June 15. At this rate, I'll catch up before the end of the month...but now that I've said that, I think that might be a taunt to Fate and I'm worried...
Either way though, this the Greek Pantheon's day to shine. I'm not going to go into them much because, if you've studied Greek history at all, you know that they have it all and don't really mind. Zeus had affairs with mortal women as a swan and a beam of light, a queen was cursed to have sex with a bull and birth a minotaur, and the gods really didn't mind sleeping with anything that moved. Zeus is a good example of it, because he's bad enough that my Greek Mythology Professor at Clark College didn't even try to object when he was deemed the Man Whore of Ancient Greece, and Theoi, a wonderful site for Greek mythology, has three separate pages set up for his affairs, not all of which are female. There were times of immaculate conception, also known as parthenogenesis, and Zeus gave birth twice. Athena came from his head after giving him a headache, and Dionysus, he killed Semele when she was pregnant, but rescued Dionysus and sewed him into his thigh so he could be carried to term. There are also a lot of times of sex with sisters, at least one case of sex with mother.
Apollo is one of those gods that I love to rag on. His dating life has some issues. I've referred to him as the eternal, unwilling, virgin before, but that isn't quite true. He did have a lot of loves and he had children with some of them, but he also had some really bad luck.
One part of that bad luck is Daphne, a nymph that turned herself into a plant to avoid his advances.
Or Bolina, who jumped into the ocean to avoid him and got transformed into an immortal nymph.
But the one that I want to tell you today is about Hyacinthus.
He didn't turn himself into a plant to avoid Apollo. No, he loved Apollo back and they had a great relationship for a bit.
The problem is that Zephyr, the West Wind, loved Hyacinthus too, and when Hyacinthus chose Apollo, he got mad.
While Apollo and Hyacinthus were playing discus, Zephyr grabbed the discus and hurled it at Hyacinthus hard enough to kill him.
Despite being the god of healing, Apollo couldn't save Hyacinthus and in his grief, he transformed the boy into a flower to immortalize him.
That makes it interesting that in some places, the meaning of hyacinth flowers can be 'Sport and play', or 'sorrow', depending on the color and context.
This is far, far, far, from being the only case of homosexual relationships in Ancient Greece. Very far.
It's just one that I know and is very firm about it being three men involved, and that it happened. A lot of the other relationships tend to be 'probably' or 'maybe'. On the side of the women, there were children. Lots of children. But, not from the men, so that makes it a bit harder. This one though, it's love and it's male and it's not iffy.
So, never doubt that humanity, when it is allowed to make it's own choices without politics involved, has a lot of LGBTQIA+ in it.
Sources:
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