Middle Ages

 OR: Around the World in 80 (Medieval) Gays 

The Middle Ages, or Dark Ages if you want to be even more outdated, is  usually defined to be from roughly 500 CE to 1500 CE1. It’s often thought to be when nothing was really happening: in this gap between the Roman Empire and the beginning of the modern age, trade decreased, as did large cities and the scale of war so everything became more locally focused. That’s a very euro-centic way of looking at history, as there was quite a bit going on elsewhere, and obviously quite a lot of queerness.2

The Arabic world was spreading west with Muslims conquering the Byzantine Empire, taking control of North Africa, and spreading into the Iberian Peninsula (Green, 2012). At this time their Arabic language contained words for lesbians, or at the very least women who had intimate relations with each other; the word comes from inherently sexual innuendo. This was concurrent with the global theme of the time of homosexuality being much more something that you did rather than something that you were. Despite these women being deeply pathologized, with some even suggesting that the desire was caused by the diet of their mother during pregnancy, literature does contain tales of enduring and supportive companionship and even the creation of specific subcultures. (Amer, 2009)

Slightly further East, China was also in its own “golden age” (Green, 2012). Queerness has appeared from the very beginning of Chinese recorded history, as almost all emperors of Imperial China are known to have both a wife, mainly for the purposes of reproduction, and significant male lovers in their life. Given the norm of bisexuality in the Imperial classes, and the fact that they were the only ones whose lives were biographed, it’s not outrageous to suggest that bisexuality may have been a norm throughout all of culture. Unusually for the historical record, the importance of love and intimacy is shown rather than just sexual pairings: Emperor Ai’s lover, Dong Xian, fell asleep on the arm of his robe, and rather than waking him, Ai cut his sleeve, leading to Passion of the Cut Sleeve becoming a common euphemism for gay men in the East. The term at the time for female partnerships was dui shi, from the term “paired eating”, which is almost certainly a sex thing, showing queer women have not been afforded their love, intimacy and companionship making it in the historical canon, or even language (Prager, 2020). However, I would like to suggest, perhaps foolishly and blinded by my own naive optimism that at least one culture wasn’t going to objectify queer women, that “paired eating” actually was a statement of shared domesticity. 
In the Tang Dynasty, which started in  618 AD, we began to see homosexuality outside of Imperial circles for the first time, unsurprising given, with the rise of meritocracy and importance of creative pursuits, it is the first time we see any real perspectives outside of the Imperial circles (Green, 2012). One such perspective is that of Bo Juyi, a poet and bureaucrat who’s poetry and the love letters he wrote to Yuan Zhen, still survive. He writes of dreaming that they are together, complains that his wife doesn’t read enough books, and makes pacts that in their retirement they will become Taoist monks together, a plan that never came as Yuan Zhen died young (Norton, 1998)3 . It was also in the Tang dynasty when homophobia began to rise in China, moving away from the previous tendencies of indifference. Many historians place this on increasing Christian and Islamic influence. (Wright-Kwon, 2019)

Further East again, but more traditionally recognised to be the West, in the Central Americas there were the Chluha-Mexica people, better known as Aztecs. We know very little about this civilisation, and most of what we do know is through the lens of Spanish colonisers. Moreover, this was a vast empire existing for hundreds of years and incorporating many different cultures and ethnicities, so the views on and experience of queerness would be far from homogenous. However, we know it must have existed in some sense for the Conquistadors to ban it when they took control of the land (PRISM Inc., 2024). 

    Further evidence of queerness in MesoAmerica is from the Mayans: the Florentine Codex, is a 16th century document written in Spanish and Nahuatl, a language of the native peoples. It contains a word for homsexuality, Xochihuah; it seems to come from the words for flower and owner, which makes sense given the illustrations that accompany it. Anthropologist Geoffrey Kimball (2010), has done a lot of work interpreting this, and has found that while homosexuality is condemned, along with “the storyteller” and “the buffoon”4, it doesn't seem to be suppressed or punished. Furthermore, disapproval is often written about in the past tense suggesting it might have been an outdated belief even by the 1500s.

While people have been occupying North America for around 30,000 years, it was around the Middle Ages when tribes that are recognisable today began to appear. For example the Diné, also known as the Navajo, began to appear around 1400, and have always recognised people and genders away from binary, Western norm. They are known as the nádleehí. Such identities were determined as a person grew up, based on their interests, gifts and the way they fit into society, and often came with high spiritual and social positions. 
    Diné are far from the only tribe with similar identities that come under the modern (slightly controversial) blanket term of “two-spirit”: around 200 tribes have their own words for this concept, including Lhamaana in the Zuni tribe, and Baté of the Osh-Tisch tribe (Flores, 2020).

It was in the Middle Ages too, around 1200 AD, when Polynesians began to settle in New Zealand. While today these people and their language is known as Māori, which actually means “normal”, no one used this term or even invented it until European settlement, as a way to distinguish themselves. (NZ Immigration, 2025). The Māori language has the word Takatāpui, which was mentioned in the first ever dictionary of the language made by Herbert Williams in 1832, however it is impossible to know how long it existed before that. Takatāpui originally referred to an intimate companion of the same sex, however the definition encompasses much more than that: to many it’s an acknowledgement of the importance of spirituality and how “genderless” that spirituality is. Today, and since the 1980s, has been used as a self identifier of all LGBT identities much like the term queer, however it is a cultural specific version that recognises that, to Māori, their identity, and therefore any sexuality or gender identity are inextricably intersected with  their heritage and culture.5 (Rainbow Youth Inc & Tīwhanawhana Trust, 2017, Darling, 2025)

Back in Europe, Christianity was really hitting its stride. It had become the official religion of the Roman Empire in 380 CE and, despite the falling of the Empire not long after, it continued to develop and wipe out many pagan and folk traditions. Specific biblical doctrine6 was banning all kinds of fun queer things like cross dressing and gay sex; cardinals of the pope were condemning homosexuality as “undermining society itself”; and Thomas Aquinas7, was declaring that homosexuality went against natural law. Natural law was a big deal to Mediaeval Christians; it stated that humans, being the rational and reasoning species they apparently are, and with a little help from God, have an inherent knowledge of right and wrong and good and bad, and what is natural. Homosexuality was just one of those things that was inherently wrong, bad and unnatural. This ecclesiastical view, and general ecclesiastical grip on everyday life, especially on those who could read, write or make anything with a chance of surviving for modern historians to see, means most artwork or literature depicting queerness is condemning it. One silver lining to these negative artistic portrayals is that they did also depict lesbians (Wiki, 2025), so I'm still taking the win for inclusion.

There is still some positive queer representation from the Christian canon at the time. For instance in Caesarius’s Dialogues on Miracles, a 13th century collection of over 700 miracles that has 4 stars in its only review on Goodreads, there is a potentially trans character. In Volume I, Book I, Chapter XV, a man takes his daughter on pilgrimage to Lebanon, the servant guiding them runs away with their fortune, the father dies and the daughter escapes on a ship with some Germans. “By tongue and by dress”, these German pilgrims assume her to be a man, an assumption no one ever corrects. Later she(?) joined a monastery, took the name Brother John and “slept among men, with men she ate and drank, with men she bared her back to the scourge.” This is all of so little importance to the story on the whole: it is much more a legal drama about Brother Joseph being framed for theft, and about how important the judgement of God is over the fault prone judgement of man. (Edition edited by Colton & Power, 1929)
    And queer relationships were still managing to flourish. Historian John Boswell has described the important same sex unions of Eastern Europe that were recognised and accepted by the Catholic church in the 14th century, with specific ceremonies to celebrate them. In many ways these happened not despite the stronghold Christianity had on Europe but because of it: the church’s encouragement of celibacy meant marriages are a relatively unimportant, secular event, so society was a whole was less focused on and structured around monogamous, heterosexual, romantic relationships than it is today8. This has been critisised by many, firstly historians who couldnt possibly believe that gayness would exist in the godfearing 1500s, but the values of historians and their cultures, and in this case their own homophobia, is inevitably reflected onto the work that they did9. But also by queer historians who suggest these unions were much more about platonic companionship, than they were homosexual (Wiki, 2025b). In Boswell’s defence, it's hard to know what's romantic when it's your own life, let alone other people from 700 years ago living under a completely different social structure.  

 
So the Middle Ages were pretty queer, not just in Western Europe, but all over the world too. 

1. I use BCE and CE rather than BC and AD not out of some anti-religious wokery, but because BC and AD is a system that uses both English and Latin, so I prefere BCE and CE that stays consistent to one language.

2. To read more about how I’m using the term “queer”, what it means to me, and what it means within the scope of this project, please my introduction to this project: On Writing Queer Histories

3. It was at this part of my research I discovered Rictor Norton, a historian who wrote his PhD in homosexual themes in English Renaissance Literature in 1972 (less than 5 years after homosexuality was decriminalised in the UK by the way) and has not stopped writing about queer history since. His website (https://rictornorton.co.uk/index.htm)  is incredible with hundreds of queer historical bibliographies, and he has published a book compiling centuries worth of gay love letters. Norton is now 80, still attending conferences, and on his Facebook he posts memes and badly framed pictures of himself and his husband in English National Parks. Needless to say, I am obsessed with him. 

4. With a personal fear of both clowns and drama students, I completely condone condemning both of these peoples. 

5. For more on queer Maori language this dictionary is great. It’s really interesting to look at the words different cultures have, the ones they don’t, and how their interpretation differs through the lenses of different cultures, and this dictionary does a great job of showing that. 

6. or maybe just interpretation or translations of those doctrine but I'm not getting into that now

7. If you recognise that name it's probably because you learned about him in year 7 religious studies, for arguing that the universe must have an original cause and that cause must be God. 

8. This structuring of society around couples, from an assumption that such relationships are a universally shared goal, and where they become valued over all other relationships, is called amatonormativity. You can read more about it in this landmark essay by Philosopher Elizabeth Brake, and in an essay I wrote explaining why my chronic singledom wasn't my fault but instead the fault of the structure of society at large. That essay got my highest ever grade at university, perhaps out of pity. 

9. To read more about how present cultural values shape understandings of history please read my edition on prehistory, where I talk about this in much more detail, and about gay cavemen: Prehistory

Originally posted May 2025, but keep having to change dates to keep posts in order. 

Amer, S. 2009. Medieval Arab Lesbians and Lesbian-Like Women. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/262459  

Colton, G. G. & Power, E. 1929. https://dn790005.ca.archive.org/0/items/caesariusthedialogueonmiraclesvol.1/Caesarius%2C%20The%20Dialogue%20on%20Miracles%20%28vol.%201%29.pdf  

Darling, H-H. 2025. Takatāpui. https://www.makingqueerhistory.com/articles/2017/10/8/takatpui    

Flores, A. 2020. Two Spirit and LGBTQ+ Identities: Today and Centuries Ago. https://www.hrc.org/news/two-spirit-and-lgbtq-idenitites-today-and-centuries-ago  

Green, J. 2012. The Dark Ages … How Dark Were They Really?: Crash Course World History #14.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QV7CanyzhZg&ab_channel=CrashCourse 

Kimball, G. 2010. Aztec Homosexuality: The Textual Evidence. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1300/J082v26n01_02  

Norton, R. 1998. Joined Delight: The Gay Love Letters of Bo Juyi to Yuan Zhen and others. https://rictornorton.co.uk/bojuyi.htm 

NZ Immigration. 2025. A brief history: New Zealand is a young country in terms of its human history. https://www.live-work.immigration.govt.nz/live-in-new-zealand/history-government/a-brief-history 

Prager, S. 2020. In Han Dynasty China, Bisexuality Was the Norm. https://daily.jstor.org/in-han-dynasty-china-bisexuality-was-the-norm/ 

PRISM Inc. 2024. Homosexuality in the Pre-colonial Americas. https://www.prismfl.org/post/homosexuality-in-the-pre-colonial-americas 

Rainbow Youth Inc & Tīwhanawhana Trust, 2017. Definition of takatāpui. https://takatapui.nz/definition-of-takatapui#takatapui-meaning  

Wiki. 2025a. Homosexuality in medieval Europe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexuality_in_medieval_Europe#cite_note-FOOTNOTEBoswell1996258%E2%80%93259-14    

Wiki. 2025b. Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-Sex_Unions_in_Pre-Modern_Europe 

Wright-Kwon, M. 2019. Queer China: A Guide. https://www.chinaresidencies.com/news/263