🏳️‍🌈🏺Saturnalia

🏳️‍🌈🏺2-Gay in History🏺🏳️‍🌈

Once a year around this time in Ancient Rome, masters served slaves, men abandoned dignity, gender blurred into costume, masculinity was mocked, sexual desire slipped its leash—not in secret, but by law.

This was Saturnalia, it supposedly started in 0497 BC —but the Roman’s love backdating traditions a couple centuries— as Rome’s midwinter celebration of licensed transgression, adapted from the Greek Kronia, as most things Roman were.

(Though interestingly Kronia was a midsummer festival, but Romans made it totally original…by changing the date)

For a brief, sacred week, the rigid rules that governed patriarchy, masculinity, and sexual propriety were deliberately suspended, inverted by permission. Famously, enslaved people were allowed to speak freely—even openly mock their masters. Masters served meals or dined alongside those they owned. Insults, excess, and pleasure, not to mention the occasional gift, were expected. Everyone wore the pileus, a felt conical hat(pictured), the cap of freedom, signaling that ordinary power relations were temporarily undone.

The stoic hetero Seneca complained about the festival’s moral collapse, writing that “all is license now” and that the city dissolved into “noise and indulgence.” Roman masculinity was usually defined by control, silence, and hierarchy. Saturnalia celebrated the opposite.

“These pages smell of Saturnalia. If you are too stoic, skip them.” - Roman queer poet Martial notes in one of his books(Epigrams 11) as a euphemistic warning before detailing sexual attraction between men and making gay sex jokes.

Gender norms loosened along with class boundaries. Roman writers are cautious and euphemistic, but they are clear enough. Slaves were permitted the dress of free people, while free people adopted “relaxed festive clothing.” In a culture where dress rigidly marked both gender and status, (just remember the numerous types of togas and the public flogging for wearing the wrong one) this relaxation invited theatricality, exaggeration, and gender play.

Many ancient traditions went in to our modern Christmas including this joyous event and Sol Invictus from Rome.

For one week a year, Rome legalized what would otherwise be condemned: softened masculinity, blurred roles, voiced desire, even allowed sexual non-conformity and cross dressing.

Dude, it’s not gay—it’s Saturnalia.

So make this Yuletide gay again! It’s tradition.