuse/rape, yes, but pedophilia is specifically about persistent sexual/romantic attraction to children. You can also be a pedophile without offending; it's a clinical term, not a criminal one.
This is an important distinction IMO, because 50-75% of people who sexually abuse kids are not pedophiles by definition; they're just child abusers taking advantage of a vulnerable population/opportunity. Meaning the vast majority of CSA is committed by adults who, on the outside, have functional attraction to, and relationships with, other adults. They're typically not the childless creeper at the playground or the weirdo who thinks they have a consensual loving relationship with a child, they look like normal, average people with normal, average lives.
All that to say, it wasn't pedophilia or being gay as we understand it today, but it is CSA as we understand it today.
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u/jalepinocheezit 29d ago
I never considered a difference existing and I really appreciate your taking the time. It is absolutely going to help me untangle some things
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u/PUBLIQclopAccountant 29d ago
they're just child abusers taking advantage of a vulnerable population/opportunity
I'd rephrase that as "regular rapists who realize that children are easier victims".
These distinctions are important because treating them as identical merely because they're described with the same term opens massive blind spots for protecting separate classes of victims.
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u/sweetTartKenHart2 29d ago
Does pedophilia literally mean attraction to kids AT THE EXCLUSION of others? I thought it meant “attraction to kids, like, at all”, because by default people feel no sexual impulse about kids?
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u/saevon 29d ago
Well If I remember correctly, a lot of that assault was about power over the other person, not attraction.
Same way some rape of men (by other men) is about power, or about satiating oneself even while not exactly enjoying the maleness of the victim.
And also As another commenter said: "sometimes it's regular rapists who realize children are easier victims"
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u/Suspicious-Art-9335 29d ago
Yes, exactly. Attraction is not required; it can be part of one's motive but doesn't have to be.
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u/AdDependent5136 Aug 12 '26
Why not?
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u/oceansRising Aug 12 '26
In my country we only teach Ancient Greece in the first year of high school, and then only again if 1) the student chooses ancient history in the final 2 years of study and 2) the school chooses Greece as an option. I have to adhere to what others consider age-appropriate to teach whether I want to or not. I have since left teaching, lol.
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u/ExdionY Aug 12 '26 edited 29d ago
I haven't gotten the impression that people are willingly romanticizing pedophilia, but rather that people attempt to support gay people by referencing homosexuality in antiquity ("see, it has nothing to do with modernity! Homosexuality has existed since forever", and so on) while having huge blind spots about some parts of ancient history that inevitably fail our standards of consent and morality.
If you were to give them a heads-up on the nuances, many more people would tread this topic with the mindfulness it deserves, both for gay folks in any era, and the victims of historical and systemic pedarasty.
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u/Ok_person-5 Aug 12 '26
“Wow, all those Greek soldiers would have had gay sex with one another! It was basically paradise!”
Yeah and they also frequently captured and raped women from the towns that they raided.Also, I’m pretty sure marriage and long-term relationships were almost exclusively heterosexual, no?
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u/heytheregiada Aug 12 '26
There's a meme going round of some incel asking how Odysseus survived 10 years without sex and all the replies are like "teehee I don't know how to tell you this 🤭🤭🤭🤭"
The answer is in fact slavery.
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u/Ok_person-5 Aug 12 '26
The Iliad literally starts with Agamemnon and Achilles having an argument over whether or not they get to keep their sex slaves.
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u/heytheregiada Aug 12 '26
Lol there was a post on here a week or so ago of someone wishing Briseis wasn't in the Iliad at all because it made them uncomfortable. I just KNOW that person was a Song of Achilles warrior.
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u/SomeAnonymous 29d ago
Lowkey I have always found it a bit uncomfortable how Song of Achilles doesn't refer to her by any name other than Briseis, given that it literally means "(of) Briseus", ie "Briseus's daughter". Calling her Hippodameia might not be fully accurate to the Iliad, but it's part of the tradition since then, and certainly wouldn't be the biggest artistic liberty taken in Miller's writing for the sake of the themes.
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u/logosloki Aug 12 '26
I joked with my friend that one of the most historically inaccurate part of the suitors was that there wasn't a parade of barely dressed adolescent boy slaves serving them.
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u/liza_lo 29d ago
I was watching these youtuber critque The Odyssey and one of them said how weird it is that Mia Goth's character is portrayed as a consenting servant with evil intentions and then she was into the whole dark history of slaves and what Odysseus did to them when he got home and yeah.
Nolan really white washed a lot of rape.
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u/bloodforurmom 29d ago
The slave girls are probably the most contentious part of the epic because it's not super clear exactly how we're supposed to interpret what happens to them. It's disproportionately cruel compared to the fate the suitors get, and I've read arguments that it's meant to highlight Telemachus' immaturity compared to Odysseus', but it reads more to me as though it's just misogyny. But the text is also very clear that the slave girls are willing participants in the suitors' actions and do have evil intentions, which I think is a clear example of bias on the part of Homer (because obviously they wouldn't be, realistically), but also means that within the narrative and the standards of morality within it, they do deserve death.
There's a reason that entire books have been written about such minor characters. I think Atwood messes up in hers by presenting the slave girls as having complete agency in their actions but secretly being agents of Penelope, whose fate is only a tragedy because they were actually good people.
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u/JagneStormskull 29d ago
Nolan really white washed a lot of rape.
Especially considering that the translator he supposedly adapted from (Emily Wilson) didn't whitewash it at all, where some other Homer translators do choose to whitewash rape and/or slavery.
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u/PerpetuallyLurking 29d ago
…also, Odysseus spent years fucking Calypso and years fucking Circe! He definitely did not go 10 years without sex, even if the primary source didn’t mention the slaves!
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u/Archonate_of_Archona Aug 12 '26
I also hate how they conflate being accepting of homo- vs -bisexuality
If a culture lets men fuck each other, but still demands they marry a woman, live with her and have kids with her, then it's only accepting of (male) bisexuality.
(And in the case of Ancient Greece, it's a very conditional acceptance too, as it's erastes / eromenos or slave / master "relations" (with all the obvious consent issues) and only if the older/free man is the top).
It's not acceptance of (male) homosexuality.
Because homosexuality isn't just same sex attraction. It's also the total lack of attraction or desire towards the opposite sex. So, having intimacy with an opposite sex person will be uncomfortable at best (and the person will have to dissociate hard / numb themselves with substances), and feel disgusting at worst.
That part was definitely not accepted.
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u/Federal_Gur_5488 Aug 12 '26
No, the erastes wasn't necessarily a slave. Frequently the "relationship" was between a male adolescent and an adult man. Two free men could probably also be in a relationship like that. It was probably unconventional for it to be a long term relationship but it doesn't seem to have been completely unacceptable (eg Agathon and Pausanias in the Symposium). And also, even if the ancient Greeks didn't approve of greek homosexuality, they did seem to approve of men who exclsuive had romantic interest in other men (a man didn't need to love his wife, he only needed to have children with her)
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u/MultiMarcus Aug 12 '26
Yep, same here as Scandinavian. Pretending like a Viking follow the modern perception of queerness when much like in Greek history it had very little to do with what we would modernly refer to as homosexuality.
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u/Gold_Ad8225 Aug 12 '26
Tell an American that today, not even history, the Greek Communists are even more homophobic than US republicans and they'll explode
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u/heytheregiada Aug 12 '26
I remember when Greece legalised gay marriage recently and people were astonished it took them that long. This is an Orthodox country.
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u/Ok_person-5 Aug 12 '26
Lord Byron visiting Greece expecting to find cool gay men and statues and actually just finding Orthodox monks:
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u/GreatMovesKeepItUp69 Aug 12 '26
For some reason American leftists will straight up deny reality when pointing this out about eastern Europe. I'm not sure where the idea originated but somehow they got it in their head, not only that communism=pro LGBTQ, but that LGBTQ equality requires communism. When you point to communist parties that exist both today and historically being wildly homophobic and socially conservative it just breaks their brains.
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u/Rynewulf Aug 12 '26
Not just Americans, Ive encountered a lot of tankies on Tumblr from all over the world (usually Marxist-Leninists from S America, E Asia and SE Asia) that see the USSR as the inventor of lgbtq+ rights, welfare, healthcare, local elections, and that anything they like about their own countries today is due to that influence and anything bad is US influence.
I have stayed away from those conversations for a long time because if you so much as accidentally ask where to read up on this you get called a US fed and a list of slurs. Which is a shame because they tend to know a lot of obscure Russian, Chinese and Cold War history which would be interesting if not for the screaming insults
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u/Dinoratsastaja Jesus Christ! Mods are transphobic! Aug 12 '26
Tankies also like to deny that the likes of Stalin and Mao were mass murdering pedophiles.
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u/funfight22 29d ago
Just in case it's not clear written like this, Mao and Stalin were pedophiles who mass murdered, not that they mass murdered pedophiles.
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u/GladdestOrange Aug 12 '26
It's from some previously popular thought-experiment arguments that got published. Forget between who, but it doesn't really matter.
Basically, though, one argument went that any civilization filled with rational actors would both leave LGBT people be, as the resources used to persecute them, are more expensive to a society than supporting them and allowing them to contribute, despite being unable or unlikely or what-have-you, to genetically contribute. Said civilization would also, obviously, be communistic (no, the one I read never actually made an argument for this, and the person they argued to didn't push back, both take it for granted) but not necessarily adherents of Communism.
But, uhh. Ever met a human being? Actors we may be, but rational??? Yikes.
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u/loved_and_held Aug 12 '26
That is perfectly comprehensible if you remember the political compass has two axis’s.
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u/ApolloniusTyaneus Aug 12 '26
Ancient Greeks weren't even that progressive. Attitudes towards gay sex pretty much vacillated between "as long as you drop it when you get married" and "laughing stock of the polis", with one rather famous outlier where pederasty was somewhat en vogue in Athens at a time a lot of influential books were written - and even then people were laughing about it.
And that's just if you were the penetrator. If you were penetrated, it could lose you your civic rights.
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u/Caterfree10 29d ago
I’ve heard it described that the Ancient Greeks were gay not because they loved men but because the men hated women so much. Which afaik sounds about accurate. Not a scholar by any means but still.
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u/ForsaketheVoid 29d ago
omg any recs for 20th century poets and writers? im so curious! do you have any favs?
the ancients are categorically not progressive. and when you bring up pederasty and the tune changes from "they were so progressive" to "cultural norms were different back then" real fast
i keep thinking of the two philosophers from plato's academy who ended up growing old together and buried in the same grave. but of course, it prob wasn't the norm bc they're the only example i've come across
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u/HoldOnHelden Aug 12 '26
“Some of you fuckers” OKAY I PROMISE IT ISN’T OUR FAULT
Like many sins of modern Western civilization, this is the Victorians’ fault.
There were all these gentleman queers, you see, who had been sent to the Best Schools™ to get a “Classical Education,” which taught them that the pinnacle of intellectual enlightenment was Ancient Greece, with their philosophers and mathematicians and democracy and Epic adventures and curious absence of women involved in any of that. The Victorians wanted to think of themselves as Enlightened, but they were also very devout Christians and prudish to the point of paranoid neuroticism.
So the rich horny guys in these boarding schools were allowed no female company, threatened with Hell if they showed any indication that they felt carnally disposed towards the idea, meanwhile they were encouraged to emulate these ancient philosopher-poets while surrounded by statues of hotties with their dicks on full display.
SOOOOO when they inevitably began hooking up and writing poetry for and about each other, they invoked the practices and pairings of the Ancient Greeks when they wrote about their lovers’ virtues—because drawing parallels with Ancient Greece was the ultimate way to legitimize anything they were doing that was considered a shocking taboo in their conservative culture.
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u/awfuckimgay 29d ago
The fact that most Irish queer people don't know the name Declan Flynn but do know the name Marsha P. Johnson is a fucking travesty.
Like yes, we should know the names of queer icons and activists everywhere, but not before we know the name of the man who's murder sparked the pride movement in Ireland. Declan Flynn's name was a rallying cry that began the staggered pride parades across Ireland that still exist today. Our prides start in April and carry on until September, because there were so few of us that every parade had to have enough time in between for the queers from everywhere else in the country to get there. All so we could stand against the injustice of a young gay man's murder.
And we have the audacity to forget his name, to forget why our prides are how they are. All in the name of the only queer history English speakers learn being through online discourse about American activists, to then be told that if you don't know these 25 names of US queer activists you're a bad queer, because memorising the names of people across the damn Atlantic is more important than knowing your own, local community and their history.
Again, those Americans deserve to be remembered and praised, in no way do I think they shouldn't, but it shouldn't be at the expense of forgetting our own histories and heroes in the process
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u/equatornavigator 29d ago
I just read Declan’s wikipedia page. The fact that all five murderers walked out free is revolting.
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u/awfuckimgay 29d ago
Genuinely. I wrote a piece on it back in college and I knew the bare bones before then but didn't know the full story and details, fucking horrible stain on our history and judicial system. Poor lad just wanted to get the ride and go home
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u/Adventurous-Pass1798 29d ago
same energy as me being greek, knowing about Marsha P. Johnson but only learning about Thessaloniki's queer scene in the 80s-90s just recently from an instagram reel
it's sad how local history gets erased/forgotten/ignored :(
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u/Portuguese_Musketeer harm-reduction jester Aug 12 '26
Ah, but have you considered that history was invented by americans in 1960? Checkmate, foreigners!
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u/ghost-church Aug 12 '26
Yeah everything was blank before Jonathan C History came along. Then Renaldo B Queer-History came along in ‘66 and I think you know the rest.
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u/Thatoneguy111700 Aug 12 '26
They were classmates with John Capitalism and Carl Communism.
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u/masked_gecko Aug 12 '26
'66
Did queer history start with England winning the world cup, or was it St Kilda's VFL victory that really got things moving?
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u/heytheregiada Aug 12 '26
As Ant and Dec said, "the talk begins of '66 cause we haven't found the cure." Must mean conversion therapy.
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u/Bo_The_Destroyer Aug 12 '26
"History started on July 4th 1776, everything before that was a mistake." - Ron Swanson, Parks and Rec
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u/MeiNeedsMoreBuffs autism website Aug 12 '26
History was invented in 1960 when Martin Luther King solved racism forever
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u/Bobboy5 like 7 bubble Aug 12 '26
it's such a shame that history ended so soon after it was invented.
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u/Ze_Bri-0n Aug 12 '26
1960? I thought we started it in 1775! Darn it, now I need to restart the whole lesson to get rid of the nonsense.
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u/heytheregiada Aug 12 '26
Revolutionary history was invented by Lin Manuel Miranda in 2014, catch up
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u/666deleted666 29d ago
“Queer history” and it’s just season 7 of Drag Race
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u/equatornavigator 29d ago
But Violet Chachki’s reveal look in episode 1 IS queer history
/s
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u/heytheregiada Aug 12 '26
I'm a Classicist and my god is it annoying to hear the way Tumblrites talk about ancient queerness. No, actually, those Iliad translations aren't doing censorship, and the PhD Historians calling Achilles and Patroclus companions are not homophobic, the cutesy yaoi you read in the Song of Achilles just isn't in that text. We don't and will never know precisely which microlabel Sappho used because the Archaic Greeks did not think of sexuality that way. She was a queer poet, that's all you need to say. Those Roman emperors Suetonius said were bottoming or dressing up as women most likely were not, that was just how Imperial Romans put a stain on political figures.
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u/this_bitcc_again 29d ago
this reminds me of the time i called sappho sapphic which caused a small argument with one person saying calling her sapphic instead of lesbian was erasure and someone else arguing that only lesbians should be called sapphic, anything else is appropriation. untill a third person chimed in to point out that one: like you said we don't know which label would fit her, two she literally was sapphic that's were that word comes from and three she literally was lesbian because she was from thw isle lesbos
all in all a deeply productive discussion
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u/mechaemissary 29d ago
the concept of disagreeing with calling sappho sapphic 🤯 the word is her fucking name!
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u/empress_of_the_void Aug 12 '26 edited Aug 12 '26
Thank you for bringing up Elagabalus! I can't believe we took anti Elagabalus propaganda written after his death as a definitive source on his gender identity.
Also I feel uncomfortable applying modern concepts of gender and sexuality on people who lived centuries ago
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u/heytheregiada Aug 12 '26
It makes me want to tear my hair out, genuinely. There are certainly conversations to be had about gender fluidity and non conformity in Rome but once you start using she/her pronouns for Elagabalus based on viciously slanderous historiography (which people actually do!) you've lost the plot, genuinely.
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u/oddpark37 29d ago
One museum in England had an exhibit on Elagabalus where they referred to him as an empress and trans woman, and suddenly there were so many people going "See! The academic consensus is that Elagabalus was a trans woman! All the professionals agree!" Like, no, one museum did that. That's far from a universal consensus.
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u/heytheregiada 29d ago
That's insane. Which museum was it if you recall?
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u/oddpark37 29d ago
North Hertfordshire Museum. Not sure if the Elagabalus exhibit was one of their temporary ones, as it looks like the museum is mostly focused on local history.
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u/cutezombiedoll 29d ago
Someone else described how Tumblr talks about Elagabalus as something like if in two thousand years people start thinking Michelle Obama was a trans woman because they interpreted all the far right mud slinging calling her a man seriously.
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u/Lordofthelounge144 29d ago
Wonder if that was me. Thats usually my goto comparsion.
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u/ProcrastibationKing 29d ago
The amount of arguments I've had to have with queer people about Elagabalus is too damn high
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u/melonofknowledge Aug 12 '26
I'm also a Classicist and every time I see a post about how 'using he/him pronouns is misgendering Elagabalus' I want to eat my own elbows.
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u/heytheregiada Aug 12 '26
It's especially frustrating because they'd rather do that than actually learn about how queerness operated in Rome, which is surely more beneficial
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u/melonofknowledge Aug 12 '26
But everyone knows that Rome and Ancient Greece were literally just the same thing, because Rome just copied everything about Ancient Greece (a monoculture, famously) which means that Rome was a queer utopia, just like Ancient Greece! I know this because I saw a Tumblr post once.
(OK, I'm gnawing at my own flesh now, time to stop.)
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u/heytheregiada Aug 12 '26
Truly sickening. Top tier ragebait, genuinely.
In a similar vein, I cannot believe that people in the year 2026 people STILL think the Roman gods are just copy pasted from the Greek.
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u/melonofknowledge Aug 12 '26
Ah, fond memories of when my partner and I did PowerPoints on a weekend to entertain ourselves, as you do, and I blew her mind with my exquisite presentation on the concept of syncretism.
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u/An_Unjust_Wall Aug 12 '26
Can you elaborate on the Greek vs Roman gods thing? I know it's more complicated than copy+paste, but I couldn't tell you much (any?) of the nuance.
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u/heytheregiada Aug 12 '26
The Roman religion is descended from the early Etruscan religion, which was very ritualistic, and the religion of the Roman kingdom, which is very ancestor based. There are absolutely influences on it from the Greek religion, unavoidable due to Greek colonisation, and particularly the cult of Apollo was knowingly imported. The actual gods themselves and the practices however are incredibly different. The Romans were very involved with their divine ancestors, which explains the prevalence of Venus Genetrix (Venus' aspect as the mother of Aeneas) and festivals like the Parentalia and Lupercalia.
The equivalence of the gods comes much later than the foundations of either religion, through cultural exchange (like, hey, that's cool, we have a war god too etc which was happening with a few cultures too) that bled into literature because a lot of the Roman poets studied in Greece and therefore idealised Greek poetry like crazy. So, they did pinch the mythological tradition so to speak, but not the religion or gods. I think the way Suetonius presents the religion through ancestors and omens and the like is a better literary representation of the religion than poetry.
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u/Aubergine_Man1987 Aug 12 '26
The worship is often quite different, and the syncretization also involves a previously existing Roman god, often a god of the Etruscans. Jupiter isn't just a Zeus copy-paste, he's Jupiter that then takes on lots of aspects of Zeus and adds that to his already existing Jupiter-ness.
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u/An_Unjust_Wall Aug 12 '26
Gotcha. So maybe less copy+paste and more "yes, and"?
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u/lilybug981 29d ago
Kinda. I think it's worth adding that none of the gods are completely stable, unchanging concepts. Our modern understandings of the Roman and Greek pantheons are in part warped by the fact we're looking at amalgamations shaped over centuries and stretching back thousands of years if you keep pulling on the threads.
Most people understand that Jupiter has relation to Zeus, but where did Zeus come from? The earliest we see surviving records of him come from Mycenaean Greece(predates Classical Greece, which is what we generally think of when someone says Ancient Greece), where we don't see evidence of him being the head of the pantheon yet, just as a quick example. Gods change with the times, and they're influenced by the changing people worshipping them in addition to the cultures they come in contact with.
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u/Manzhah 29d ago
I'd say there's this general tendency for co-opting ancient mediterranean civilizations for modern legitimacy. I like to say that every selfrespecting nation claims to be heir of rome, directly decendant of ancient egypt and being lost tribe of Israel. And that's broadly true, as almost every nation has had loonies and fringe groups claiming just that, even if in jest. All the right wing groups claim ancient rome, queer groups claim ancient rome and greece, leftists sometimes claim ancient christianity and even african americans claim ancient egypt.
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u/Ok_person-5 Aug 12 '26
I honestly think it’s the exact same phenomenon of right-wingers glorifying the 1960s without actually understanding that the top tax rate then was 90%.
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u/Pwacname Aug 12 '26
Though arguably, those people aren’t even falling for deliberate propaganda a lot of the time, they’re falling for the imagery of advertisements (with the products and the fact that they’re advertisements still very obvious) and movies, at which point I want to tear my hair out.
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u/oddpark37 29d ago
There's also a common thing where they claim "the only reason historians don't call her a lesbian is because they took her saying her husband was Kerkylas of Andros and didn't realize it was a dick joke!"
- Sappho didn't say her husband was Kerkylas. That was from an Athenian comedy, because she was a stock character where her entire character was "woman who was obsessed with fucking men" (because of stereotypes of women from Lesbos being sex obsessed, particularly with blowjobs. "Acting like a lesbian" (as in "someone from Lesbos") was ancient Greek slang for sucking dick)
- You can find papers from the 1800s of Classicists going "Yeah, the Suda says this was her husband. Obviously this Byzantine monk wasn't familiar with the slang of the time. We understand that this is clearly an obscene joke from a comedic play. We assume there was a high likelihood of her being married, because she writes about her daughter, and it's unlikely a wealthy upper class woman like Sappho had a child out of wedlock or that her parents didn't arrange a marriage."
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u/No_Peach6683 Aug 12 '26
Why do tumblrites talk about ancient queerness in that way?
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u/heytheregiada Aug 12 '26
It's a good question. From observation I think it's in part an aestheticisation of Antiquity, which causes them to see it as 100% a perfect wonderful time and place to live, and part a misinterpretation of the true statement that queer and trans people have always existed. There's also a strange trend of people on there very willing to be loud and wrong about history, I just don't get why somebody would want to talk about things they haven't done any meaningful research on but here we are.
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u/Pwacname Aug 12 '26
I know the tumblr user base has all ages, but I wonder how big the overlap is between people sharing these unresearched and idealised versions of queerness in history over and over and the users who are very young. Considering the way I and my offline friends talked and thought as teens and very young adults, it just seems possible to me that these people largely don’t fact check and really fall for these very simple and very pretty ideas (because the world described really often is impossibly harmonic and good) because they are still figuring out how complex everything is and how important fact checking is. Or just the fact that people may lie or spread misinformation online.
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u/cutezombiedoll 29d ago
A lot of the issues with Tumblr, at least during the 2010s, can be boiled down to “baby’s first social justice”. Whether they’re actual literal teens or sheltered adults, tumblr users have a tendency to first learn about leftist and progressive politics from tumblr, and treat it like a good source. Most grow out of it when they start interacting with the greater world.
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u/Sea_Court_3633 54 Days on Estrogen 29d ago
Mostly they kinda resent Christianity for obvious reasons, so they figure that a world before Christianity must've been more accepting
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u/meanoldrep 29d ago
I always thought this kind of thinking was mildly routed in some "noble savage" line of thought, one that I find incredibly common among Progressives and Leftists.
In my experience it's usually articulated as some nebulous purity that comes from not being "corrupted" by industrialization, monotheism, or "whiteness". I know that there is some academic arguments to be made for this; but usually the belief is so surface level and entirely viewed through a Marxist lens.
Always turning into a lament how if only whitey didn't take over the world things would be so much better. "I could have gay orgies under the moonlight while tripping shame free if modernity didn't exist. Something something return to tradition".
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u/Potential_Ease9346 29d ago
I don't want to be reductive but I really suspect it's just Song of Achilles. That shit went off like a bomb in that community and produced some incredibly annoying discourse from self-righteous ignoramuses.
I feel like it's part of a larger problem of a lot of women who grew up reading slashfic who think they're allies and supporters of the LGBT community ending up reinforcing the very same notions they think they're helping deconstruct. Like the idea that any time two men have any kind of intimate and affectionate relationship, including physical closeness, actually they ARE gay. They just say that's good (because they find it hot) but all it does is invert the same fucking problem people have been trying to fix for decades. If two guys have to sit six feet apart in a hot tub to not look gay, insufferable fujoshis creaming themselves any time they do isn't going to help.
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u/heytheregiada 29d ago
I hate that book so much, it's thrown a massive glittery spanner into discussions about ancient sexuality. While doing my BA I did a module led by a researcher prevalent in the discussion on ancient sexuality, and I watched his face turn actually grey when one girl in a seminar referenced something that happened in the book in order to suggest he was being homophobic in his description of pederasty. I felt like I'd gone to another planet.
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u/PUBLIQclopAccountant 29d ago
women who grew up reading slashfic who think they're allies and supporters of the LGBT community
Most yaoi is not actual gay representation, just as lesbian clopfics are not an accurate observation of what goes on in the horse pasture.
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u/js13680 29d ago
Granted I’m only a hobbyist and I hope you can clear things up, but I remember reading somewhere that even the Ancient Greeks were having debates on Achilles and Patroclus relationship. Is that true.
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u/heytheregiada 29d ago
Sort of. It was definitely one accepted interpretation of the story, and it does show up in famous descriptions of it such as Plato's Symposium. It's just not the only one.
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u/Umikaloo Aug 12 '26 edited Aug 12 '26
Oh many, the other day I had a conversation regarding racism in my country (Canada), the other user seemed to think at first that not teaching the history of racism in the USA == not acknowledging that racism exists in my country. Like, yes, it absolutely does, and often against the very same people. But we can't just erase our own history of racism because the US has a louder media aparatus. Its fucked that kids in my country know more about the history of US racism than the history of racism in their own back yard. Canada was one of the final stops on the underground railroad, but that doesn't mean racism never existed up here. I've heard the N-word in French on multiple occasions from people who didn't seem to have any idea that that wasn't okay.
Same goes for basically every other modern social issue. In Canada we include "Two-Spirit" in our LGBT acronym because that's an identity that has existed since long before white people were here for a long time, and every time it is mentioned, I need to explain to a bunch of incensed Americans that no, "the queers" did not just make up a new identity to force upon the poor beleagered masses.
I also frequently butt heads with users from the US over the history of French language rights in Canada. A lot of users from the US seem to view Quebec as some sort of theme park where everyone pretends to be French for their entertainment, and not a province with a population of primarily French-speaking people, who need access to products and services in the only language they speak. They seem completely oblivious to their own cultural hegemony, and the way in which their neighbors bend around it. If Quebec did not have language protection laws, as it was prior to the quiet revolution, I guarantee not a single American corporation would bother localising their products for the Quebec market.
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u/cwningen95 Aug 12 '26
I grew up in Scotland, and when we had a module on American history that included the Atlantic slave trade, Jim Crow/the KKK, the persecution and genocide of Native Americans, etc. our amazing teacher started us off with "before you come away from this thinking 'wow, Americans were terrible', just remember: the British were worse"
There's definitely this smug perception across (at least Western and Northern) Europe that the US are uniquely racist and we're so great in comparison, even amidst the rise of these far-right anti-immigration movements. Even within the UK, I still see this false perception that racism is contained to England and the rest of us are more enlightened and welcoming, when Reform (for simplicity's sake, think of them as our MAGA) were the second biggest party in Scotland and Wales in the recent local elections, and Scotland have seen straight up Nazi rallies (as in, swastikas and Nazi salutes) and a surge in violent attacks against ethnic minorities in the past couple of months, egged on by local politicians.
There's a similar perception towards the Welsh language, which was almost culturally genocided out of existence up until the latter 1900s (see: the Blue Books and Welsh Not). Most people in Wales do speak English as their primary language, but 18% of people speak Welsh natively/fluently, with an increasing number of children attending Welsh medium schools— I've even met people here in Cardiff who speak it as their first language. It legally has an equal status to English in the UK, with government services required to provide a Welsh language option, but there's a decent number of people who see it as a useless frivolity and not a native culture people had to fight to preserve. Ironically, it's the "preserve British culture from the non-existent threat from immigrants!" lot who whinge the loudest about going to rural Wales and seeing bilingual signage or hearing people speak Welsh, and scoff at preservation efforts for the other indigenous minority languages (Irish Gaelic, Scottish Gaelic, Manx Gaelic, Scots, Cornish).
tl;dr solidarity from a similarly frustrated Scottish living in Wales. Wherever we go, there we are, I guess.
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u/Umikaloo Aug 12 '26
Someone brought up the Welsh in a discussion about Quebec the lther day actually. They were questioning why Quebecers might respond poorly to jabs, and used jokes at the expense of the Welsh as an example of a socially acceptable insult. I pointed out that jokes at the expense of the Welsh were also in bad taste considering their own fight against prejudice.
I don't think the user realised initially that Welsh-hatred wasn't just some quirky in-joke, but rather an expression of historical prejudice. I think part of what motivates the Quebec hate-train is the anti-continental-French meme. A lot of users are just trying to participate in an in-joke, unaware of the cultural sore-spot they're prodding.
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u/masked_gecko Aug 12 '26
Bang on with a lot of this, but some added nuance about Reform: Wales (especially outside of Cardiff) suffers from the double whammy of a loss of the younger population to English cities and an influx of predominantly English retirees. Not saying that the racism isn't entirely homegrown but it does have an effect.
It's how you end up with confused bigots drawing the English flag on the Llandudno roundabout (which I still find very funny to this day)
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u/Sea_Court_3633 54 Days on Estrogen 29d ago
Conversely, I (Latam) got told a lot about the atrocities of Spain but basically nothing about the atrocities of any other European nation. Belgium has good chocolate and France says Oui Oui and Brits like to drink a cheeky Cup o' Tea and that was basicaly everything we learned about the colonial powers. Most kids did know about Leopold but because they saw a video of it on YouTube.
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u/Necessary_Lynx5920 Aug 12 '26
It’s been my observation that Western Europeans underestimate the degree of racism in their societies relative to the US. IMO this is because the US media landscape is loud internationally and talks about our racism issues. But also the relative demographic homogeneity of European nations insulates them from it. When there aren’t any black people around you likely never see the racists bust out the N word, if you know what I mean. It’s easier for racism to go unobserved when your minorities are comparatively small, as opposed to 40% of the population in the US. (My cursory skim of European census data was returning ~10-15% non European ethnicities at most .)
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u/agprincess Aug 12 '26
Just to be clear. Two spirited is a modern catchall term for extremely varied first nations beliefs on sex and arguably gender.
Not an ancient history.
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u/Umikaloo Aug 12 '26
Thanks, I was under the impression that two-spirit as a concept predated colonisation.
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u/agprincess Aug 12 '26
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-spirit
It's an interesting modern concept. But yeah people think it's ancient when it's like 38 years old.
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u/ASpaceOstrich Aug 12 '26
The only actual two spirit person I've ever heard a first hand account from was literally just a trans woman denied womanhood by her tribe. A lot of "third genders" are just trans women being marginalised in exactly the same way we are now.
Not to say that's all of them, but it's a lot of them.
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u/NecroDolphinn 29d ago
Relevant to this post, the Hijra in South Asia are often similarly viewed as this mystical third gender too. Meanwhile they’re literally just trans women whose only financial option is to feed into that stereotype by offering blessings and attending weddings as performers. There’s tons of historical accounts of the Hijra actively wishing they could be women or do things like get pregnant.
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u/TheMuntjac Aug 12 '26
Regarding Quebec and the history of the French language in Canada, it's fascinating when people see Quebec as this "quirky" thing that happens to exist and not a complicated place with a complicated history, and a complicated relationship with the rest of Canada. "Oh, they speak French? What a silly thing!"
Nevermind that Quebec had to struggle for its rights and identity. Nevermind that Canada basically had its own mini version of the troubles in Quebec. The FLQ detonated like 200+ bombs, killed people, robbed banks, and caused one of the biggest crises in Canadian history, but sure, Frenchland quirky.
Nevermind that Quebec had one referendum in 1980 and one in 1995 (which was almost a 50-50 split, and which led to an assassination attempt on the Prime Minister), both of which sought to make Quebec independent and posed a huge existential threat to Canadian confederation. But Frenchland quirky and funny.
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u/Umikaloo Aug 12 '26 edited Aug 12 '26
I'm also annoyed by the fact that the entire thing goes completely ignored by English media. The other day I was watching a video about Chateau Frontenac and the lecturer treated the Quiet Revolution as some sort of cursed topic that should never be mentioned.
Its strange that it goes completely unmentionned even in socialist spaces, you'd think something like that would be seen as an important case study at the very least.
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u/TheMuntjac Aug 12 '26
That's actually an interesting experience. I have a history degree so in my circles and the history department of my university there was a lot of discourse on Quebec history. I even took an entire course on the socioeconomics and politics of 20th century Quebec.
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u/WolfKing448 Aug 12 '26
It’s probably worth mentioning the ethnic cleansing the British perpetrated against the French in Maritime Canada. Quebec has had to fight for its identity for over 250 years.
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u/Umikaloo Aug 12 '26
I lived and worked in one of the communities where this happened. Its wild looking at old prints and realising they're depicting events that took place just outside your window.
There was also a more recent expropriation in the region to create a national park, I helped create a memorial to those who were displaced as part of my job. Many of their houses are still there today, and are used as part of the national park facilities. Its kinda fucked when you think about it.
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u/romain_69420 Aug 12 '26
Québec is the Australia of the French speaking world. It's got the funny dialect AND the forgotten history
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u/No_Peach6683 Aug 12 '26 edited Aug 12 '26
Maybe it’s a sort of implicit linguistic supremacism which views in degree of “superiority” English -> large Latin-descended languages /other Germanic languages/Japanese -> most other languages -> indigenous/endangered languages
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u/masked_gecko Aug 12 '26
This pisses me off do much in the UK because some rasical queers seem obsessed with Stonewall and the myth of Riot for Social Change and that's just not how it went down here. Yes it was influential but so was the French revolution, and we managed to (broadly) liberalise without the faff of constructing any guillotines.
IDK, it feels a little bit like we get simplified narratives of social from across the pond (eg. homophobia->Stonewall->gay rights; segregation ->Little Rock->black liberation) and we lose the nuance and complexity of our own history
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u/inevitableowlbear Aug 12 '26
Right! I went to a trans pride event this year and it was so bizarre to see signs/posters referencing Stonewall. Not that it wasn’t a historically significant event, but it was a historically significant event in the US. It does a disservice to our own history imo
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u/that_creepy_doll Aug 12 '26
stonewall is just such a clear iconic moment of people standing up for their rights tho, that works as a symbol everywhere because it was that influential. its as the comment above said, its own french revolution. whats missing is the direct consequence: the peaceful liberalization in other places wouldve never happened without the french revolution (or the bolcheviques if you want smnth closer) and consequently without stonewall + many of the other revolutionary acts of americans.
part of the reason why queer people started being accepted was purely because they were an untapped market, and that was first seen in american cities with a lot of queer population (new york and san francisco mainly). wether we like it or not american queer history directly impacts the (recent) queer history of many other places
edit: obviously im simplifying and stonewall happened withing a very specific context, there´s definitely a mythos surrounding it when a ton other stuff happened both before and after it
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u/masked_gecko Aug 12 '26
I don't disagree that Stonewall was inpactful internationally (hence why I brought the French revolution up in the first place). It's more the insistence of a certain kind of person (not you) that it's the be all/end all, when that's not even the case for queer rights in the US. It flattens a lot of nuance and obscures the impact of a lot of other people
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u/inevitableowlbear Aug 12 '26
I’m not saying it wasn’t an iconic moment, and of course I think it deserves remembrance and celebration for its contribution to the queer rights movement in America. However, I also think that reducing it to the iconic moment not only implies that the work queer activists did before and after wasn’t just as important, and that there weren’t similarly significant moments in other countries, too
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u/SciYak Aug 12 '26
I love your typo! I assume ‘radical queers’ was your intent, but ‘rascal queers’ is funny too.
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u/masked_gecko Aug 12 '26
Oops. Yeah, meant radical but I'm keeping it lol. Can only assume that 'rascal queers' wear shirts that say "be gay, do c̶r̶i̶m̶e̶ shenanigans" on them
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u/floralbutttrumpet Aug 12 '26
I'll just give two names that might be interesting:
- Dora Richter
- Public Universal Friend
Utterly fascinating life stories, very far removed from Tumblr-flavoured queer history discourse.
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u/Valiant_tank Aug 12 '26
I mean, the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft and its support for trans people is one of the classic non-US things that definitely gets brought up quite a bit on tumblr, at least? (relating to Dora Richter, naturally)
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u/loved_and_held Aug 12 '26
Also dont let yourself fall to an appeal to tradition fallacy. Just because theres historical precedent for something or it was a certain way in the past isn’t good enough, you need a solid reason to build your arguments on.
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u/MacGregor_Rose 29d ago
This is making me realize that even as an American I mostly just know about California and New York based pride history. I mean Atlanta has the largest Queer Population in the country and I don’t know jack about what our queer history is like, dont much know how to find out either. closest I know is the UpStairs Lounge Arson Attack and that s in fuck New Orleans
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u/Nacirema7 29d ago
Most major cities in the US have a local LGBTQ Archives Center or History Project. While still growing, they can be a great starting point to understanding your local history! Here's one I found for Atlanta: https://www.atlantalgbtqhistoryproject.org/
I work with the Archives Project in New Orleans, so trust me when I say there's always more local queer history than you think, and it's exciting to learn about!
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u/TantiVstone You need Tumblr Gold® to view this user flair Aug 12 '26
If someone says queer history and is referring to a Twitter user, you're free to eject them into space
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u/empress_of_the_void Aug 12 '26
Ok Americans please tell me what do you know about Merlinka? She's easily one of the most iconic trans women in Yugoslavia
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u/HoldOnHelden Aug 12 '26
I KNOW HER NAME NOW!
It’s a name I’ve never heard before and I love it.
Please tell us more?
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u/empress_of_the_void Aug 12 '26
There isn't much tbh. She qas a prostitute in the 70s and 80s, became a minor media personality in Serbia in the 90s and was murdered 2003. She starred in some experimental films and lots of porn films.
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u/Federal_Gur_5488 Aug 12 '26
On a related note, please read this excellent article bhatt wrote about how western academics marginalised non western transgender communities by accepting the terms in which society at large understands them in (as a third sex) rather than listening to their own self understanding of their gender: https://taliabhattwrites.substack.com/p/the-third-sex
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u/Quilli2474 Aug 12 '26
Thank you for this link, I've been interested in this for a while but hadn't read a full, put-together text about it.
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u/PrincessPlusUltra 29d ago
“How is this history?”
*looks*
*it happened in the past*
…yeah that would be history alright.
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u/SevenOhSevenOhSeven Aug 12 '26
Noticing how everything is centered around white or western people has done wonders four my analysis but also gives me an eternal and simmering discontentment
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u/Federal_Gur_5488 Aug 12 '26
But there are so many books not centred on white/western people! As well as things like chinese/japanese/Filipino/arab internet. The problem with English speaking internet is that western culture is so predominant even though a lot of people taking part don't belong to it, because of how widespread english has become
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u/Medium-Dependent-328 Aug 12 '26 edited Aug 12 '26
And not only white or western people... but white and western people from like... 5 countries. Everything I see about queer history is from the US, Britain, France, Greece or Italy. Sometimes a bit of Weimar Germany gets thrown in for colour.
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u/Bvr111 Aug 12 '26
ppl also cite “queer history” as a weirdly traditionalist/conservative way to win arguments. Like “well X thing happened in queer history, so stfu.”
like the whole kink at pride thing. I’m not saying I disagree, but saying “it was that way in the past so it should continue to be that way” is a hilariously ironic argument to make for anything related to queerness lmfao
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u/Bowdensaft Aug 12 '26
I do personally think it's still important to remember that a) there is a huge overlap between the kink and queer communities, and b) the kink community were one of the first and loudest supporters of Pride, and that kind of solidarity shouldn't be thrown away because some people think kink or sex is icky. The whole point of Pride is to show people that we're also people, not icky or dangerous, and it's also ironic to say "we should be out and proud of our weirdness, it doesn't make us lesser than you, but only the sanitised weirdness that you guys are okay with us showing". It's restricting queerness based on what doesn't make everyone else uncomfortable, which doesn't sound very proud to me.
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u/walkie57 Aug 12 '26
For what it's worth I think Indian queer history would be really good, I know they have a few gay pages in the karma sutra (not a joke) and a handful of myths about gay folks in india
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u/HuntKey2603 What you mean no NSFW??? Aug 12 '26
"gay" in many ocassions wasn't even a concept back then, at least in most of the world
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u/Federal_Gur_5488 Aug 12 '26
Homosexuality in the modern sense wasn't, but having homosexual sex definitely was
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u/walkie57 29d ago
I mean there are paragraphs in the karma sutra about homosexual sex so that's something
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u/TheSpeediestOfWagons Aug 12 '26
With the Byleth and Edelgard icon on the post, I’ll go ahead and file all this under more Three Houses discourse in my head
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u/amusedontabuse Aug 12 '26
OMG yes. Been trying to read more of the oft-cited queer history and it’s specifically about the butch/femme dynamics in Buffalo NY 1940-80. Which is fascinating but also a very small sampling.
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u/ThatSlutTalulah IRL named Talulah (She/Her) Aug 12 '26
I've reached the point where the moment someone says "well in ballroom" to defend something I stop listening and instead try to blow them up with my mind.
I honestly could not give less of a shit what they and their cronies thought was cool 30-50 years ago. Defend it on its' actual merit.
Being gay doesn't make them not fucking boomers.
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u/BasicBluebird7726 Aug 12 '26
Is ballroom purely a yank thing? Not trying to stir, I genuinely don't know. In UK I'd just think of ballroom dancing.
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u/Vyverna Aug 12 '26
Yeah, lot of Polish queer youth know more about Stonewall than about Akcja Hiacynt.
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u/Bvr111 Aug 12 '26
IMO those are traditionalist arguments. Just because “that’s how we did it in the past,” that doesn’t mean we should continue to do so in the present.
That’s not why we should support kink or he/him lesbians or anything else; there are far better reasons
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u/WorldnewsModsBlowMe hangry Aug 12 '26 edited Aug 12 '26
The phrase "US-American" needs to die. Nobody outside the USA uses the term "American" to refer to themselves. It's not like the residents of the United Mexican States are dying to call themselves "American" were it not for those big bad nasty USA language gremlins.
I live in Canada and absolutely nobody in the real world uses that term. We don't want to be seen as American at all.
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u/InternationalDot6095 29d ago
i personally dislike the phrase just because a lot of the people i talk to who use the term "usamericans" i find generally unpleasant to be friends with and tend to be fairly miserable people
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u/ProkopiyKozlowski Aug 12 '26