Most people definitely know that Leonardo da Vinci was gay. Or that Michelangelo was gay. Or Oscar Wilde, of course.
But who else?
Well, there is a full list here, and what I'm going to do now will be to just take out a couple of names from there. As I said, there is a huge number of them, so I would have to sit here and write for a year so I could list them all.
Anyways, here are some famous gay men you probably never really known were gay.
1. Alexander the Great
Of course, by those standards most of them could be considered bisexual in modern times, but when you only sleep with a woman out of duty, it could be debated.
Alexander was one of these people.
2. Hadrian
Romans back then were only not too different from the Greek when it came to sexuality. They didn't have strict homosexual or heterosexual categories for people, instead they had the active dominant (masculine) and passive submissive (feminine) sexualities for every person.
This way, it was perfectly all right for you to be openly dominant in a homosexual relationship - you wouldn't lose your masculinity or your social status. Thus submissivs were generally the slaves, the prostitutes or the young ones.
Just like with Alexander, Hadrian had sex both with women and men, although he seemed to be inclined more toward men. He had a young, Greek youth as a companion for six years (Antinous), when the boy died. After his death Hadrian insisted on the deification of the youth, which didn't go down very well, since deification was usually bestowed only on deceased emperors and their families.
3. Cyrano de Bergerac
Everyone knows the guy, but probably not in the correct way. Rostand wrote a play about him, and there were quite a few movies made off of the play too - still, that story is just that. A story.
Bergerac was most and foremost a a rebel. He was a very good duelist, and an even better writer (he wrote a tragedy, letters, and two science fiction works). He was pretty much hated by the church, because he was a free thinker, who always seemed to question religion.
He wasn't too orthodox in his private life either. Of course, he fooled around with his cousin Madeleine, but that was probably his only relation with a woman. Bergerac paraded around with quite a few homosexuals - a poet, who was a suspected sodomite, a man who named himself the emperor of the burlesque, and an entourage of choirboys.
Bergerac also suffered from syphilis, which is why so many references say that he was a madman (though he died after he was first confined to a lunatic asylum by his brother, and possibly attacked by Jesuits.)
4. Abraham Lincoln
People are still debating this one (Lincoln DID have a wife and kids, after all), but apparently there is some evidence that Lincoln had an affair going on with his friend, Speed.
Lincoln was also really weird around women, while he always seemed to be in his element when it came to men. He lived in pretty close quarters with Speed for quite some time, and when the guy decided to live (funnily enough, at the same time Lincoln got engaged to Mary Todd), Lincoln kind of cracked.
Speed told Lincoln to not break the engagement, but Lincoln did tell Mary that he did not love her.
The two men corresponded for a long time after that, and they mostly talked about their fear of marriage. Speed married after that while Lincoln encouraged him but he also seemed to be on the edge of a breakdown, just like Lincoln was previously.
5. Hans Christian Andersen
Andersen was a victim of the society's opinions on sexuality.
He seemed to have a few crushes on women, but he also fell in love with quite a few men in his time of life. Of course, as the public opinion went in those days, he could never really take on a male lover, and he never married a woman either.
Instead, he channeled his sexual energies in his fairy tales (apparently, The Little Mermaid was written after Edvard Collin, the love of his live got married and he suffered a breakdown).
He recorded almost everything in his life (his journal is even full with little crosses that indicated how many times he masturbated - and apparently he did that a LOT) - and he more than likely died a virgin.
+1. King Richard the Lionhearted
Once again, this is a debated topic, but apparently there is evidence that he was, indeed, gay. What's this evidence?
A contemporary account of Richard and King Philip of France, that goes like this:
"They ate every day at the same table and from the same dish, and at night their beds did not separate them. And the king of France loved him as his own soul; and they loved each other so much that the king of England (Henry II, Richard's father) was absolutely astonished at the passionate love between them and marveled at it".
The debate here seems to come from a couple of historians that claim that the part where they slept in the same bed didn't indicate anything else besides how politics were done back then... (What the hell? And if it were true, what's with the whole "passionate love" thing?)
