Contents:
WAS ACHILL GAY? WHAT WE KNOW FROM CLASSIL LERATURE
One of the most asked qutns of all time is: was Achill gay?
One of the ma arguments that suggt he might have been gay is the exprsn of love between Achill and his clost iend Patrocl, who he had known sce childhood.
Some thk he was bisexual, sce there is evince of his romantic attachments to both men and women, while others see his ep attachment to Patrocl as a nfirmatn that he was gay. In twenty-first-century adaptatns of the story of the Trojan War, Achill and Patroklos are often portrayed as gay lovers. Breakg out of the “gay” vers “straight” dichotomy.
IS ACHILL GAY?
Today we generally tend to thk of people as beg eher “gay” or “straight, ” but this is not how the ancient Greeks generally thought of sexualy. The fact that Aisch uld treat as axmatic that Achill and Patroklos were a homosexual relatnship a speech that was meant to be livered ont of an Athenian jury clearly monstrat that, by the time Aisch was wrg the late fourth century BCE, this mt have been a fairly wily accepted terpretatn. Beyond intifyg wh characters, the artistic mediums and their exemplifitn of a homosexual relatnship helps reimage the heroic ial.
20 GAY GREEK GODS
This isn’t a se for the advocy of prentism, we are not simply tryg to project our morn embrace of the LGBTQI + muny onto a historil time and story whereby homosexualy eher did not exist or was owned upon, we are aimg for que the oppose fact.
The stigma and disapproval of homosexualy, acrdg to historians David F Greenberg and Marcia H Bystryn, did not arise until late antiquy when all sexual pleasur were looked upon negatively, practilly a lennia after the creatn of “The Iliad” the 8th Century BC. Greenberg and Bystryn outle their paper, “Christian Intolerance of Homosexualy”, that “male homosexualy has been regard monly as havg arisen as an exprsn of the raship of arms, among noble warrrs of the Heroic Age”.