Famous gree people who were gay
Home / gay topics / Famous gree people who were gay
Their names were Harmodius and Aristogeiton, and they assassinated the older brother of a dictator who was ruling Athens in 514 BC. It may have been a private act of revenge, but when the democracy was founded 3 years later, the Athenians saw them (though they were dead of course!) as the founders.
They sacrificed at their tomb, sang songs about them (we still have the lyrics!), and depicted them in many places, including this paired statue that was in the middle of the Agora, the center of civic and commercial life.
The best remaining copy of the statue is in the archeology museum in Naples, Italy (also very worth a visit) but in the Agora museum in Athens, there is a chunk of the original monument, on which you can still read the first letters of the name HARMODI.
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.
And, of course, there are LGBTQ+ people in Greece today.
Milestones to an Open-Minded Athens
This liberalism carried into all aspects of everyday life in ancient Athens. Famous modern Greek LGBTQ+ people include the poet Constantine Cavafy and the painter Yannis Tsarouchis. 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!).
You can just make out the letters HARMODI. Zeus, Apollo, Eros, Dionysus, Hermes, Artemis, Athena and so many more, all star in tales of same-sex love that often came with some sort of tragic ending, spurred by jealousy and vengeance. And in the museum, there is a wonderful statue of Zeus with his boyfriend, the Trojan prince Ganymede.
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. Even in the largest LGBTQ+ legal cases today, someone will generally invoke the Greeks.
In what culture did the king of the gods, the greatest heroes, and the greatest general all have boyfriends?
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. 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.
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). The best remaining copy of these statues is in the Archaeological Museum in Naples, Italy, but you can see a part of the base of the original statue in the Agora Museum—an amazing survival.
It is a little piece of a memorial to a gay couple who were, in effect, the Uncle Sam of the Athenian democracy. Above all, love was raised on an idealistic pedestal and worshipped as the truest form of human connection—regardless of gender and sexual preference. And he was worshipped throughout the Roman empire for centuries!
Finally, here is one you can see in Athens.
Zeus saw how beautiful he was, transformed himself into an eagle, and carried Ganymede off to Mount Olympus, where he served as a personal drink-pourer for Zeus for all eternity.
Zeus’s behavior with Ganymede might not have been a good model for a Greek gentleman: swooping down and carrying a young man off is not likely to win you his affection.
Ancient Greece, of course. Zeus, as I was saying, had a boyfriend, a young man called Ganymede (from whose name the English word ‘catamite’ derives).
Ganymede, like so many young men in myth, as a prince, and also a shepherd—not a combination often seen in real life. In our culture, we have traditionally hidden the LGBTQ+ side of stories. 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.
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. Oh, and let’s not forget that ancient Greek athletes competed in the nude….
An LGBTQ+ traveler might of course also want to go to Lesbos, an island close to the Turkish coast.
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.