NationStates Jolt Archive

simple enough, yay or nay?

I think I remember reading something on him being bisexual, which was fairly common among Greeks. Mainly because women were seen as inferior and incapable of having an intellectual relationship during that time.

he had a lot of wives, many of whom were from lands he conquered along his way... so he wasn't gay bi, perhaps.

I don't really think it'll be possible to prove either way lol.

Considering their culture's low opinion of women, he probably had alot of very close male friends that someone from our culture might think they were gay ... but I think in terms of actual "lovers", he was probably straight.

Of course I don't really have any proof to substantiate that, just my opinion *shrug*

Engaging in homosexual sex was frequent in his times, but "being" gay was obviously never documented back then for a conclusive statement to be given.

shaekspeare was

shaekspeare was
Did Shakespeare really exist as one person? Was it a pseudonym. And who is behind it - one person or a group.
I don´t know. And I don´t know what the research has brought out and how reliable it is.
He has written great works of literature. He is certainly the greatest British writer and one of the greatest of Europe as well.
But before the identity isn´t clearified I´m a bit sceptical about such assumptions. Even more: how do we really know that today - it was many centuries ago.

of course he was real :rolleyes:

of course he was real :rolleyes:
Though according to the few informations which exist about him he was married with Ann Hathaway and had three children.
That doesn´t sound gay as you claim, though.

i guess it depends on what you mean by gay

did he have sex with men?

yes

did he have sex with women? well he had wives, mistresses and one night stands so probably

does that mean he is GAY? id say it means he was a typicallly horny man of the times.

There isn't much evidence proving conclusively that Shakespeare existed or that the works attributed to Shakespeare were actually written by a man named William Shakespeare. Historians are still trying to determine who exactly wrote the Shakespeare literature, and if the man actually existed or not.

However if he did exist then he was very likely gay because many of the sonnets that Shakespeare wrote were love poems about other men.

There isn't much evidence proving conclusively that Shakespeare existed or that the works attributed to Shakespeare were actually written by a man named William Shakespeare. Historians are still trying to determine who exactly wrote the Shakespeare literature, and if the man actually existed or not..
Thank you for that information. I´ve heard that they are many uncertainties about the identity of the author. It is actually assumed that the guy with the name Shakespear wasn´t the "Shakespear". But the question it who was it. I don´t know, and I don´t know with what theory the historians and literates have come up now. It seems to be a mystery like that of Atlantis. There is a story about it - as there is a story about Shakespear and someone had to write all those stories. But it is unclear who did it. I´ve actually heard that some assume that it may be a woman actually - or husband and wife, or a grooup of people who used this pseudonym,or,or,or.
Well - I don´t care. There are just great stories.
But that makes the question of his sexual orientation even more speculative.

Alexander the Great had a male lover and several wives...

That would make me think he was bi. ;)

Alexander the Great had a male lover and several wives...That would make me think he was bi. ;)
I think he loved his horse, lol.
Though he was certainly not from Trotzkygrad since he was from the real world.

CAn any one really exist? If shakespheare didnt then did Dickens or Jane Austin, who can really say. Wow i got side tracked. I forgot what i was going to say ............ aaah well probably going to be rubbish anyway?

CAn any one really exist? If shakespheare didnt then did Dickens or Jane Austin, who can really say. Wow i got side tracked. I forgot what i was going to say ............ aaah well probably going to be rubbish anyway?

Strictly speaking we may be living in the Matrix, so if you want to get into dense philosophy then no, we can't 100% anyone exists or existed. But for all practical purposes we can make generalizations about things in history.

There is a lot more evidence proving the existence of Dickens or Austen or even the lesser known contemporaries of Shakespeare such as Christopher Marlowe. Historians are perplexed by the question of Shakespeare's identity because there simply isn't a lot of direct evidence from his life. There are no school records, and few references from others living at that time even though we today know Shakespeare as a famous person even when he was alive. There is also a lot of circumstantial evidence suggesting some other person wrote the works, or that the Shakesperean works are not all written by the same person. Personally I believe Shakespeare existed but there does exist an active controversy and interest in Shakespeare's identity... few other famous people's mere existence is questioned to such a degree.

Well, your question poses a large problem, in that you are trying to classify a person who lived in a completely different world to the one that we live in, with it's modern conceptions of homosexuality and bisexuality.
The Ancient Greeks did not understand homosexuality the way we do.
In fact, they had no words for gay, homosexual, bi, lesbian...etc...
To ask whether he was gay, is to ask whether he was gay in the way we understand gay to be.

Did he have male lovers? Very likely
Did he have female lovers? Very likely
DId he have wives? Ofcourse

But I don't think you can put him or any other ancient greek personality -mythic and real- into a modern category of sexual orientation because their society was very different.

I think I remember reading something on him being bisexual, which was fairly common among Greeks. Mainly because women were seen as inferior and incapable of having an intellectual relationship during that time.


Wow, nailed it. Nice. This area of history (Greece and Rome) is my PhD work btw, and I couldn't have put it any better.

Give yourself a cookie good man.

not so simple at all

no reason in hell he couldn't have been

but how the bloody would could anyone know for sure at this late date???

(and what difference would it make anyway? what we DO know is that he was one singularly bloodthirsty bastard when to it came to making war on people in places like india and afghanistan that he had no reason in hell for doing so, nor can i see what he was supposed to have accomplised in those battles other then to have gotten a lot of people killed in their own homes, villages and even cities)

=^^=
.../\...

(and what difference would it make anyway? what we DO know is that he was one singularly bloodthirsty bastard when to it came to making war on people in places like india and afghanistan that he had no reason in hell for doing so, nor can i see what he was supposed to have accomplised in those battles other then to have gotten a lot of people killed in their own homes, villages and even cities)

=^^=
.../\...

He had a reason, he was trying to conquer the world.

He has unfortunately written great works of literature.

Someone explain this to me: how is it unfortunate to have written great works of literature?

Was he gay?

Does Margaret Thatcher use a vibrator?

WHO CARES ??

The value of a leader's public works is in no way mitigated by the pleasures that leader enjoys in private.

Though according to the few informations which exist about him he was married with Ann Hathaway and had three children.
That doesn´t sound gay as you claim, though.

yes but there was someone else in his life which wasnt documented as much

Alexander the Great had female wives because, during his conquests into Persia, he needed a way to gain the support of the many tribes/ex-empires that made up the Persian Empire. He decided to do this by marrying a woman from some faction to forge an alliance between Greece and the faction. This made conquering Persia a lot easier, and might explain his wives.

Although I do think he was bi.

We can not know since it is not mentioned in the writings done about him. These writings were also done 100 yeazrs after his dead. There is only one potrtret of him, made just after his dead.

Someone explain this to me: how is it unfortunate to have written great works of literature?
My mistake - fortunately would be the right word - but I´ve cut it out anyway. Thanks for the correction.

CAn any one really exist? If shakespheare didnt then did Dickens or Jane Austin, who can really say. Wow i got side tracked. I forgot what i was going to say ............ aaah well probably going to be rubbish anyway?
The question is not whether someone wrote this works but who it was. One person, a group of perons, e.g?
And this uncertainty does not exist about other historic figures and authors. Shakespear is in that sense a "mysterious figure".

simple enough, yay or nay?

Yay

Was he gay?

Does Margaret Thatcher use a vibrator?

WHO CARES ??

The value of a leader's public works is in no way mitigated by the pleasures that leader enjoys in private.

Damn straight!

If he was truly gay, he wouldn't have likely wanted as many wives as he had, which leads me to believe he was bi. Now he likely had sex with both genders but given that gay sex wasn't that uncommon in Greece at the time, it probably wasn't taken too seriously as being extrodinarly odd.

Alexander the Great had over 400 children by over 100 women, if I am not mistaken. No gay man fathers that many kids with that many women. He could have been bi, though.

Alexander the Great had over 400 children by over 100 women, if I am not mistaken. No gay man fathers that many kids with that many women. He could have been bi, though.
How do you know that? And how do you know that this is true. Probably just an exageration to overplay his greatness!

How do you know that? And how do you know that this is true. Probably just an exageration to overplay his greatness!

I heard it somewhere. Besides, even if that figure is inaccurate, he had a buttload of kids with a buttload of women for reasons described previously in this thread.

I heard it somewhere. Besides, even if that figure is inaccurate, he had a buttload of kids with a buttload of women for reasons described previously in this thread.
That is likely to be true. But that doesn´t mean that this figure is acurate. Seems to be too exagerated to me.

I heard it somewhere. Besides, even if that figure is inaccurate, he had a buttload of kids with a buttload of women for reasons described previously in this thread.


Umm no, not at all.

Alexander had two sons, possibly a third, amoung his 3 wives. All of them mysteriously "died" after his death as his generals seized control of various pieces of his Empire. Alexander's heir was his son Phillip the 4th and his brother, Philip the 3rd, was to act as regent. Philip the 3rd however seemed to have been mentally deficient and was disposed of. On his deathbed, just as he died, he was asked to whom was his kingdom to go, and probably racked by fever and delusion he simply replied "Give it to the strongest" or "Give it to the strong." His generals used this to legitimize their rule over what become the Hellnistic kingdoms.

nicely put mr. penguin, got some historical knowledge on ya

1. Sappho (600 B.C.) Greek Poetess
2. Socrates (470-399 B.C.) Greek Teacher and Philosopher
3. Plato (427-347 B.C.) Greek Teacher and Philosopher
4. Alexander The Great (356-323 B.C.) Macedonian King and Military Leader
5. Wu (140-87 B.C.) Chinese Emperor
6. Hadrian (76-138 A.D.) Roman Emperor
7. Richard the Lion Hearted (1157-1199) English King and Crusader
8. Edward II (1254-1327) English King
9. Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) Italian Renaissance Artist, Teacher, Scientist and Inventor
10. Michelangelo (1475-1564) Italian Renaissance Artist and Sculptor
11. Montezuma II (1480-1520) Aztec Emperor
12. Julius III (1487-1555) Catholic Pope
13. Ieyasu Tokugawa (1542-1616) Japanese Shogun and founder of the Edo Shogunate
14. Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) British Statesman and Writer
15. Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) English dramatist and poet
16. Christina (1626-1689) Swedish Queen
17. Peter the Great (1672-1725) Russian Czar
18. Frederick the Great (1712-1786) Prussian King and Military Leader
19. Madame de Stael (1766-1817) French Writer and Intellectual
20. Lord Byron (1788-1824) British Poet
21. Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875) Danish Poet and Writer
22. Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) Euro-American Writer and Journalist
23. Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) Euro-American Philosopher, Naturalist, and Peace Activist
24. Walt Whitman (1819-1892) Euro-American Poet
25. Herman Melville (1819-1891) Euro-American Writer
26. Chief Crazy Horse (Tashunca witco) (1849-1877) Oglala Sioux Chief
27. Peter I. Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) Russian Composer
28. Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) Irish Writer and Dramatist
29. Dame Ethel Smyth (1858-1944) British Composer, Writer, and Activist
30. Marcel Proust (1871-1922) French Writer
31. Sergei Diaghileff (1872-1929) Russian Ballet Impresario
32. Vita Sackville-West (1892-1962) British Writer
33. Vaslav Nijinsky (1890-1950) Russian Ballet Dancer
34. Edward Carpenter (1844-1929) British Author and Gay Rights Pioneer
35. Willa Cather (1873-1947) Euro-American Writer and Critic
36. Colette (1873-1954) French Writer and Actress
37. W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) British Writer and Dramatist
38. Alice B. Toklas (1877-1967) Euro-American Writer; Stein's Domestic Partner
39. Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) Euro-American Writer and Art Collector; Toklas' Domestic Partner
40. Bessie Smith (1894-1937) African-American Blues Singer and Entertainer
41. E.M. Forster (1879-1970) British Writer
42. Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) British Writer and Publisher
43. Ernst Rohm (1887-1933) German Nazi and SA Leader
44. T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) (1888-1935) British Soldier
45. Jean Cocteau (1889-1963) French Writer and Filmmaker
46. John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) British Economist and Nobel Prize Winner
47. Cole Porter (1893-1964) Euro-American Composer
48. Bayard Rustin (1910-87) African-American Civil Rights, Labor Rights, & Peace Activist/Leader
49. Alan Turing (1912-1954) British Mathematician and Computer Scientist
50. James Baldwin (1924-1987) African-American Writer and Civil Rights Activist
51. Truman Capote (1924-1984) Euro-American Author
52. Tennessee Williams (1914-1983) Euro-American Dramatist
53. Marguerite Yourcenar (1903-1987) Belgian-American Writer
54. Federico Garcia Lorca (1894-1936) Spanish Poet and Dramatist
55. Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986) British Author
56. W.H. Auden (1907-1973) British Poet and Writer
57. Harvey Milk (1930-1978) Euro-American Politician
58. Audre Lorde (1934-1992) African-American Writer and Activist
59. Billie Jean King (1943 - ) Euro-American Tennis Champion and Activist
60. Martina Navratilova (1956- ) Czechoslovakian-American Tennis Champion and Activist
61. Andy Warhol (1930-1987) Euro-American Pop Artist
62. Frieda Kahlo (1907-1954) Mexican Artist and Activist
63. Gore Vidal (1925- ) Euro-American Writer
64. Rudolf Nureyev (1938-1993) Russian dancer
65. Freddie Mercury (1946-1991) British Singer/songwriter/musician
66. Elton John (1947 - ) British Singer/songwriter/musican
67. Janis Ian (1951 - ) Euro-American Singer/songwriter/musician
68. Nathan Lane (1956 - ) Euro-American Actor
69. Ellen Degeneres (1958 - ) Euro-American Comedian/actor
70. Melissa Etheridge (1961 - ) Euro-American Singer/songwriter/musician
71. k. d. lang (1961 - ) Canadian Singer/songwriter

yup. gay. gay like...aww, forget it. but he WAS gay, rest assured...

Whats with the list Globes R Us

Whats with the list Globes R Us


It's a list of famous people who are known to be homosexual. It is often used to show that homosexuality is as normal as heterosexuality.

It's a list of famous people who are known to be homosexual. It is often used to show that homosexuality is as normal as heterosexuality.


Oscar Wilde had issues.

not just really gay, gay like liberace.



sorry, it was the first thing that came to mind... i couldn't help myself.

i dought that alexander the great was gay mabey bi but not gay if you think that considering i am i big fan of alexanders work i will snipe you out :sniper:

So being gay negates a mans virtues and lifes work does it?

Oscar Wilde had issues.


Indeed. Mainly The Times each day.

So being gay negates a mans virtues and lifes work does it?



I personally think he was bi but not gay.

alexander the great was bi. it was even documented a long with the fact that royalty almost always did that in the past. ;) :fluffle: :D

Yet another attempt at revisionist history. If the gays had their way, we'd be taught every single person in the past 6000 years was actually gay. They somehow managed to reproduce via asexual cell division or something.

simple enough, yay or nay?You know, outside the Yahweh-cult such questions of sexuality were no issue in ancient times. That is because civilized folks outside the Israelite tribal clans did not have to worry about their reproduction rates. In those times only followers of Yahweh would have wasted thoughts on such irrelevant questions. It is a known fact that back then almost all men (in leading jobs) had sexual encounters with both women and men, and no-one would have considered that a matter to be wondering about.

Asking if Alexander was gay is a bit like asking if Aristotle was a Christian, in that while Aristotle and modern Christianity might have agreed on a surprisingly large number of issues, you're still, by asking this question, trying to fit him into a hole that didn't even exist while he was alive. In the same way, Alexander might have engaged in homosexual acts, but the simple fact that one engages in homosexual acts is hardly enough in and of itself to call him a homosexual.

Just to review: did Alexander have sex with other men? Almost certainly (although very likely he was almost never a bottom). Were these sexual liasons a part of a committed, monogamous relationship that we mean when we use the term "homosexual"? Almost certainly not. Far more likely is that he was simply partaking in a common Greek custom of the time: older men usually entered into a quid pro quo arrangement with pubescent boys. Older men would teach the boys how to act and think like men, and in exchange for this wisdom, the boys would usually (but not always) consent to being used as a means of sexual satisfaction for said older men.

This practice, of course, is totally alien to modern homosexuality; homosexuals don't sodomize as part of a business relationship, they do it because it's fun, or because they're doing it with someone they love. As such, you have a very, very, very hard time saying that anyone who did this was homosexual or no, because in order to do it you'd have to look at the motives of Alexander, and we have no idea what his motives behind his sexual encounters was. He might have been in love (in our sense of the term) with one of the men he slept with. . .and then again, he may have just been stressed out, and some corporal just happened to stumble into his tent at the wrong time.

simple enough, yay or nay?
Its not a meaningful question, the division didn't exist in those times.

Just to review: did Alexander have sex with other men? Almost certainly (although very likely he was almost never a bottom). .
Perhaps not in later life (although he only lived to about 30), but when being mentored by Aristotle I'd have thought he would have.

They somehow managed to reproduce via asexual cell division or something.
I would have said that was ridiculous, but then, I think of all the people for whom it was so likely the case...

Yet another attempt at revisionist history. If the gays had their way, we'd be taught every single person in the past 6000 years was actually gay. They somehow managed to reproduce via asexual cell division or something.

Really? So who on that list I posted do you dispute? Doed being gay preclude one from greatness...or compassion.......or intelligence? If so, we wouldn't have half the medical aid we enjoy now for instance.