we all know that the idea that queerness is modern is absolute nonsense, but check out this Renaissance play:
One of the first English plays to duplicate cross-gender disguise was Lyly's Gallathea (1583-85), performed by the Children of Paul's at court and probably in their own private playhouse. The idea for duplication was evidently Lyly's, for in his source (the tale of Iphis and Ianthe in book IX of Ovid's Metamorphoses), only one girl is raised as a boy, and she is transformed into a male in order to marry the other. Lyly has both girls, Phillida and Gallathea, disguised as boys and then makes them fall in love with each other but leaves open the question of which one Venus will change into a boy.
This uncertainty preserves the symmetrical balance between the two heroines, symmetry being as central a feature of Lyly's dramaturgy as euphuism is of his prose style. In parallel scenes, Lyly shows that each girl has been disguised as a boy by her father so that she will not be taken as "the fairest and chastest virgine in all the Countrey" (I.i.42-43), who must be sacrificed to Neptune. At the beginning of act II, Lyly brings the two disguised heroines together. From this point, they are always onstage at the same time and usually speak and act as mirror images of one another. Each girl has fallen in love with the boy that the other pretends to be and so feels trapped within her own cross-gender disguise. In their second meeting, each one hints at her true gender, and they do so with such success that they suspect each other of being a girl in male disguise.
we simply love ??lesbians?? performed by boys playing girls playing boys, one of whom ends up playing girl-transformed-into-boy
(quote from Gender in Play on the Shakespearean Stage: Boy Heroines and Female Pages by Michael Shapiro)