Throughout several centuries and into modern-day, queer people always have existed within the theatrical space. In Euripides’ Bacchae, in the story of Achilles and Patroclus, or Sappho’s impact on the theater, queerness in ancient Greece, specifically in artistic spaces, has always existed despite attempts to erase this. While queerness in ancient Greek times was widely accepted as the Medieval Ages caused a change within the culture, “sodomites” were often blamed as scapegoats for natural disasters. People thought natural disasters, such as an earthquake or a flood, were a punishment from God, and they had to “purge the town of evil” by killing men accused of having sex with other men. Because of this shift, queerness was also purged from history. Bacchae was interpreted differently, Achilles and Patroclus were seen as a wholesome example of brotherhood, and they even tried to assert that Sappho was a heterosexual woman. However, these impacts on theater could not be erased, and they still thrive today.
To begin with a bit of history: the word “queer” originated in 1513 when it first appeared to mean something “not normal, peculiar, or odd.” However, the Oxford English Dictionary reports the noun “queer” as not describing homosexuals until 1894, when it was used by the 9th Marquess of Queensbury, John Douglas. In October 1894, Queensbury’s son, Francis Viscount Drumlanrig, died in a hunting accident, and rumors quickly began circulating that Francis had a relationship with Prime Minister Lord Roseberry and he had committed suicide. Queensbury accused “Snob Queers like Roseberry” of causing his son’s death. Nineteen years after the first use of the noun “queer” in a public way, the description “queer” began to mean “homosexual” around 1914. A printing of the Concise New Partridge Dictionary of Slang notes that it was “derogatory from the outside, not from within,” meaning the word “queer” was a self-description before 1914 and well before 2022.
Meanwhile, a 1949 printing of Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary lists “queer” as meaning “counterfeit money” since dictionaries shied away from definitions and words that could be considered offensive in order to be used by schoolchildren. A 1965 printing of Webster’s New World Dictionary, College Edition lists “queer” as slang for homosexual but not derogatory slang. Webster’s New World College Dictionary, Fifth Edition, or the most current one, lists “queer” in these exact words: “[Slang] homosexual: in general usage, still chiefly a slang of contempt or derision, but later used as by some academics and homosexual activists as a descriptive term without negative connotations.” In the early 1990s, “queer” was adopted as a positive term in the spirit of gay pride, and it has stuck around since. Because of this, I will use the word “queer” when discussing LGBTQIA+ relationships, issues, and histories.
When talking about actors assigned male at birth cross-dressing in Greek theatre, one has to realize that the performance put on by these men helped to expose a lot about how we perceive gender. Dionysius is the god of “transvestism”, theater, wine, and the collapse of binaries. However, for the sake of this paper, the words “gender non-conforming” or “transgender” will be used interchangeably in the place of “transvestism.” In the Dionysian theater, gender became a theatrical act viewed mainly by other men. Due to this, drag became a legitimized art form that became a massive part of the Athenian ideology, and the idea that gender is something that is taught and can be learned was introduced. In Bacchae, Dionysius moves between genders seamlessly and magically throughout the show, inadvertently showcasing gender as a performance within a performance. However, Dionysius does not only move between the extremes of gender as being a “man’s man” in one scene and a “girly girl” in another. He blends the characteristics of both genders to create his own mixture that probably matches how we view gender non-conforming people today (a la Alok Vaid-Menon). The idea that Dionysius’s gender non-conforming would “rub off” on Pentheus comes from the principle that Dionysius is this great destroyer of boundaries. Yet, it can be interpreted as Pentheus’s desire for Dionysius, either sexually or platonically, and his wanting to imitate this power that Dionysius is walking around with. This is why he chooses to cross-dress and go against the traditional idea of what masculinity should be that he has aligned himself with his whole life. However, the way that Pentheus carries himself as a woman is deeply rooted in internalized masculinity. When he first emerges from his palace as a woman, he sees “two suns, and a double Thebes” (918-19), and seeing double was a sign of “madness,” which was inherently female at the time because of the societal pressures and expectations placed on women at the time. After all, if one could not handle it all with grace and poise, how could one even be considered a woman? With the underlying homoeroticism within Bacchae and the ideas of gender essentially being flipped on its head, Euripides’ Bacchae can easily be seen as an example of how queerness and theatre overlapped in ancient Greece.
Much of Sappho’s life is scattered and incomplete, with rumors of a daughter or a mother (not sure how you mix those up) named Clëis, a father supposedly named Scamandronymus, and an alleged husband by the name Kerkylas of Andros. The name of her husband, Kerkylas, alone seems to be made up, perhaps by Sappho herself, as the name comes from the word κέρκος (kerkos), which means “penis” and is not associated as a name at any point in history. Andros is the name of a Greek island where this man could’ve been from, but it is also a form of the Greek word ἀνήρ (aner), which literally means “man.” Despite the rumors of Sappho’s husband and child, her love of women and sex were well-documented and are even what she is known for. She wrote in one of her translated poems, “Sweet mother, I cannot weave– slender Aphrodite has overcome me with longing for a girl.” Once again, the use of the word “girl” is also often speculated as the translations have also yielded words such as “youth” or “boy.” These translations are often misidentified or changed to try to reimagine Sappho as a straight woman. An ancient tradition even suggested that Sappho jumped to her death from the Leucadian cliffs for her love of a ferryman named Phanon around 570 BCE. However, this is regarded as ahistorical, and the legend may have resulted in an attempt, once again, to assert Sappho as heterosexual. Despite the fragmentation of her life story and swirling rumors, Sappho became the subject of several French operas, including Sapho by Charles Gounod (1851) and Charles Cuvillier’s Sapphô (1912), as well as the muse of the Sapphic dramatic activities of Natalie Clifford Barney (1900). Sappho is considered among the canon of the Nine Lyric Poets and was hugely revered through much of antiquity. Her impact can be felt today, not only in how we talk about women loving women in history, the arts, etc. but also in how queer people identify. On any social media platform, if you look under #sapphic, you will see thousands of women loving women, queer love stories, and even Sapphic history! Today, there are countless plays, poems, movies, novels, and more about her life, and she is revered in the lesbian community as a glimpse into our untold queer history.
The relationship between Achilles and Patroclus, while ambiguous in Homer’s Iliad and often overlooked as “military camaraderie,” has recently and essentially been flipped on its head in the past hundred years. Thanks to the beautiful re-telling of the story in Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles, the myth and the theories have only continued to grow in popularity and ambiguity. For literally thousands of years, scholars have gone back and forth on whether or not Achilles and Patroclus were homosexual, with the biggest proponent of this idea being Greek philosopher Xenophon, who even went as far to speak for Socrates and say that the friendship between Achilles and Patroclus was just that: a friendship. However, several translations show that Achilles and Patroclus treated one another, loved one another, and eventually grieved one another as lovers often do. In one of the passages of Homer’s Iliad, specifically the one dealing with Achilles’ insomnia caused by his grief of Patroclus. This passage highlighted what, at the time, was a typical and conventional symptom of love called signum amoris and is similar to the one Medea faces for Jason. However, in Medea’s case, her insomnia is two-fold because of her anxiety about an uncertain and dangerous future and her love for Jason. Madeline Miller tells of this love and sadness in a heart-wrenching way, “I could recognize him [Patroclus] by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world. (Miller, 134)” The intense love and adoration these two men share were discussed not only in the Iliad but in the surrounding conversations about it. Chariton of Aphrodisias was known to have quoted a passage from the Iliad describing Achilles yearning for Patroclus when describing the love felt by a Persian king. The Achilles-Patroclus link is also referenced throughout other works. In Circe by Madeline Miller, another re-telling of a Greek myth, she writes, “When he was gone, would I be like Achilles, wailing over his lost lover Patroclus? I tried to picture myself running up and down the beaches, tearing at my hair, cradling some scrap of old tunic he had left behind. Crying out for the loss of half my soul. (Miller 69)”
The erasure or diminishing of this queer relationship, despite its clear and profound effect on much of antiquity and even modern-day, is not uncommon. How many queer partners stood at their lover’s funeral after a brutal fight with HIV/AIDS only to be called their roommate and close friend (Timothy Conigrave and John Caleo)? How many lesbian mothers have been forced to choose between their partners, community, and activism or their parental rights to their children (Ellen Nadler, Earnestine Blue, Sandra Panzino, etc.)? How many queer people have been killed solely because of who and how they love (Kierstene Chapa and Mollie Olgin, James Zappalorti, Harvey Milk, etc.)? It is inherently queer to have your identity constantly called into question, and your lovers are often reduced to close friends or roommates. It has happened for several thousand years and continues to this day. Whether disguised as scapegoating, erasure, or even to appease an elderly relative at Thanksgiving, queer people have always been forced to lock away parts of themselves to seem digestible enough, to seem worthy of respect and praise not only by historians but by loved ones. Because of this, because of the hoops straight people have forced us to jump through for centuries, calling Achilles and Patroclus close friends is, without question, inherently queer.
It feels as though much of queer history is hidden in the dark corners of the library and buried under centuries of heterosexual assertions. However, the long-lasting effects that queer people have had on theatre and the arts are unmistakable. Queer people have always existed in the arts and the theatre, despite intense attempts to erase queerness from the narrative. There has long since been a call within the queer community to reclaim our history because it’s been hidden, stolen, and mutilated so that we may not feel a connection to our roots. If we have no roots, how can we truly be a community? However, in reading Euripides Bacchae, analyzing Achilles and Patroclus’ relationship, and reading Sappho, the queer community can see that we have existed for centuries. Not only have we existed, but we’ve thrived and made impacts and loved and fought as we will continue to do.
Works Cited
“Introduction.” Queer, There, and Everywhere, by Sarah Prager, HarperCollins, 2018.
English, Madeline. “Why ‘Queer’?” The Queer Agenda, 14 Feb. 2022, https://the-queer-agenda.com/2022/02/14/why-queer/.
Natalia Theodoridou. "A Queer Reading of Euripides' Bacchae" A Postgraduate eJournal of Theatre and Performing Arts, vol. 3, no. 1, Platform, 2008, pp. 73-89
Dorf, Samuel N. “Seeing Sappho in Paris: Operatic and Choreographic Adaptations of Sapphic Lives and Myths.” Music in Art, vol. 34, no. 1/2, 2009, pp. 291–310, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41818596. Accessed 9 Apr. 2022.
“POEMS OF SAPPHO.” Translated by Julia Dubnoff, Poems of Sappho, https://www.uh.edu/~cldue/texts/sappho.html.
Gabriel Laguna-Mariscal, and Manuel Sanz-Morales. “Was the Relationship between Achilles and Patroclus Homoerotic? The View of Apollonius Rhodius.” Hermes, vol. 133, no. 1, 2005, pp. 120–23, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4477639. Accessed 9 Apr. 2022
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