🏳️🌈🏺gay ancient Persia
🏳️🌈🏺2-Gay in History🏺🏳️🌈
“It does not suit the rulers that their subjects should think noble thoughts” —Plato on gay love in Persia
Iran, the theocracy that hates every tolerant value the West claims to own, or so Fox News says. No, this is an old game, that buries 2.5K years of one of the most queer cultures on earth. The Shah’s regime scrubbed history to appear more modern & European. The Islamic Republic finished the job while claiming to reject western homosexual influence of the Shah. Everyone now wants a Persia that had never been gay
It was always gay.
After only a m generation of the formation of Persia, Lovely Boys were common and acceptable presence in every noble and satrap haram.
The oldest evidence is Artaxerxes II, Great King of the Achaemenid Empire, he loved a eunuch named Tiridates, ‘the most handsome & attractive man in Asia’ according to Aelian. When Tiridates died young, the King refused to leave their bed. A concubine named Aspasia finally got through to him—by dressing in the dead boy’s clothes.
There’s Bagoas, a eunuch of extraordinary beauty who belonged to Darius III, then after Persia fell, to Alexander. Plutarch says that at a festival in Carmania, Bagoas won the dance competition & sat down beside Alexander, & the Macedonian army roared for their king to kiss him.
Hellenistic homosexuality was common during the Seleucid Empire that covered much of the Middle East.
Alexander’s generals brought the Greek gymnasium east, as far as Bactria, at Ai-Khanoum, archaeologists dug one up—dedicated to Hermes & Herakles, patron gods of beautiful youths. Persian taste for lovely boys met Greek institutionalized boy-love. Although more archeological than textual there is strong evidence that homosexuality was practiced in Bactria and was commented on by ancient Han Chinese visitors and said to be common further west throughout Persia.
The later Persian Parthians called themselves ‘Philhellene’ on their coins. At a wedding the court’s entertainment was Euripides’ ‘Bacchae’—the play where a god in women’s clothing destroys a king for policing gender. The actor used the actual severed head of Roman general Crassus as his prop. They can love good queer drama and still hate Rome.
The Zoroastrian Sassanids kept the court & its beautiful boys despite a strong resurgence of Zoroastrianism. King Khosrow summoned a ‘redag’—a lovely well-bred youth—to his bed chamber and spends hours questioning him on food, the sweetest music, the most beautiful flower. The text plays up the sensuality, the aging king who cannot get enough of a pretty boy’s ‘company’.
Queer life was widely accepted until 250CE, when reactionary Zoroastrianism priests codified the Vendidad, condemning sex between men as a sin with no atonement, a demon’s work.
It forced the practice underground, just as Rome was embracing Christianity and slowly less approving opinions on homosexuality and gender fluidity. Hilariously the Romans blamed the east for soft Lovely Boys and the Persians blamed the west for horny Boy Love. Both claiming Queerness was foreign. Just as wrong as today, another Masculinity in Crisis Panic. But as always, rich just continued behind closed doors.
