Being gay in the middle ages?

It sounds like it would be a lot more painful. Also STDs; STDs everywhere.

 

Something that people did in the privacy of their bedrooms and didn't talk much about. Or had private gathering for like minded folks. Kings and queens often had a favorite they spent a lot of time with, could be for companionship, could be for something else.

 

Its an interesting thought. Im guessing it might have been similar to how some really religious countries are like now like those in central Africa and the Middle east.

 

I'd be more concerned about the lack of penicillin...

 

I thought I was the only one who had random thoughts about how tough it must've been for gay people in the Middle Ages lol. But yep, I've wondered about that as well.

 

Where? And when? The Mediaeval period wasn't religiously, politically, or culturally the same throughout its duration, and each culture obviously had different practices.

 

FWIW, the concept of homosexuality as we now conceive it didn't exist before the end of the 19th-century. Go all the way back to the medieval period and I am sure they would be plenty confuzzled by these "scientific" notions of ours of typing people based on attraction.

As it was, the only real hang up the Church of the Middle Ages had about the matter was sodomy, which even then did not refer specifically to penis-orifice sex between men. Passionate love between men (women, too), as long as it did not crossover into sodomy, was deemed more or less OK.

Or at least that's what my armchair PHD program taught me!

 

Thinking about gay people in the middle ages makes me feel better about my own life. While a lot of us LGBT people have it bad now, things were much worse back then.

 

It was actually pretty ok as long as you stayed out of cities. Most country folk weren't aware it was a "sin" and monastaries were pretty much medieval gay... things where people gather... St. Anselm convinced the council of london that homosexuality should not be a crime worthy of death or long imprisonment. Every once in a while there was a witch hunt, but overall, more tolerant than many places today.

 

If u were gay in the Middle Ages then they would tie u up to a roaster pole cut your penis or boobs off and then roast u. No joke that's what happened there were a lot of insane people back then some of them still exist today

 

Well, if I remember correctly, the Templars were into buggery, among other homosexual practices. One of the reasons why the order was abolished in the 1300's.

 

Well I'm gay and middle-aged...:dry:

 

*rolls eyes so exasperatedly that they displace themselves and tear a vein*

 

:roflmao:

 

Accused of being a witch and burned at the stake :lol:

 

This is a riveting topic for me, as I am interested in both gay relationships and medieval culture hehe. Impossible to say in one description "how it was" because it was over half a millennium of history.

All I know for sure is that it is sometimes hinted at in Medieval 2: Total War, and I have a slight desire to write a short story about a few squires who deal with the issue firsthand.

 

This isn't exactly true.

It is actually the century that came directly after the medieval period homosexuals began being explicitly persecuted and burned in some cases. Prior to the fifteenth century, the issue surrounding homosexuality was only sinful in the sense of pure sodomy. Men were notoriously together in ways that would be deemed to today as romantic and sexual. Laws against sodomy weren't enforced legitimately in most cases, rather they were used as a way to kill off enemies through rumors of abomination. It was really after the fifteen century that the downward spiral for homosexuals truly began.

 

Unfortunate too that that almost directly coincides with the last breaths of the middle ages themselves, when gunpowder began to overtake archery and melee in warfare significance.

 

Mankind might be starting to move in a much better direction, but I think we can all agree that the last five centuries have been the lowest points in our history. Widespread African slave trade and religious intolerance beginning to peak in the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries. The great explorations that benefited no one but the countries that would later become the first world. The social darwinism and global domination of the nineteenth century. The world wars and genocides of the twentieth. It's sad that so much of dark fantasy fiction can even begin to top our actual history.