All written word is "The Opinion" of Thomas A. unless otherwise noted...
|
|
June 27, 2002 Hello Gays & Gals! Rex D. here, with a little
something different to offer my readers; I
am going to be featuring a different “Famous Homosexual In History” each
month for the next several months. The
gay community has been taking a beating for some time, and I feel a boost in
‘Gay-Pride’ would be appropriate right now. My first offering will be my
favorite historical gay hero….”Alexander the Great”! “How do we know Alexander
was Gay”? 2,300 years ago in
Greece, men had a mixture of wives, mistresses, and lovers of either gender. Alexander’s father, Philip of Macedon, had male lovers as
well as many wives. Alexander loved his boyhood
friend, Hephaestion. They were both
brilliant young men and were tutored by Aristotle.
Alexander and Hephaestion felt like the two heros Achilles and Patroclus,
from the Illiad, which was Alexander’s favorite book. Hephaestion started off as a
regular cavalry soldier – Alexander did not play favorites – and rose
through the ranks on merit alone. Later,
Alexander also fell in love with a courtier from the conquered Persian court,
scandalous not because the courtier was male, but because he was Persian. Most
Greeks thought that ‘other’ people were barbarians.
Alexander married a princess from a faraway mountain kingdom of Asia, but
it’s unclear if he loved her because their only child was born much later. He also married the defeated Persian King’s daughter, a
purely political marriage, and Hephaestion married her sister, since he and
Alexander wanted their children to be cousins. After they conquered Asia, Hephaestion died suddenly of typhus. Alexander’s grief was monumental. He asked the oracles if Hephaestion was a god (back then people could become gods by achievement) and was told that Hephaestion was indeed a hero, a lesser type of god. Now, Alexander, who had no doubt of his own divinity, knew that he would meet his beloved again in the Blessed Realm, where gods and heroes live. He got his first wife pregnant and died himself without waiting for the child to be born, all within eight months of Hephaestion’s death, just as Ahilles had followed Patroclus in the Illiad. He was 32 years old Rex D. |
All written word is "The Opinion" of Thomas A. unless otherwise noted...
|