🏳️🌈🏺2-Gay in History🏺🏳️🌈
Dionysus is terrifying to the Romans. Drunkenness=strangeness=madness. But his life was queer, though he kept almost losing it.
It starts with his mother burned to death & ends with his aunt tearing apart her son.
Semele, a Theban princess, had an affair with a man claiming to be Zeus. But Hera seeded doubt.
She demanded ‘Zeus’ promise her one favor, then asked to see his true form. When he begged her to reconsider, she insisted, & his godly light incinerated her & part of the palace. Zeus snatched the fetus from the fire & sewed it into his leg.
Hera was after all of Zeus’ illegitimate children, so hermes gender swapped the baby & had relative raise her. Found, they escaped as a goat. Hera’s Titans caught & ate him, but he regrew. Now going mad, he fled to leopard-loving Rhea (aka Cybele, with eunuch & non-binary followers)
Later pirates kidnapped him for sex slavery, he turned them all into still-horny dolphins.
Then he promised he’d bottom for Polymnus if he guided him to the underworld to meet to Semele, his mom. Polymnus died on the way, so Dionysus kept the promise on his tomb with a fig-wood dildo.
It was Ampelus, his satyr BF who became his greatest creation, the grapevine. In a suggestive boast to the moon, “Now I am both—I have horns & I ride a bull!” When he died, grapevines grew from him, & Dionysus set him in the stars (per Ovid) & made wine.
The Romans called him Liber (freedom) but crushed his festivals for their class-crossing, gender-bending orgies.
In Thebes, his cousin, now king, Pentheus (meaning suffering) mocked his crazy aunt Semele, who thought she banged gods & burned herself to death. Disguised Dionysus & blind Tiresias urged him caution. He refused, so Dionysus drove all the women to the woods in ecstasy. The king dressed as a woman to spy on them, & Pentheus’ own high mother tore him apart, mistaking him for a lion.
Empowering women, bending gender, twice-born, loving satyrs, inventing theater & breaking class rules, it’s little wonder Dionysus scared the Romans. He also invaded India, fought the Titans, & gave Hephaestus drunk therapy, finally going to Olympus . Be queer do crime & orgies.
On a side note. I was taught in college that Dionysus was a foreign import from Turkey or further, but his Etruscan name is almost his Mycenaean name, and he is one of the oldest gods we have in the Greek language tradition. Dionysus is also considered by the Greeks and Roman’s as one of the most queer, gender fluid, most sexually liberated gods, is it any surprise even they othered him by making them foreign.
