I bought this book at Colchester castle on my visit to see A Number in Space and Time.

I’d assumed from the title that it was a book of pictures of LGBTQ+ artifacts from throughout history – silly me didn’t actually open the book to see! It contains five sections, which reference artifacts but actually cover different ways LGBTQ+ existed throughout history – more reading than I expected, but also more interesting!

The first thing Ben Paites covers is the actual difficulty of identifying LGBTQ+ in history because the terminology and even the way these people felt about themselves is very different from what we use and understand today.

I was delighted to find that Alexander the Great is associated with kissing a eunuch called Bogoas on page 9! References to eunuchs having any kind of positive association in history is rare, so this was a nice surprise.

Ben is pretty good at pointing out bias in our sources, because accessing somebody of homosexuality in most ages and locations in Western history has been used as a way to discredit them. That means that at least some people accused of having an LGBTQ+ identity would not have had … but the same token would lead to straight-washing “good” people who we would identify as LGBTQ+ in order not to discredit them.

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The animal kingdom is a different matter! Here find other animals, although mostly mammals, engaging in same sex coupling – and evidently for attachment and/or pleasure. Not dissimilar to us!

Giraffes and sheep have high tendencies to be exclusively homosexual – what’s interesting about sheep is that this behaviour would have been easily observable, so why is it so little known?

The first ever recorded sexual activity between two humpback whales was between two males.

What we don’t know is why some species (including our own) have non-sexual mating. What is important is that humans aren’t anything special.

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Gay! Well, the term “gay” to mean homosexual evolved from the name of a male who worked at a “gay house”, which was an old term for a brothel – hence “gay boy”. “Gay boys” didn’t need to be gay, they just worked there!

Anyone ever heard of “neurogender”?

Neurogender is a broad term for someone who feels that their gender identity is intrinsically linked to their neurotype, neurological condition, or neurodivergence. This means their neurodivergency significantly affects their understanding or experience of gender, to the point that it cannot be separated from it. Neurogenders are a subset of nonbinary identities, sometimes overlapping with other identities, and exist for many different neurodivergencies, such as ADHDgender or Autigender.

We’ve both learnt something today!

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Ben retells the Cybele and Attis myth slightly differently from what I’d heard previously; Cybele was a goddess born with both masks and female genitalia. The gods forced her to become female by castrating her!

Attis was born from Cybele’s discarded penis, however she didn’t know that. When she met Attis she felt a strange attraction to him and she fell in love with him.

Attis was unaware of Cybele’s attraction and went ahead and married somebody else. Cybele was angered by this and turned up at a wedding and cursed all the guests. Attis then castrated himself with a rock! Ouch!

So there are two eunuchs in the myth and not the one that I though there was!

The priests of Cybele were castrated and presented as female both in and out of the temple, and the Romans recognised them as a third gender.

And then I read of another religious cult presided over by eunuchs, this time of the mermaid like goddess Artagatis of Syria. Ben Paites doesn’t say too much about her.

Then there’s the Anglo-Saxon god Woden (Norse Odin), who practised female magic and is sometimes seen as being gender fluid. I’m going to have to check that out with my friend Tacitus.

Loki of Norse mythology could shapeshift into male or female forms – and had sex as both! The myths suggest that he they were quite happy in either form.

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50 LGBTQ+ finds was an easy read. Short chapters and accessible writing helped the words glide into my mind. Some of the links were a little tenuous, but I’ll forgive the author that because I learnt quite a bit about LGBTQIA+ history and have my thirst whetted for more.

Perhaps history is even queerer than we think!