The earliest examples of gay people in history
A post shared by ℭ (@cleitonkasper)There are many contenders for the title of “first gay person in history.” Both ancient Greek and Indian literature are laden with tales of same-sex relationships and characters who identify as a “third sex”.
Archaeologists also continue to find evidence of prehistoric men buried with women’s clothing or tools, as well as male lovers laid to rest side-by-side.
These can perhaps be regarded as some of the earliest recorded instances of queerness and queer love. Below, we take a closer look at these early examples, as well as try to understand what society might have been like for LGBTQ people of the distant past.RELATED: History buffs list their favorite facts about queerness through the agesThere’s no one answer to this question, as people who had same-sex relations and those who identified as a kind of “third sex” have existed throughout history.
Examples of this can be found in ancient Greek and Indian literature – from the Sacred Band of Thebes, a military unit that consisted of pairs of male lovers, to the sexually fluid Mughals, a noble class from Central Asia.But recent archaeological finds have shown that there is some evidence pointing to potentially gay and trans life that may have thrived thousands of years before the writing of these tales.In 2011, archaeologists in the Czech Republic discovered a grave that many have purported to belong to the “oldest known homosexual or transgender person”.
