Memes

Fair enough. I know Achilles' and Patroclus' affair has been discussed for more than a century.

I subbed to Reddit's community on this topic (SapphoAndHerRoommate?) out of curiosity, and it struck me at some point that none of the examples posted were historians denying the possibility of historical figures being gay. So at some point I actually went through like 3 pages of the top stories...like 50+% were tweets saying basically "Boy, those historians sure do like to pretend gay people don't exist! Imagine them pretending Achilles and Patroclus were just buds lol!" Seriously most of them were specifically about A&P.

Then another 30% or so were religious fundamentalists posting complaints about how people were trying to queer up history.

There were a handful of historians saying "hey guys, gender roles were different back then, it may not be accurate to label a history figure 'gay' even if they did have male lovers"

Then there were like 3-4 quotes from popular biographies from the 1800s that used funny language about "never married" and "lifelong friends".

And finally there was one article from the BBC about two dudes from the Roman period in Britain who were buried in an embrace, and it was like "What could their relationship have been? We can only speculate...maybe they were both apprentices?" or something. It was pretty egregious. Maybe a historian was involved in that.

Anyway, that was one example in the 60 or so top stories. It seems like a meme that just keeps on going even though it's been obsolete for a century.