Gay TimelineFamous Gay Men in History: 16 Lives From Ancient Egypt to Harvey Milk
The short answer. Gay men have shaped history in every century we have records for: pharaoh’s courtiers, conquerors, monks, kings, poets, film directors, codebreakers and soldiers. This list follows sixteen of them in order of time, from Egypt around 2400 BCE to San Francisco in 1978. For each one we say what is documented and what is still debated, because for much of history the evidence was hidden on purpose.
A word about the word
“Gay” as we use it is recent. Nobody before the late nineteenth century thought of himself as belonging to a category defined by whom he loved. So when we call a pharaoh’s manicurist or a Prussian king gay, we mean something simpler: the record shows that his deepest attachments were to other men.
That record is often thin, and not by accident. Letters were burned by embarrassed families. Biographers looked away. For centuries the only time an ordinary man’s love life was written down was when he was arrested for it. So this list keeps to men for whom real evidence survives, and it tells you where historians still disagree.
The ancient world
1. Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep (Egypt, c. 2400 BCE)
Two overseers of the royal manicurists, buried together in a single tomb at Saqqara. The walls show them embracing and touching noses, poses Egyptian artists otherwise reserved for married couples. Some scholars read them as brothers or twins, others as partners. Either way they are the earliest pair of men in history shown this way, which is why they are often called the first gay couple in recorded history.
2. Alexander the Great (Macedon, 356–323 BCE)
He conquered an empire from Greece to India before he was thirty-three. The person closest to him throughout was Hephaestion, his friend since boyhood and later his second in command. At Troy the two honoured the tombs of Achilles and Patroclus together. When Hephaestion died, Alexander’s grief was so violent that it alarmed his generals, and he followed him within the year. Whether they were lovers is argued in detail in our article on Alexander and Hephaestion.
3. Hadrian (Rome, 76–138 CE)
The emperor who built the wall across Britain and rebuilt the Pantheon. Around 123 CE he met Antinous, a youth from Bithynia in what is now Turkey, who travelled with him for the next seven years. In 130 Antinous drowned in the Nile. Hadrian wept openly, founded the city of Antinoöpolis on the riverbank, and had the young man declared a god. Statues of Antinous were set up across the empire, and so many survive that his is one of the best-known faces of the ancient world. There is no debate about this one. The Romans said it plainly.
The Middle Ages and Renaissance
4. Aelred of Rievaulx (England, 1110–1167)
Abbot of a great Cistercian monastery in Yorkshire, and the author of Spiritual Friendship, a book arguing that love between friends is a path to God. He wrote with unusual tenderness about the men he loved, and admitted that in his youth at the Scottish court he had been ruled by desire. Whether that makes him a gay man or a celibate who understood love is something historians still argue about. He is the subject of one of the newest stories in our library, “Inside Rievaulx Abbey”.
5. Michelangelo (Italy, 1475–1564)
Sculptor of David, painter of the Sistine ceiling. In 1532, aged fifty-seven, he met a young Roman nobleman named Tommaso dei Cavalieri and wrote him some of the finest love poems of the Renaissance. When the poems were published after his death, his great-nephew quietly changed the pronouns from “he” to “she”. They were not restored until 1863. It is as neat an example as you could want of how the evidence went missing.
The seventeenth to nineteenth centuries
6. Frederick the Great (Prussia, 1712–1786)
As an eighteen-year-old crown prince, Frederick tried to flee his brutal father with his closest friend, Lieutenant Hans Hermann von Katte. They were caught. A court martial sentenced Katte to life in prison. The king changed the sentence to death, and on 6 November 1730 forced his son to watch from a window as Katte was beheaded. Frederick called out to beg his forgiveness. Katte answered that there was nothing to forgive.
Frederick went on to become the greatest soldier-king of his age. He lived apart from his wife, had no children, and filled his palace of Sanssouci with male company. Contemporaries, Voltaire among them, were in little doubt about his tastes.
7. Walt Whitman (United States, 1819–1892)
America’s great poet. The “Calamus” poems he added to Leaves of Grass in 1860 celebrate what he called the love of comrades, in language that leaves little to guess at. His longest attachment was to Peter Doyle, a streetcar conductor he met in Washington in 1865. When an English admirer wrote late in his life to ask directly whether the poems were about love between men, Whitman denied it and invented six illegitimate children. Few scholars believe him.
8. Oscar Wilde (Ireland and England, 1854–1900)
In early 1895 Wilde had two hit plays running in London. By the end of May he was in prison. He had sued the father of his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, for libel, lost, and been prosecuted in turn for “gross indecency”. He served two years’ hard labour, most of it in Reading Gaol, and died in Paris three years after his release, aged forty-six.
Wilde’s trial was the moment the Victorian public was forced to admit that such men existed. They had always existed in London, of course. The molly houses of the 1720s were raided under an older and harsher law, and there the penalty was the gallows.
The twentieth century
9. James Whale (England and Hollywood, 1889–1957)
The director of Frankenstein (1931) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935). In an industry where studios arranged sham marriages for their stars, Whale lived openly with his partner, the producer David Lewis, for more than twenty years. Many viewers have since seen something of the outsider’s experience in his lonely, hunted monster.
10. Willem Arondeus (Netherlands, 1894–1943)
A Dutch painter and writer who joined the resistance under Nazi occupation. In March 1943 he led the bombing of the Amsterdam public records office, destroying thousands of files the Germans were using to identify Jews and expose forged papers. He was caught and executed that July. Through his lawyer he left a last message: “Let it be known that homosexuals are not cowards.” The Dutch state did not properly honour him until the 1980s.
11. Alan Turing (England, 1912–1954)
The mathematician whose work at Bletchley Park helped break the German Enigma cipher, and whose ideas underlie every computer in use today. In 1952 he reported a burglary, and in the course of the investigation admitted to a relationship with a man. He was convicted of gross indecency and given a choice between prison and hormone injections. He chose the injections. Two years later he was found dead of cyanide poisoning. He received a royal pardon in 2013.
12. Bayard Rustin (United States, 1912–1987)
The organiser of the 1963 March on Washington, where Martin Luther King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. Rustin had taught King the methods of nonviolent protest. Because he had been arrested in 1953 on a “morals charge” involving other men, rivals inside and outside the movement tried to push him out, and he spent much of his career in the background of events he had made possible. California pardoned him in 2020.
13. James Baldwin (United States, 1924–1987)
Novelist and essayist, and one of the essential voices of the civil rights era. In 1956, against his publisher’s advice, he published Giovanni’s Room, a novel about love between two men in Paris. He was told it would end his career. It is still in print, and still being discovered by young readers every year.
14. John Fryer (United States, 1937–2003)
In 1972 the American Psychiatric Association still classed homosexuality as a mental illness. At its annual meeting in Dallas, a speaker took the stage in a rubber mask, a wig and an oversized tuxedo, using a microphone that distorted his voice. He introduced himself as Dr H. Anonymous and began: “I am a homosexual. I am a psychiatrist.” He was Dr John Fryer of Philadelphia, and he would have lost his job had he been recognised. The following year the Association removed homosexuality from its manual of disorders. We tell the story in full in “The Joke-Shop Mask That Changed American Psychiatry”.
15. Leonard Matlovich (United States, 1943–1988)
An Air Force sergeant with a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart from Vietnam. In 1975 he deliberately told his commanding officer he was gay, to create a test case against the military’s ban. His face appeared on the cover of Time under the words “I Am a Homosexual”. His gravestone in Washington carries no name, only this: “When I was in the military they gave me a medal for killing two men and a discharge for loving one.”
16. Harvey Milk (United States, 1930–1978)
A camera-shop owner on Castro Street who, in November 1977, won a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and became one of the first openly gay people elected to public office in America. He served eleven months before he and Mayor George Moscone were shot dead at City Hall. He had recorded a message in case it happened: “If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door.”
The men who are not on any list
Every name above belongs to someone powerful, gifted or brave enough to leave a mark. Most gay men in history were none of those things. They were sailors, footmen, ranch hands, clerks and soldiers, and they left no record at all unless a court took down their names.
Those are the men we spend most of our time on at Gay Timeline. The library holds more than 100 true stories about them: whaling crews out of Nantucket, servants in English country houses, miners in the Gold Rush, bachelors on the Canadian prairies. They are built from court files, letters and newspapers, and read aloud by one narrator. If you would rather listen than read, our guide to gay audio stories explains where to start, and one full story is free.
History’s famous men are the easy part
Hear the stories of the ones nobody recorded. 100+ true stories from gay history, read by Julian, with no ads.
Questions people ask
Who was the first gay man in history?
No one can know who was first. The earliest evidence is the shared tomb of Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep in Egypt, from around 2400 BCE, which shows two men in poses normally used for married couples.
Was Alexander the Great gay?
He had relationships with both men and women. His closest bond was with Hephaestion, and most modern historians think it likely they were lovers, though it cannot be proved.
Was Frederick the Great gay?
Most historians think so. He lived apart from his wife, had no children, kept an almost entirely male court, and his contemporaries commented on it. His closest youthful friend, Hans Hermann von Katte, was executed in front of him in 1730.
Why is it hard to be sure who was gay in history?
Because the evidence was often destroyed or disguised. Families burned letters, editors changed pronouns, and the men themselves hid what could get them imprisoned or killed. The word and the idea of a gay identity are also modern.
Who are some famous gay men from the twentieth century?
Alan Turing, James Baldwin, Bayard Rustin, Harvey Milk, the director James Whale, the Dutch resistance fighter Willem Arondeus, the psychiatrist John Fryer and the airman Leonard Matlovich are among the best documented.
How this article was made
Written by the Gay Timeline team, who research and produce the stories in our library. We drafted it with the help of AI writing tools and checked the facts against published sources before publishing. Where historians disagree, we have said so. Last reviewed 11 November 2026.
Sources and further reading: Hans Hermann von Katte; World History Encyclopedia on same-sex couples in ancient history; Making Gay History, whose archive includes interviews on the 1972 APA panel and the early gay rights movement.