Ancient Greece

In what culture did the king of the gods, the greatest heroes, and the greatest general all have boyfriends?  Ancient Greece, of course.  Many cultures have viewed same-sex relations more positively than America traditionally did—but no-one tops the ancient Greeks.  Male-male relations occupied a key role in their culture:  they were thought of as the way that young men...Read More

You might not think there have been many LGBTQ rulers in world history.  But you would be wrong!  From Alexander the Great’s Macedonia to Mad Ludwig’s Bavaria and beyond, there have been rulers (and members of ruling families) with many different sexualities and gender identities throughout world history.  And a number of them, unsurprisingly, have...Read More

Penises in art are a bigger theme than you might think.  After all, what is the number one question people ask in the Greek and Roman collection of any museum?  There is no competition:  why the penises in Classical art are smaller than real-life average adult penises.  And the second is:  whether Christians really broke...Read More

Why is Greece a great place for travel? Well, it doesn’t hurt that Greece has some of the world’s most beautiful beaches and that some of them–especially Mykonos–have a wild gay club scene. But there is another, fascinating level to Greece for the gay traveler, because travel to Greece is all about its ancient culture...Read More

In a way, this blog post is a protest against Facebook and its homophobia. I am intentionally writing a post that I will not be able to treat as an ad on Facebook, because (as you may or may not know) Facebook will not allow companies to have any nudity in their ads—even the naked...Read More

When Oscar Wilde Tours designs gay history tours, we always try to show people the gay side of famous places.  We do for instance “gay secrets” tours of Westminster Abbey, the Louvre, and the Vatican.  But we also try to take people to some places that are important in gay history and that they might...Read More

Since I wrote my blog post last week about my gay history explorations, people have been asking me to say something more about gay history in Greece. And this is very much on my mind, as I am leading Oscar Wilde Tours’ gay history and art tour in Greece in only 3 or 4 months...Read More

Check out my latest blogpost for the Gay and Lesbian Review.  It’s about Harmodius and Aristogeiton.  Along with Achilles and Patroclus in the Iliad (whom the ancient Greeks mostly saw as a couple), Harmodius and Aristogeiton were the biggest gay heroes of ancient Greece .  Harmodius and Aristogeiton were a Greek-style male-male couple, who assassinated...Read More

We recently got a great write-up from Merryn Johns, Curve Magazine’s wonderful editor-in-chief. This is a source of great pleasure to me, as I have struggled hard to include Lesbian history in our tours. Unfortunately, as anyone who studies LGBT history knows, there is less evidence for Lesbian history than gay male history from almost...Read More

While I was in Greece researching Oscar Wilde Tour’s 2016 Greece tour, I was following a great story from gay history: the story of the ancient Athenians’ favorite heroes—right up there with Theseus, the city’s mythical founder— Harmodius and Aristogeiton, the male-male couple who assassinated the brother of the last tyrant of Athens and whom...Read More