🏰🏺Ludwig II

🏳️‍🌈🏺2-Gay in History 🏰🏳️‍🌈

Ludwig II became king of Bavaria at just 18 years old. He was young, romantic, and immediately scrutinized for his sexuality.

Bavaria was one of the largest states as Germany was unifying out of the old Holy Roman Empire.

Ludwig’s private letters and diaries reveal deep romantic and erotic longing for men, especially his devoted aide Richard Hornig, to whom he wrote with jealousy, tenderness, and despair. At the same time, he recoiled from heterosexual marriage, breaking off his politically advantageous engagement after repeated delays, panic, and withdrawal.

In a monarchy built on heirs and masculine conformity, Ludwig’s queerness became evidence of “unfitness” in an era of rapid political maneuvering. Bavaria was forced into a union with Prussia. His isolation and artistic obsessions were reframed as pathology. In 1886, doctors declared him insane without examining him. He was conveniently deposed, paving the way for full unification with Germany and days later, he was mysteriously dead.

However Ludwig legacy is as one of Europe’s great artistic patrons. He rescued Richard Wagner from exile and debt, enabling operas that transformed Western music. He built visionary palaces—most famously Neuschwanstein—that rejected militarism and bureaucracy in favor of fantasy, beauty, and interior worlds. Mocked in his lifetime as delusional excess, they became global symbols of imagination itself.

He was a ridiculously romantic person, who lived his fantasies, idolized heroic masculinity and myth, and entered into cultural zeitgeist. When the Third Reich was coming to power they took Wagners myth and Ludwig’s castles as a symbol of German cultural superiority, while murdering homosexuals.