LGBT+ History and the Importance of the Queer Headcanon by Charlie Chowdhry
Recently, I have been thinking about the Iliad, the epic poem by Homer. It got me thinking about how gay men are treated in fiction. In my opinion, it is very obvious from the content of the Iliad that Achilles and Patroclus are lovers. Some writers (namely Plato and Madeline Miller) agree with me. However, some historians disagree, saying that we are reading too much into it and doing these characters an injustice by projecting our “modern values” onto these ancient figures. After all, Homer never explicitly said that the two were lovers. Fair point. Homer never said ‘and then everyone’s favourite twunk, Achilles, turned to his boyfriend and said-’, but he did have Achilles say “...my dear comrade Patroclus has fallen—he whom I valued more than all others, and loved as dearly as my own life?” (The Iliad, 18.78-81)
Illustrations:
12
@glass.soda
Oh my God, they were comrades! Perhaps you’ve been unlucky enough to read The Da Vinci Code. If you’ve made it this far through my article, you’re probably as horrified as I am at what Dan Brown decided to shoehorn into the last few pages of the novel. (Spoiler alert: after the entirety of the book, with absolutely no build-up or indications of anything beyond a professional relationship, the two leads get together, literally in the last three pages of the book). If that nonsense will fly, “he whom I valued more than all others, and loved as dearly as my own life” is one of the most profound declarations of love in the past couple of millennia. I could, of course, just be projecting. It’s not like the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus is directly comparable to a pederastic relationship between the two of them that has continued from adolescence into adulthood. It’s also not as if later Greek writers were not only in agreement with me on this, but established who fitted into which role in the relationship, or anything completely impossible to ignore like that. It seems that, for whatever reason, characters have to be straight until proven LGBT+. And, even then, some people seem unwilling to disregard it. But it’s not like there’s a shortage of canonically cishet characters in literature, either. After my initial meditations on Achilles and Patroclus, I began thinking about my own favourite LGBT+ characters from fiction (Sirius Black and Remus Lupin, Sherlock and Watson, Anne Shirley, Dean Thomas and Seamus Finnigan) and realised that none of them are canonically LGBT+...
