A robe, sliced—not from vanity or vengeance, but to preserve the dream of a man asleep. Emperor Ai of Han China took a blade to silk so his lover Dong Xian might rest undisturbed on the emperor’s sleeve. That single gesture—that quiet refusal to wake desire—became idiom. “The passion of the cut sleeve.” And it is how Chinese still refer to same-sex love.
The existence of LGBTQ+ royalty is not a modern revelation. It is a recovery. Not rumor. Not euphemism. Not speculation. History. Not invented yesterday by hashtags or pride floats.
For millennia, queer rulers have occupied courts from China to Córdoba, from ancient Macedonia to modern Britain—gay kings and queens, gender-defying nobles and their same-sex sovereign lovers. These figures were not always hidden, either. In many cases, they were integral: lovers, advisors, warriors, and heirs. What erased them was not absence, but history's obsession with purity, lineage, and control. Censorship masquerading as historiography.
That veil of censorship wasn't self-woven. It was imposed—by Christian clerics with sharp tongues, by colonial administrators with sharper pens, by historians taught to see love between men as weakness, between women as myth. But behind every crown sits a body. Behind every body, desire. Behind desire—story. And this is a story of kings and consorts, queens and courtiers, of the secret architecture of power built on longing, loyalty, and risk. From ancient gay kings and queens who ruled with open secrets, to medieval monarchs undone by whispered passions, to contemporary royals confronting the mirrors of history.
This is not just a celebration. It’s a reckoning. A refusal to let queer royalty remain a parenthetical in footnotes.
Key Takeaways
- Discover how power and queerness coexisted behind crowns, in palaces where lineage and longing collided without apology.
- Explore forbidden liaisons and sanctioned lovers—LGBTQ+ monarchs whose reigns redefined legitimacy through intimacy.
- Gain insight into the coded gestures, ceremonial affection, and emotional architecture of queer nobility, from antiquity to empire.
- Understand how homosexual kings and queens navigated piety, inheritance, and desire within systems designed to erase them.
- Delve into the layered legacies of same-sex rulers, where personal devotion and political performance blurred.
- Uncover the persistence of royal LGBTQ+ figures—not as footnotes, but as architects of dynasties, war, and myth.
- Reflect on the return of these erased lineages in today’s fight for recognition, visibility, and the rewriting of LGBTQ+ identity and acceptance into history’s core text.
Ancient Empires and Same-Sex Love: Open Secrets of the Past
In many ancient societies, same-sex relationships in royal courts weren’t aberrations. They were structural. Dynastic power was not jeopardized by desire; it was often solidified through it. Kings and emperors took lovers not merely in secret, but in ceremonies, in rituals, in palaces where the gender of affection mattered less than the loyalty it cemented.
No one spoke of “gay” or “straight” in the modern sense. Sexuality had not yet been pathologized. There were acts, affections, hierarchies of love and favor. The erotic didn’t threaten legitimacy—it often reinforced it. What mattered was succession, not shame.
These early empires offer something modern archives resist: the normalization of fluid desire in spaces of supreme power. Their monuments bear it. Their poetry alludes to it. Their political dramas revolve around it. While modern historians comb sources for definitive “proof,” antiquity gave us something subtler and more durable: patterns of intimacy embedded in the daily rituals of rule.
What survived was not confession—but continuity.
Alexander the Great and Hephaestion
Some loves reconfigure geography. Others redraw the musculature of myth. Alexander the Great, war-born son of Zeus (or so he was rumored to believe), did both. His empire sprawled like a fever dream—from the Mediterranean’s salt-rimmed lips to the heatstroke of the Hindu Kush. But it was not conquest alone that defined his legacy. It was Hephaestion, the general at his side and—though academic scruples twitch at the word—lover by every logic but legal.
They were educated together under Aristotle’s precision and excess. They learned anatomy not only from scrolls but in the curvature of each other’s devotion. The ancient world did not require a term like “homosexual” to comprehend intimacy between men. In Macedon, affection wasn’t defined—it was displayed: on the battlefield, in the bedchamber, through public ritual and imperial grief.
When Hephaestion died suddenly in Ecbatana, Alexander’s response wasn’t melancholic—it was seismic. He shaved his head, executed a physician, refused food, and declared a nation-wide mourning so severe that temples across Babylon were shuttered. He demanded that Hephaestion be honored like a god, even as he lived as a man. He built altars, minted coins, and planned a hero’s funeral that dwarfed those of kings. The ceremony didn’t just signal loss. It was a declaration: this man mattered more than dynasties.
Modern historians, ever clinging to plausibility like an oar in floodwaters, hedge their language—companions, lifelong friends, favorites. But ancient chroniclers, looser in tongue and richer in metaphor, tell a more vivid story. They compare Alexander to Achilles, Hephaestion to Patroclus—not as a literary flourish, but as spiritual equation. This wasn’t allegory. It was lineage. Same-sex relationships in royal courts weren’t just tolerated—they were archetypal.
And in this case, gay royalty wasn’t scandal—it was statecraft. The general was the lover. The lover was the legacy.
Emperor Ai of Han and Dong Xian
Across the curvature of the globe and deep in the lacquered traditions of Han Dynasty China, another monarch turned intimacy into idiom. Emperor Ai, ruling from 7–1 BCE, didn’t fight wars for love. He wrote it into governance. Dong Xian wasn’t a military hero. He was an aesthetic presence—young, refined, tender as lacquered silk—and he ruled beside Ai not through decree but through nearness.
The records do not equivocate. Dong Xian slept in the emperor’s bed, rode in his chariot, issued edicts with his seal. His ascent through court ranks was dizzying, and not merely political—it was devotional. The court gossiped, but it did not revolt. In fact, much of the Han court’s early culture had made room for what we would now recognize as bisexual normativity. Official records—particularly those of the chronicler Sima Qian—detail not only Ai’s affections but also the broader landscape of male favorites, eunuch intimacy, and queer camaraderie.
The most enduring image, though, is the simplest. Dong asleep on Ai’s robe. The emperor, unwilling to wake him, cuts the silk. A quiet, practical gesture that echoes like thunder in historical memory. That story became a metaphor—the “cut sleeve”—and still survives in the Chinese language as a euphemism for queerness. Not shameful. Not hidden. Memorialized. Internalized. Part of the cultural lexicon.
In early imperial China, there was no rupture between affection and statehood. Queer intimacy wasn’t an asterisk; it was a lived part of sovereignty. LGBTQ+ monarchs weren’t aberrations—they were anchors in the narrative of dynastic life. Ai’s love for Dong Xian may not have been strategic. But it was influential, poetic, and legible across time. More than two millennia later, we still cite the sleeve. We still remember the softness.
Hadrian and Antinous
Where Emperor Ai gave us a phrase, Emperor Hadrian of Rome gave us a god. His love for Antinous, a youth of extraordinary beauty from Bithynia, was no secret. It was spectacle. They traveled together across the empire—through Greece, Anatolia, the Levant. The older emperor, the younger muse. And then, in 130 CE, Antinous drowned in the Nile under circumstances murky and mythic.
Hadrian’s grief was imperial in scale. He declared Antinous a deity, founded a city (Antinopolis) at the site of his death, and commissioned statues in his likeness throughout the empire. More than 100 sculptural depictions survive—an astonishing act of material devotion. His image was fused with those of Dionysus and Osiris. He was carved into myth with the tools of marble and mourning.
And for all this, Hadrian’s rule did not collapse. The Senate grumbled. Philosophers speculated. But the emperor remained in power, his devotion undeterred by optics or orthodoxy. Same-sex relationships in royal courts, in this case, didn’t need euphemism. They were immortalized in stone, currency, city-planning.
Some scholars argue Hadrian’s veneration of Antinous was performative—a political move, a mythologizing of loss. But performance is not the opposite of sincerity. In empire, the two are often indistinguishable. Love becomes pageantry. Grief becomes religion. Antinous became a constellation.
The scale of Hadrian’s mourning tells us everything we need to know. This was not an emperor indulging whim. This was a man carving the memory of his beloved into the geography of his dominion. It wasn’t only desire—it was legacy. And though Rome would later sanitize its narratives under Christian rule, the images remain. The temples remain. The face of Antinous stares back from busts and reliefs like a whisper refused erasure.
Lesser Known LGBTQ Monarchs from the Ancient World
Not all ancient LGBTQ+ royal narratives were so celebrated as Hadrian and Antinous, of course. Some have been lost in translation or intentionally muted. We know, for instance, of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal recording affection for a male courtier in cuneiform poetry, or pharaohs of Egypt engaging in same-sex rituals as part of divine kingship – but many such accounts are fragmentary. One figure whose story only survives in scandalous later reports is Emperor Elagabalus of Rome (3rd century CE), who was said to have married a male slave and even offered vast sums to any physician who could physically transform him into a woman – a description that today leads some to consider Elagabalus a transgender or gender-nonconforming royal. While Roman historians (who despised Elagabalus for many reasons) likely exaggerated these tales, they suggest that gender fluidity in the palace is not a modern phenomenon. Indeed, people who defied the gender binary or embraced fluid sexuality have existed under crowns and tiaras long before current terminology evolved.
But They Weren't Queer, Were They?
This is where the archive fidgets. The moment we try to drape modern language—gay, bi, queer—over figures who never uttered such terms, history shifts uncomfortably in its seat. But the discomfort isn’t in the truth. It’s in the translation.
In ancient societies, identity was less a performance of permanence and more a choreography of acts. A king could take male lovers without collapsing the throne. A queen could confide in a woman more deeply than any consort, and no one rushed to rewrite their titles. What mattered was continuity, not conformity. The crown didn’t much care who you loved—as long as the heir arrived, and the empire didn’t unravel.
To call them LGBTQ+ monarchs today is not to retrofit identity—it’s to reclaim history from euphemism. Because what we’re confronting isn’t just erasure. It’s linguistic laundering. The past didn’t lack queerness; it lacked labels. And so, we inherited centuries of courtly “companions,” “favorites,” and “close confidants,” footnoted into invisibility.
Were they queer? No, not in the boxed, bureaucratic sense that identity papers now demand. But were they lovers? Did they craft dynasties through desire? Did they rule in tandem with those who shared their bed? Unquestionably.
They weren’t queer by name. But by gesture, ritual, and rumor—they absolutely were.
Medieval and Renaissance Realities: Forbidden Love, Scandal, and Survival
As the medieval world tightened its grip on sin, sovereigns didn’t stop loving—they just learned to do it behind heavier doors. Christianity, rising from ritual into law, recast same-sex desire not as indulgence but as damnation. In Europe, sodomy was officially a sin, and chronicles grew more coy about royal favorites of the same sex. Yet LGBTQ+ monarchs didn’t vanish. They adapted—tucking affection behind altars, threading it through coded letters, burying it in alliances cloaked as brotherhoods.
Inquisition made affection subversive. Passion became policy liability. And yet the queer nobility of the time endured—not despite the repression, but because love found shape in secrecy. Their stories don’t echo in royal decrees; they flicker in betrayal, exile, jealous lovers turned rebels.
Yet even in an age of stringent orthodoxy, queer relationships occurred behind castle walls, sometimes influencing politics in profound ways. This was not a dark age of silence. It was a theatre of concealment, where desire rewrote diplomacy—and scandal left the only surviving clues.
King Edward II of England and Piers Gaveston
Power loves a mirror. But sometimes the mirror answers back. And sometimes that mirror—dressed in silk, made Earl, draped over the throne like a favorite cloak—becomes a man. A lover. A liability.
King Edward II of England, that ill-starred prince with a crown heavy enough to bruise a bloodline, saw in Piers Gaveston something more than fraternity. He saw himself, yes—but better. Wiser, sharper, more adorned. The barons called it corruption. The court called it excess. But Edward called it love, or at least its feudal equivalent. Gaveston wasn’t just raised above his station—he was catapulted through the stratosphere of royal favor, crowned with titles meant for bloodlines, not bedmates.
The court chroniclers, laced tight with incense and inhibition, couldn't quite say what they meant, so they reached for euphemism: an unbreakable bond, brotherhood before all mortals, sweet companion. But when the king gifts you a title, a castle, and the near-total collapse of national equilibrium, we know exactly what game is being played. And it’s not chess. It’s gay royalty trying to love openly in a kingdom addicted to appearances.
Gaveston mocked the Queen. Flirted in public. Dressed like he ruled. He was the peacock in the cathedral. A queer nobility that refused to whisper. He disrupted the choreography of obedience, and the lords, already simmering from exclusion, boiled over. They banished him. The king wept. They let him return. The king smiled. They murdered him. The king broke.
Edward didn’t learn. Or didn’t want to. His next favorite, Hugh Despenser, was greedier, crueler, more toxic to the system, and still, the king clung tighter. The court muttered poison. And the Queen, Isabella, sharpened her rage into a blade to conspire with her own lover—Roger Mortimer—and plot a coup. Captivity and abdication. Possibly a red-hot poker to the rectum, if you believe the rumors. But even if that’s apocryphal, the humiliation wasn’t. Edward, once king, now prisoner, fell as much for who he loved as how he governed.
English Heritage puts it plainly: “The king’s downfall was due in part to his reliance on his ‘favourites’, Piers Gaveston and Hugh Despenser, who were rumoured to be his lovers.” But this isn’t just about favoritism. It’s about what happens when a homosexual king refuses to keep his affection in the dark corners of history’s hallways. Edward didn’t code his desire into metaphor. He lived it into disaster.
And therein lies the brilliance and horror. His queerness wasn’t clandestine—it was centrifugal. It pulled power, politics, and public perception into a vortex of desire and defiance. This wasn’t just a king who loved another man. This was a man who refused to pretend he didn’t. And in a medieval world that tolerated secrets but punished spectacle, that refusal became his noose.
Gay monarchy, in Edward’s case, was not anomaly—it was revolution by intimacy. The throne could handle cruelty. It could even stomach incompetence. But when love began to look like power, and power like affection, the realm recoiled.
Edward’s greatest offense wasn’t loving Gaveston. It was doing so without apology.
Caliph Al-Hakam II of Córdoba
In the tenth-century mosaic of Al-Andalus, where poetry dripped from the arches and libraries swelled like lungs, sat a ruler who preferred scrolls to swords and boys to brides. Caliph Al-Hakam II of Córdoba, whose reign was stitched with enlightenment and sensual resistance, didn’t just build a kingdom of books—he built a court that bent masculinity around desire.
This was no decadent rumour tucked beneath silk sheets. It was a structural preference. A public quiet. The caliph, famed for founding Córdoba’s great library and expanding the Mosque of the Caliphate, also surrounded himself with a harem—not of women, but of adolescent male courtiers. Ministers wrote around it. Historians coded it. But in the corridors of the Alcázar, it was known.
His wife, Subh—sometimes Aurora—was said to have disguised herself as a boy to win his affection. She cut her hair, donned masculine robes, and played a character named Ja’far, because only when she looked like one of his boy-companions could she earn a gaze. This wasn’t fetish. It was survival. In a court defined by queer nobility, proximity to pleasure often required disguise.
Later chroniclers would baptize these truths in caution. They’d speak of ḥubb al-walad—love of boys—as an aesthetic tradition or a poetic metaphor, not as the intimate, daily reality of a homosexual king ruling without apology. But Al-Hakam’s life does not fit in the footnotes of denial. His lovers shaped his court, shaped succession, shaped the gossip of viziers and the pacing of power. His queerness wasn’t a secret—it was a rhythm woven through policy, architecture, and the scent of ink on vellum.
That Córdoba did not collapse under this intimacy is no accident. It flourished. Because under Al-Hakam, love didn’t threaten sovereignty. It flavored it. It ornamented it. It made it legible in verse. This was gay royalty not as deviation, but as dynastic fact.
King Henry III of France
If decadence were a doctrine, King Henry III of France was its high priest. Draped in lace, flanked by perfumed boys, and scandal-stalked by pamphleteers, he reigned not just as monarch but as myth in motion—a monarch who turned court into theatre, gender into performance, and power into pageant.
His coterie of favorites—les mignons—were the embodiment of courtly provocation: young, beautiful, aggressively elegant, their doublets more extravagant than most noble dowries. They powdered their faces, curled their hair, and moved through the palace like living rebuttals to French masculinity. Publicly adored. Publicly loathed. The whispers about their relationships with the king weren’t so much whispered as shouted in sonnets, etched into satire, embroidered into slander.
And perception was everything. Enemies of the crown branded Henry with epithets sharpened for execution: “sodomitical” and “effeminate.” Gossip became a form of political warfare. Moralists turned fashion into deviance. Public malignity toward a possibly gay monarch wasn’t just about disapproval—it was strategy. The accusation that he surrounded himself with heterodox sexuality was deployed not as scandal, but as statecraft.
Whether Henry lay with les mignons matters less than how his enemies wielded the suspicion. His effeminacy, real or constructed, became a political cudgel. The ultra-Catholic League, eager to discredit the monarchy during the Wars of Religion, didn’t just accuse Henry of moral decay—they made his queerness the decay. He was cast not as incompetent but as unnatural, a man whose private desires corroded France’s divine order.
Pamphlets of the era spun the mignons into symptoms of monarchical decay. Their closeness to the king, their privileges, their style—they became evidence of instability. The charge that Henry’s queerness had infected the realm was more than whisper: it became an analytic. Historians later noted that such perceptions were “found to be a factor in the disintegration of the late Valois monarchy.” In other words: the optics of intimacy broke the dynasty before any army did.
Yet within his court, the spectacle served a purpose. To those who loved him—or needed his patronage—Henry III’s queerness was not deviance but currency. Power flowed through intimacy, affection, and aesthetic kinship. He reigned with queer nobility not despite their flamboyance, but because of it. And Henry’s legacy is less about who he loved than what that love disrupted: a monarchy’s image of stoicism and control. He ruled in perfume and pearls while France burned around him, and the world responded not with nuance, but with assassination.
In the end, it wasn’t war or famine that killed him. It was fear—fear of a gay monarch who refused to erase his pleasure from power.
King James VI of Scotland and I of England
To read a kingdom through its love letters is to learn how sovereignty weeps. King James VI of Scotland and I of England—the monarch who gave us the King James Bible—also gave us a paper trail of desire. His reign united crowns, but his heart split its attention between duty and devotion. And that devotion, uncoded, unrepentant, and blisteringly affectionate, was to men.
From his earliest days as king of Scotland, James surrounded himself with male favorites whose influence eclipsed bloodlines. First came Esmé Stewart (Lord d’Aubigny)—a French cousin whose arrival electrified the court and horrified the Calvinists. Then Robert Carr (Earl of Somerset), who rode James’s affection to dizzying political heights. But none mattered like George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham, whose beauty turned the court into a stage and James into a poet.
These weren’t casual alliances. They were coronations of intimacy. The letters James sent to Buckingham were not clothed in ambiguity. In one, he signed, “Your dear dad and husband, James.” Another moaned about absence, another praised beauty. The paper held what the court could not: a homosexual king writing himself into the archive without shame.
James himself did little to hide his feelings; numerous surviving letters from King James to Buckingham are ardently affectionate. In one, James writes, “I had rather live banished in any part of the earth with you than live a sorrowful widow’s life without you”, and in another he signs off as “Your dear dad and husband, James”. It’s hard to read such missives as anything but expressions of romantic love. Indeed, a large collection of these letters “provides the clearest evidence for James’ homoerotic desires”.
Crucially, James I did not face a Gaveston-style revolt; by his time, the English court had begrudgingly adjusted to the idea of a king with male lovers, so long as those men did not grossly abuse their station. Buckingham, however, did amass great power and was deeply unpopular – Parliament even tried to impeach him – yet James protected him to the end. “The king himself, I daresay, will live and die a sodomite,” wrote one acid-tongued MP in 1617, using the era’s harsh term. But James died on the throne. Unexiled. Unburned. Unshaken.
Historians now largely agree that these relationships, especially with Buckingham, clearly were sexual. Power moved through them, statecraft bent around them, and affection bloomed into policy. And after James’s death, Buckingham remained influential under Charles I, showing that the royal favorite system had essentially become an accepted (if resented) institution.
To be fair, the court itself had already learned to look without blinking. The English court had begrudgingly adjusted to the idea of a king with male lovers, so long as those lovers didn't outshine Parliament or threaten succession. Still, tensions flared. Buckingham was nearly impeached. Gossip clung to his every title. But James defended him, coddled him, and kept him close.
Even so, James played both roles well. He fathered eight children with Anne of Denmark and authored polemics against sodomy, compartmentalizing his public virtue and private truth. This wasn’t hypocrisy—it was strategy. A way to thread the needle of divine right and earthly longing.
Yet the archive flinches. Modern biographers hedge. They say “emotional closeness.” They say “platonic favoritism.” But the letters, read plainly, provide the clearest evidence for James’ homoerotic desires. Not because they hint—but because they confess.
In James, we see a monarchy made elastic by desire. A realm ruled not just by lineage, but by longing. His love letters weren’t scandalous footnotes—they were state documents, drafted in the same ink that signed laws. For all their intimacy, they didn’t destabilize the realm. They redefined it.
This was gay royalty not confined to the margins but written into the architecture of empire. James didn’t just rule with lovers at his side. He ruled through them.
Queen Anne and Sarah Churchill
There are love stories that unfold in letters rather than bedrooms, in pet names rather than pronouns, in alliances so entangled they threaten the very seams of state. Queen Anne and Sarah Churchill were not merely friends. They were not simply confidantes. They were women who made monarchy emotional—who governed through proximity, jealousy, devotion, and rupture.
They called each other Mrs. Morley and Mrs. Freeman, a pastoral fiction meant to obscure and protect. It did neither. Their nicknames leaked into court gossip, their correspondence became ammunition, and their bond—woven tighter than any treaty—drew scrutiny usually reserved for military affairs. Sarah didn’t just influence Anne; she animated her. She wielded access like a weapon. And when that access was revoked, the fallout was volcanic.
Their close relationship and reported romance was not exceptional—it was criminally ordinary for women whose public roles left them no space for sanctioned intimacy. Like many royal women, Anne’s most meaningful relationships existed outside the language of legitimacy. Sarah was her partner, her mirror, her political North Star. And then, her most strategic enemy.
When Sarah was cast out and replaced by Abigail Masham, the court erupted. Not because of policy, but because of feeling. Was it a love triangle? A shift in alliances? A loss of erotic attention disguised as court reorganization? History doesn’t confirm. It murmurs.
The epistolary record glows with tension. Affection curdles into accusation. Letters once signed with pet names became legal threats. At one point, Sarah threatened to publish Anne’s most intimate correspondence—a royal outing via blackmail.
But Anne’s story was not singular. In 18th-century Europe, queens and duchesses performed their love in shadows cast by dynastic duty. Princess Isabella of Bourbon-Parma, married to a Habsburg, found her truest allegiance not in her husband but in his sister, Archduchess Maria Christina. Over 200 letters survive. They are not mild. They are not misread. They are declarations. “I begin the day by thinking of the object of my love… I think of her incessantly,” Isabella wrote. Her grief was not romanticized. It was archival. She called Maria Christina “the great love of her life.”
These women weren’t writing history. They were leaking it. Pressing their queerness between pages that would only be read centuries later, by scholars with gloves and suspicion.
Anne’s monarchy did not collapse because she may have loved a woman. But it bent under the weight of a bond it could not categorize. Lesbian royalty—especially in the early modern era—wasn’t criminalized, it was erased. Anne wasn’t punished. She was archived. Lovingly. Loosely. Half-labeled.
In Anne and Sarah’s orbit, we see the workings of a queer monarchy that thrived not despite erasure, but because it adapted to it. Their intimacy built governments. Their fallout redirected history. They ruled through emotion, and that emotion—unsanctioned, unreadable—left fingerprints across every act of sovereignty.
Philippe I, Duke of Orléans
To strut through Versailles in diamonds then defeat an army in heels was never a contradiction. Philippe I, Duke of Orléans, younger brother of Louis XIV, didn’t disguise his queerness. He dressed it. Weaponized it. Performed it until performance became personhood.
He wore gowns with military medals. Rouge with regalia. And though Louis—le Roi Soleil himself—reigned with absolute power, he made space for his brother’s radiant disobedience. Because Philippe wasn’t a threat. He was flamboyant, flirtatious, strategically irrelevant. But he was also a war hero. And in a world where masculinity was measured by conquest, Philippe marched in lace and still conquered. That made him dangerous in a different way.
At the center of his court orbit was the Chevalier de Lorraine, a man described as both lover and poison. Their affair was not whispered—it was catalogued. Versailles wasn’t blind. It was indulgent. The French court of the 17th century was, as some historians put it, “fairly tolerant compared to other countries” when it came to queer aristocracy, especially if that queerness came wrapped in nobility, charisma, and careful irrelevance to succession.
Louis needed Philippe married, so married he was. Twice. Offspring secured. Boxes ticked. But no one mistook obligation for passion. Everyone knew where Philippe’s gaze landed. It wasn’t on queens. It was on courtiers with good cheekbones.
And still, he was adored—or tolerated, depending on who was asked. He was dubbed Monsieur, a title both formal and ironic, a nod to his rank and perhaps a wink at his subversion. Even when he attended court in women’s clothing, he was Monsieur. Even when he draped himself in scandal, he was Monsieur.
What protected him? Context. He didn’t want the crown. His performances amused the king. And in that amusement, he found safety. Like certain African cultures with female husbands, or communities that understood gender as constellation rather than binary, Philippe lived in a sliver of tolerated rebellion. His queerness didn’t threaten the state—it ornamented it.
The French had a phrase—“Italian tastes”—to describe his inclinations. Euphemism turned into taxonomy. It meant what it didn’t say. And Philippe, shimmering in brocade, smirked at every denial with a wink, a flourish, and an inheritance intact.
His was not an exile story. It was survival through spectacle. He lived, loved, and governed without disguise. Not tolerated in spite of his queerness, but because he knew how to stage it.
Gender Rebels in Royal Garb: Women Who Would Be King, Men Who Would Be Queen
History’s mirrors have always warped the light around royal bodies that refused to obey. Not every crown rested on a head content with the gender assigned to it. Some monarchs ruled not just over kingdoms, but over the boundaries of gender itself—challenging, collapsing, and reimagining the binary long before the words "non-binary" or "transgender" existed. These figures—neither myth nor metaphor—moved through their courts with the audacity of paradox: women who ruled as kings, men who donned dresses not in disguise but declaration. Their lives were not anomalies. They were possibilities incarnate.
Queen Nzinga
In the 17th-century crucible of colonial incursion and internal upheaval, Queen Nzinga of Ndongo and Matamba (in present-day Angola) carved out a realm of resistance and reinvention. Born around 1583, Nzinga was forged in the heat of Portuguese aggression and the brutal commerce of the Atlantic slave trade. A gifted diplomat and warrior, she took power in a patriarchal society that rarely tolerated female rule. And so Nzinga, sovereign and strategist, blurred the contours of gender until they bent around her will.
To command authority among male allies and rivals, she dressed as a man and required her court to address her not as Queen, but as King. She even maintained a harem of young men whom she reportedly called her “wives,” flipping the gender script so thoroughly that even colonial chroniclers—eager to paint her as savage—could not ignore the symbolic power of her transgressions. Some European reports, brimming with racist and misogynist disdain, claimed these men were made to wear women’s clothing. Whether that detail was accurate or slander, it attests to how deeply Nzinga unsettled colonial notions of gender order.
Yet her identity was never merely performative. Indigenous African cultures—including those of the Mbundu people—often understood power, gender, and spirit to be more fluid than European binaries allowed. In several pre-colonial African societies, women could become “female husbands”, adopt male social roles, and even take wives of their own—not as mimicry, but as legitimate extensions of cultural logic. Nzinga’s political masculinity was thus not an aberration, but an adaptation rooted in African epistemologies of power.
Still, we must be cautious. Did Nzinga truly identify as male, or did she merely adopt male presentation as a tactic of rule? The historical record, fragmentary and refracted through hostile lenses, cannot answer definitively. But what is clear is this: Nzinga refused to be confined by the expectations of her assigned sex. She weaponized gender ambiguity as a form of sovereignty, defying both local custom and European eyes that sought to reduce her to caricature.
A modern historian has argued that Nzinga’s royal status gave her the rare latitude to “perform a queer identity”—not queer in the modern sexual sense necessarily, but queer in the deepest etymological sense: strange, subversive, and resistant to categorical neatness. She governed as a king, negotiated as a warrior, prayed as a Catholic convert, and fought as an indigenous queen. Her fluidity was her force.
Nzinga’s story survives in dual forms: in Portuguese archives that tried to diminish her, and in Angolan oral histories that celebrate her as a trickster hero—a monarch who beat the Europeans at their own game. Today, she stands as a symbol not just of anti-colonial defiance, but of gender variance rooted in African traditions. In LGBTQ+ history, Nzinga is often cited as an early example of a gender-nonconforming ruler. Whether or not she fits modern labels, her life boldly defies the idea that gender fluidity is a Western invention.
Queen Christina of Sweden
Across the seas from Nzinga, and nearly contemporary in time, Queen Christina of Sweden (1626–1689) was weaving her own iconoclastic legacy—this time in a Protestant northern kingdom whose orderliness she would rattle to its bones. Crowned at eighteen, she refused to follow the choreography of royal femininity. Christina dressed in male clothing by preference, rejected marriage altogether, and pursued scholarly, artistic, and philosophical interests with a fervor usually reserved for men. She invited René Descartes to court. She mocked corsetry. She wanted nothing to do with dynastic reproduction.
Her letters and actions radiate the tension between internal conviction and external expectation. She formed a deeply intimate bond with Countess Ebba Sparre, a relationship that Christina herself called one of bed-sharing and affection. Christina introduced Ebba to others as her “bed-fellow,” and their letters pulse with longing, admiration, and a kind of co-dependency that, while couched in courtly language, exceeds platonic bounds.
Historians continue to debate the exact nature of their connection—physical, romantic, spiritual—but it is unmistakably central to Christina’s emotional life. Ebba was not merely a friend. She was Christina’s chosen partner in a world that demanded political marriage and female decorum.
Christina, however, had her own designs. In 1654, she abdicated the throne—citing exhaustion, lack of an heir, and the burdens of power—and departed Sweden dressed in men’s clothing. She traveled to Rome, where she converted to Catholicism and lived as a political and cultural celebrity, flouting convention at every turn. In Rome, she continued wearing masculine garments and was even painted in armor. A Vatican report at the time noted her “ambiguous sex” with both curiosity and concern, as if her very being defied theological certainty.
Christina never married. She kept male and female companions. She funded operas, collected art, and scandalized the nobility of every country she entered. Pamphlets accused her of debauchery, heresy, and sapphism. Yet none of it deterred her. In an era when female rule was still precarious and tightly scripted, Christina discarded the script altogether.
Modern readers have variously cast her as an early feminist, a lesbian monarch, or a transgender proto-icon. All of these interpretations hold water—and all fall short. Christina refused to be known fully, even by posterity. She is a figure of fragmentation and refusal, someone who understood that identity is a performance, but not always one you stage for others. Her rebellion lay in living—and ruling—as if the constraints of gender had no power over her crown or her selfhood.
Archduke Ludwig Viktor of Austria
In the centuries that followed, the space for royal gender nonconformity narrowed under the weight of Victorian morality and press surveillance. But still, some slipped through. Archduke Ludwig Viktor of Austria (1842–1919), younger brother of Emperor Franz Joseph I, lived a life of courtly queerness barely veiled behind euphemism.
Nicknamed “Luziwuzi” by his family, Ludwig Viktor never married and made no secret of his preference for male company. He hosted lavish parties, patronized the arts, and moved through Vienna’s upper crust with a flamboyance that dared gossip to speak aloud what discretion demanded be whispered. For decades, he was tolerated under the condition of silence. The Habsburg court knew. The press knew. Everyone knew. But decorum—bolstered by rigid censorship—held the façade in place.
That illusion shattered in 1861, when Ludwig Viktor allegedly propositioned a soldier at the Central Bathhouse, who responded by punching him in the face. The scandal, too public to suppress, forced the emperor’s hand. Franz Joseph banished his brother to Schloss Klessheim in Salzburg, where he lived out his years in de facto exile.
Even then, the official story framed his removal as one of temperament or health—never sexuality. To admit a Habsburg prince had been exiled for propositioning men would have ruptured the imperial image. But diaries and private correspondence leave no doubt. Ludwig Viktor’s queerness was tolerated until it became inconvenient. Then, like so many before him, he was quietly written out.
His story is a coda to Nzinga and Christina—a reminder that gender nonconformity, even when veiled in privilege, has always exacted a toll. But it is also a testament to the persistence of identity under pressure. Ludwig Viktor did not marry. He did not recant. He simply lived as he wished until the mask fell.
Today, he stands as one of the clearest examples of an openly gay 19th-century royal figure—known, loved, mocked, and ultimately silenced, but never erased.
Tolerance... with Limits
Viktor's episode shows that the tolerance of 19th century European aristocracy had limits, just like so many other royal courts we've learned about in this blog post. The gay prince could only be himself as long as discretion prevailed. A public scandal involving homosexuality could not be stomached. It’s a pattern that would keep repeating in various forms until very recently – living a double life was often the price for queer nobles to survive in society.
Crucially, even as stigma grew, these relationships did not vanish – they simply went underground or were cloaked in delicate language. The human heart, even one weighed down by a crown, would not be so easily legislated. The stage was now set for a collision between longstanding queer royal traditions and the impending forces of imperialism and Victorian morality, which would attempt one of history’s greatest erasures of LGBTQ+ acceptance.
Only in recent decades have researchers “rediscovered” these LGBTQ+ royal histories, interpreting them in a more understanding light. Projects to re-examine historical records have shown that many cultures prior to the 19th century did allow more gender fluidity at the highest levels than previously acknowledged – a reality often hidden by Victorian-era historians who projected their own values backwards.
These individuals stood at the intersection of power and personal truth, using one to express the other. They were protected to an extent by their rank, yet ultimately their queerness put them at odds with expected norms, requiring sacrifice (be it Nzinga’s loneliness, Christina’s crown, or Ludwig Viktor’s exile). Their indelible marks on history challenge the misconception that discussions of gender diversity and transgender royalty are purely modern phenomena. Indeed, if anything, history shows that whenever there have been rigid rules of gender and sexuality, there have also been those exceptional royals who bent or broke them – and sometimes, carved out a legacy precisely because of their defiance.
Colonialism and Christianity: Erasing Queer Royal Legacies
As ships unfurled across oceans and pulpits were planted like flags, a quieter campaign advanced behind the clamor of empire—one that targeted memory, ritual, and flesh. The collision between colonialism and Christianity didn’t merely redraw borders; it redrew the contours of affection, gender, and desire. Where once queer royals moved within systems that accommodated, even celebrated, fluid identities, empire brought a scalpel—shaving history down to the bone of binaries.
The project of imperialism was never solely about land. It was about rewriting the body politic—and the bodies within it. Monarchs who had once kept male lovers in their courts, queens who wore masculinity like a coronation robe, gender-nonconforming courtiers who thrived in localized cosmologies—all were made deviant overnight by imported texts, foreign laws, and the lethal mingling of sermon and statute.
Christianity, in its colonial deployments, was weaponized not merely to save souls but to reorder them. The crucifix didn’t replace the crown. It redefined who was fit to wear it.
Exportation of Anti-Sodomy Statutes
Among Britain’s most enduring imperial legacies—besides railroads and tea addiction—were its penal codes. Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, drafted in 1860, criminalized “carnal intercourse against the order of nature.” It was a phrase engineered in Victorian courts, but its implications were planetary. From Calcutta to Cape Town, Port of Spain to Nairobi, these laws codified queerness as a crime, often for the first time in these regions’ histories.
The irony, almost too cruel to savor: in many of these cultures, prior to European contact, queer practices were neither scandalized nor suppressed. Hindu epics featured gender transformation as divine play. Persian-influenced courts in the Subcontinent recorded same-sex liaisons between nawabs and courtiers without moral panic. Hijra communities—transgender or third-gender people—held esteemed positions in Mughal courts. But colonial administrators, steeped in Christian purity codes and Edwardian sexual panic, viewed these traditions as grotesque. They didn’t just outlaw them—they sought to erase the very language used to describe them.
Homophobia, in this context, was an export. A technology of control. The British Resident in an Indian princely state didn’t merely advise on trade. He spied on private lives, catalogued “unnatural vices,” and wielded accusations of sodomy like diplomatic daggers. Blackmail became governance.
Across the empire, queer royal behavior was rendered both illegal and inadmissible. Not just in court, but in history.
Colonial Censorship of Queer Monarchs
Records were rewritten not by fire but by omission. Court documents, censuses and biographical entries in imperial gazettes omitted previous mentions of male favorites or genderfluid courtiers. The colonial project was not just about moral imposition—it was historiographical sanitization.
What could not be purged was pathologized. Monarchs whose desires deviated from colonial Christian norms were recast as mentally unstable, perverse, or demonically influenced. This tactic had a dual effect: it justified removal from power and ensured future historians viewed them through a lens already fogged with bigotry.
The kingdom of Buganda offers a stark case.
King Mwanga II of Buganda
Mwanga II ascended the throne of Buganda in 1884. He was a young king in an old system, one that understood power, succession, and sexuality in ways unrecognizable to his European contemporaries. Mwanga, by today’s standards, was likely gay or bisexual. He took male lovers from among his royal pages—a practice that had long precedent in Bugandan royal traditions.
But Mwanga ruled at the threshold of Christian incursion. Anglican and Catholic missionaries, arriving with Bibles and imperial backing, had begun converting his court. These newly devout Christian pages, now instructed in sin and salvation, began to refuse the king’s advances—not simply on personal grounds, but as theological rebellion.
The result was a political and spiritual crisis. In 1886, Mwanga executed a group of young male converts who had defied him—an act that would transform them into the Uganda Martyrs. Their story, canonized by the church, became a symbol of faith resisting tyranny. But within that narrative lies a different truth: this was also a collision between imported morality and indigenous sovereignty.
Mwanga did not view his actions as depravity. He viewed them as asserting royal prerogative, now undermined by foreign gods. But the colonial press had no such nuance. They painted him as a deviant despot, his queerness folded into a narrative of madness. When the British finally exiled him in 1897, his sexuality was cited as evidence of his unfitness to rule.
Today, anti-LGBTQ+ voices in Uganda often claim homosexuality is a Western import. Yet Mwanga’s story suggests the opposite: that queerness was native, and the homophobia now enshrined in law is the colonial legacy.
Christianity’s Moral Machinery
The spread of Christian doctrine was not merely spiritual—particularly in Protestant and Catholic missions. It was disciplinary. It carried with it a theology of heterosexuality as holiness and any deviation as demonic.
In Africa, Asia, and the Americas, Christian missionaries taught that same-sex relationships were sinful, that gender variance was aberrant, and that royal courts that tolerated either were in need of redemption—or replacement. The structure was clear: convert the monarch, and the nation follows. In many cases, missionaries achieved just that. The result? Royal courts once rich with pluralities of desire were reduced to heteronormative silence.
In the Americas, especially in indigenous communities under Spanish and Portuguese rule, two-spirit identities and other nonbinary roles were targeted for eradication. Colonial priests wrote of these individuals as “sodomites” or “witches,” and recorded their destruction with sanctimonious pride.
Straightwashing in Europe
This purge of queer narratives wasn’t limited to the colonies. Back in Europe, Victorian historians applied the same antiseptic lens to their own monarchs. Where earlier chroniclers might have celebrated or at least acknowledged same-sex relationships in royal courts, 19th-century scholars revised, euphemized, or omitted.
Hadrian’s love for Antinous became a sculptural curiosity. James I’s letters to Buckingham were reprinted with footnotes urging readers not to read too much into them. Queen Anne’s relationship with Sarah Churchill was described as “emotional dependence.” The word “homosexual” itself, only coined in the late 19th century, was treated like a diagnosis—not a descriptor.
Biographers leaned on euphemism: “lifelong companion,” “unusually close friendship,” “favored courtier.” Language was sanitized not to preserve dignity but to erase deviance.
Even Greek mythology was not immune. Zeus’s abduction of Ganymede, once a celebrated homoerotic motif, was recast as symbolic mentorship. The Sacred Band of Thebes—an elite military unit of male lovers—was described as comrades-in-arms, not lovers-in-arms.
The Legacy of Legal Poison
By the early 20th century, as colonies began to unshackle themselves politically, the legal chains of empire remained. Sodomy laws, inherited from British, French, or Spanish codes, were absorbed into postcolonial legal frameworks. In many new nations, political leaders upheld them—sometimes out of inertia, sometimes to appease religious majorities.
To this day, nearly half of the world’s anti-LGBTQ+ laws are traced directly to colonial legal systems. Section 377 remained in India until 2018. Dozens of African nations still prosecute homosexuality under statutes introduced by Europeans. These are not indigenous laws. They are colonial ghosts masquerading as tradition.
Reclaiming the Royal Archive
In recent decades, the work of recovery has begun. Scholars are reopening archives, re-reading court records, reinterpreting myth and ritual through lenses untainted by colonial or Christian bias. The result is not a rebranding of the past, but a restoration.
King Mwanga is now understood by many historians as a queer figure whose sexuality was weaponized against him. Hijra communities in South Asia are recognized not as curiosities but as participants in a centuries-old court culture. The letters of James I are read not as curiosities but as confessions.
This reclamation does not impose modern identities on historical figures. It allows those figures to speak with fuller voice, freed from the distorting filters of empire and faith.
The Aftershocks of Erasure
But erasure leaves echoes. The decades when queer monarchs were deleted or denounced created a vacuum. Even today, monarchies struggle to reconcile tradition with authenticity. Same-sex royal marriages remain rare. Queer identities within royal houses are still seen as scandals, not inheritances.
When we forget—or refuse to remember—the royal queerness of the past, we teach future sovereigns that visibility is disqualifying. But history tells us the opposite: that many thrones were shaped by love between men, devotion between women, gender that refused simplicity.
Colonialism and Christianity tried to erase those truths. They failed. And the cost of that failure has been centuries of silence.
Now, as we recover and reassert these stories, we do more than honor the past. We reclaim the right to imagine royal futures that are inclusive—not in spite of history, but because of it.
Modern Renaissance: Out Royals, Changing Laws, and New Legacies
In an age where royalty has become more brand than birthright, more televised tradition than divine inheritance, something strange and luminous has begun to bloom: queerness in crowns no longer confined to scandal or subtext. The velvet closet door, once bolted shut behind bloodlines and ceremony, now swings open—not always with ease, but with momentum. And as it creaks, the ghosts of queer monarchs past don’t groan. They sigh with relief.
The modern era has not invented queer royalty. It has simply given them new tools: press releases instead of whispered court gossip, state-sanctioned marriages instead of coded metaphors, and the aching, joyful possibility of living in daylight. No longer just the subject of censored letters and scandalized chronicles, LGBTQ+ royals now claim both ancestry and authenticity in a single breath.
This isn’t progress. It’s reparation.
Lord Ivar Mountbatten
The British aristocracy doesn’t like surprises. But in 2016, Lord Ivar Mountbatten—cousin to Queen Elizabeth II and descendant of Queen Victoria—unveiled something neither scandalous nor shameful, but long overdue: he was gay. The press had a field day. Historians revised their footnotes. And suddenly, a family that had danced carefully around every rumor now found itself confronted with something more radical than rebellion: honesty.
In 2018, Ivar married James Coyle in a private ceremony. His ex-wife Penny walked him down the aisle. Their daughters smiled. The tabloids swirled, but the monarchy stayed still. For the first time in British royal history, a same-sex marriage had occurred within its extended family. And nothing crumbled.
Lord Ivar was not a direct heir, and perhaps that distance allowed him the space to breathe. But his coming out was not quiet. It echoed through every marble hall and tabloid headline: the first publicly gay royal in British history. In 2018, he married James Coyle. His ex-wife walked him down the aisle. Their daughters bore witness. The ceremony was private, but its resonance was public.
There were no peerage adjustments. No courtesy titles for his husband. But there was, finally, an image: two men beneath a canopy of legitimacy, sanctioned not by bloodline but by love.
“I never thought this would happen,” Ivar said in interviews, his voice brittle with wonder. “But now it has, I feel lighter.” That lightness—so rare for those who carry names carved in stone—marked a quiet revolution.
British nobility did not collapse. The monarchy did not flinch. The world, used to royal restraint, blinked, smiled, and moved forward.
Prince Manvendra Singh Gohil
In India, tradition is an empire unto itself. When Prince Manvendra Singh Gohil of Rajpipla came out in 2006, he did so not in a whisper, but with a cannon blast that echoed from Gujarat to Oprah’s couch. He was disowned. Effigies were burned. Commentators clutched rosaries and colonial laws. But Manvendra didn’t flinch.
In a society still shackled by the colonial scaffolding of Section 377—a British-imposed anti-sodomy law—his announcement was met with both celebration and horror. His parents disowned him. Religious leaders called him cursed. Strangers burned his effigy in the street.
But Manvendra did not step back. He stepped into activism. He founded the Lakshya Trust, championing HIV/AIDS awareness and LGBTQ+ rights. He opened the gates of his ancestral palace to queer youth disowned by their families. He stood on Oprah’s stage and told the world what royalty could look like when stripped of shame.
In 2013, he married Cecil DeSouza, an American. At the time, India did not recognize their union. But the symbolic power of a royal wedding—same-sex, cross-cultural, defiantly joyful—ripened into myth.
By 2018, when India’s Supreme Court struck down Section 377, Manvendra was no longer a scandal. He was a hero. Not because he wore a crown, but because he refused to remove it when the world asked him to bow.
Luisa Isabel Álvarez de Toledo
Another modern pioneer was a Spanish aristocrat known as the “Red Duchess.” Luisa Isabel Álvarez de Toledo, 21st Duchess of Medina Sidonia (1936–2008), was a grandee of Spain – holder of one of the country’s oldest noble titles – and also an outspoken leftist dissident during the Franco era.
Republican, dissident, lesbian, legend. Born into power, she rejected its scripts. In her personal life, Luisa Isabel was openly lesbian or bisexual among close circles. In a final act of defiance against convention, she married her longtime female partner, Liliana Dahlmann, on her deathbed in 2008. This secret civil ceremony, conducted just hours before she died, shocked her estranged children and made headlines around the world.
For decades, the Duchess had been involved in lesbian activist groups quietly, but Spain’s conservative society (especially under Franco) had kept her from living fully openly. By 2008, however, Spain had legalized same-sex marriage – so the Duchess took the opportunity to legally wed her partner of 20+ years, ensuring her lover would be heir to her estate and archives. It was, as newspapers put it, “the final, defiant act” of a very defiant life.
The fallout – a legal battle between her children and her widow – was messy, but in terms of legacy, the “Red Duchess” became an icon for LGBTQ+ rights in aristocracy. She proved that even a septuagenarian blue-blood could embrace change and that love trumped lineage. Her story also pressured Spain’s noble circles to acknowledge LGBTQ+ members in their midst.
Royal Gay Marriage
The question hung in the air like fog: if a reigning monarch came out, could they marry a same-sex partner and remain on the throne?
In 2021, the Netherlands—a monarchy already steeped in progressivism—gave its answer. Prime Minister Mark Rutte wrote to Parliament, affirming that Crown Princess Catharina-Amalia could marry someone of any gender without forfeiting her claim. “The government believes the heir can marry a person of the same sex,” he stated plainly.
It was the first time a government explicitly endorsed queer marriage at the sovereign level. Not theoretically. Not symbolically. Constitutionally.
Questions remained—about heirs, about inheritance, about reproduction in a system built on succession. But the principle was unshaken: being queer is not incompatible with being royal.
In the UK, the press prodded Prince William about the same. “I’d be absolutely fine if my children were gay,” he replied, adding that his only concern was the pressure they’d face. It was the kind of statement that wouldn’t have been thinkable fifty years earlier. Now, it was headline fodder. And a signal.
Europe’s royal houses, once slow to evolve, now move with cautious grace toward something like inclusion—not yet a parade, but no longer a purge.
LGBTQ+ Advocacy and Representation
Beyond personal lives, modern royals have taken up LGBTQ+ advocacy roles. For instance, members of the British Royal Family – who may not be LGBTQ+ themselves – have publicly championed equality. The late Princess Diana famously reached out to HIV/AIDS patients in the 1980s, helping destigmatize what was then seen as a “gay disease.” More recently, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have voiced strong support for LGBTQ+ rights, and other younger royals have followed suit by patronizing LGBTQ+ charities.
In Scandinavia, Crown Princess Mary of Denmark and Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden have attended LGBTQ+ events or spoken against discrimination, setting inclusive examples in their countries. These actions by straight allies in royal ranks illustrate how royalty and LGBTQ+ rights are no longer at odds in the public imagination, but increasingly aligned. In many ways, the royal families (often thought of as bastions of tradition) have recognized that being supportive of LGBTQ+ citizens is part of remaining relevant and loved in modern democratic societies.
Royal Stories in Popular Culture
The screen has done what history books wouldn’t. In The Favourite (2018), Queen Anne’s relationships with Sarah Churchill and Abigail Masham are reimagined not as courtly affection, but as full-bodied intimacy. The performances are raw, vicious, tender. They won awards. They reopened wounds. They started conversations.
Versailles, the French drama series, gave us Philippe I, Duke of Orléans, in pearls and powdered wigs, bedding his lover and winning battles with equal flair. In The Crown, queerness flickers beneath the surface, but its presence is unmistakable.
Even children’s history books—those final bastions of sanitized biography—have begun to include queerness in royal timelines. A nod. A paragraph. Sometimes even a name.
We are watching the archive rewrite itself, not through apology, but through presence.
The Crown’s Evolving Rainbow
History did not forget queer royalty. It buried them—beneath euphemism, theology, and colonial ink. But the archives leaked. Stone remembered. Silk held its creases. And now, the ghosts of sovereigns who loved outside lineage return—not in shame, but in syntax.
They were always there: men who kissed like oaths, women who wrote love into linen, nonbinary monarchs crowned in categories their courts could not pronounce. Their queerness wasn’t ornament—it was infrastructure. Political. Personal. Enduring.
This revival is not retrofitting—it’s excavation. We aren’t imposing modernity. We’re removing censorship. The narrative always included queer kings and sapphic duchesses. We just stopped reading the margins.
Religion tried to name their bodies sinful. Empire tried to make their desire illegal. But devotion outlasted doctrine. Even in exile, their letters burned bright. And now, as courts allow princesses to wed wives and dukes to hold husbands’ hands at banquets, what once hid now reigns.
Imagine Edward II witnessing Lord Ivar’s wedding. Or Christina of Sweden watching a crown princess keep both her throne and her lover. Vindication echoes across dynasties.
For the first time, a gay monarch could inherit without abdication. That is not a footnote. That is a revolution in velvet.
The crown no longer demands the severing of self. Queerness no longer needs a disguise to enter state functions.
This isn’t progress. It’s return. It’s justice.
History is not just conquest and coronation. It is intimacy. Defiance. Passion wrapped in protocol.
In every castle there were rooms sealed by shame. They open now. The air is thick with memory.
Among the swords and treaties, there were love letters. Among the heirs, there were lovers. Among the portraits, ghosts.
And now, among the monarchs—queer ones. Visible. Venerated.
This is not the crown’s corruption.
It is its evolution.
Reading List
Prager, Sarah. “In Han Dynasty China, Bisexuality Was the Norm.” JSTOR.
Liverpool Museums. “Antinous and Hadrian.” National Museums Liverpool.
“Edward II of England” and English Heritage. “Piers Gaveston, Hugh Despenser and the Downfall of Edward II.” English Heritage.
Historic Royal Palaces. “LGBT+ Royal Histories.” HRP.org.uk.
Wikipedia. “Al-Hakam II” (sections on possible homosexuality and Subh).
Norton, Rictor (ed.). My Dear Boy: Gay Love Letters through the Centuries – Letters of King James I to the Duke of Buckingham.
Wikipedia. “Sexuality of James VI and I”.
Wikipedia. “Les Mignons” – on Henry III of France’s favorites.
The Gay & Lesbian Review. “King Henri III and His Mignons” (analysis of Henry’s reputation).
Tatler Magazine. “Regal Pride: Royals throughout history who were LGBT” by Isaac Bickerstaff, 2024.
Tatler. Regal Pride: Royals throughout history who were LGBT.
MambaOnline. “Royally queer: 6 queer royals you probably didn’t know about,” 2023.
Africa Is a Country. “Six LGBTQ+ figures from African history,” 2020.
O’Mahoney, Joseph. “How Britain’s colonial legacy still affects LGBT politics around the world.” The Conversation, 17 May 2018.
Ferguson, Christopher. “How Forbidden Love Benefited Opera – Was Bavaria’s mad king in love with Richard Wagner?" Psychology Today, 27 Sep 2019.
Reuters. “Love is love: Gay marriage possible for Dutch monarch,” 2021.
Telegraph (UK). “Red Duchess wed lesbian lover to snub children,” 2008.
Business Insider. “6 LGBTQ+ royals you probably didn’t know about,” 2023
History Today J.S. Hamilton, “Ménage à Roi: Edward II and Piers Gaveston”
