A Leonardo da Vinci biopic is in the works—& it sounds like it’s gonna be very, very gay!
All Of Us Strangers, gay filmmaker Andrew Haigh has been tapped by Universal Pictures to helm a “high-priority” biopic of influential Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci.You may say, “why do we need a movie about one of the most famous people in history?,” but we’ll tell you why: We have reason to believe this movie is going to be very, very gay.Sure, Haigh’s involvement is a huge part of that.
The man behind beloved gay romance Weekend (which gets us emotional just thinking about it) and much of HBO’s Looking is one of our most prolific LGBTQ+ writer-directors working today—he’s even directing a new music video for the Pet Shop Boys!—and much of his acclaimed output has explored queer themes.Subscribe to our newsletter for your front-row seat to all things entertainment with a sprinkle of everything else queer.But there’s also the fact that this upcoming biopic will be adapted from author Walter Isaacson’s celebrated Leonardo da Vinci: The Biography, which made waves upon its release in 2017 by arguing that the artist lived his life as a gay man.Now, if you remember back to high school art classes, many of us were taught that da Vinci was celibate.
Though he kept manuscripts with thousands of pages on his work, there were very few references to his personal life, so the prevailing assumption was that he didn’t have romantic or sexual partners.However, over the years, a number of academics (including Sigmund Freud himself) have threaded together context clues and other texts to deduce that da Vinci was, in fact, gay and had a number of male companions.“There is no reason to believe that he remained celibate,” Isaacson wrote. “On the contrary, in his life and in his notebooks, there is much evidence that he was not ashamed of his sexual desires.
Instead he seemed amused by them.”Seriously, early modern art is literally filled with hot dudes everywhere you turn. In his biography, the author challenges previous notions about the artist’s sexuality, referencing.
