ok so i listened to two different podcast episodes recently. the first is an episode of Factually with Adam Conover where Adam talks with Dr. Kit Heyam, the author of a book called Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender. It's a really interesting episode where Heyam gets into the complicated fact that there may be queer history where no one "identified as queer".
In broadstroke this is a pretty simple thing to understand -- like, of course certain terms were not always in use or in vogue or whatever. Terms change from time to time and from societal context to societal context. But you can use a modern lens to read a quasi-throughline of queerness within history if you want to, and that offers a lot of opportunities for the modern queer scholar or scholar wannabe.
But it's complicated, of course, because a lot of our modern understandings of queerness (on whatever axis) rely on self-identification, which, like, you can't get... from most people... who are dead. Maybe if they lived in a time that used the same terms/viewpoints as we do, but even if we're really generous that's maybe like 300 years back at most. But it's a fascinating take, obviously.
It's a really fun episode if this sort of thing interests you. Heyam clearly wanted to look at more than just the standard Western corpus of examples, and i think their work really stands out due to that breadth.
Anyway the other podcast I listened to was this episode of the History of Byzantium podcast about women in the Byzantine world. There were three short stories in the episode, and the first one was about Saint Marina/Marinos.
Here's how the myth of Saint Marina/Marinos goes, in my own retelling of it:
A girl is born by the name of Marina in the 400s in (probably) Byzantine Lebanon. Her father, poor and without a wife, decides to go to a monastery and abandon Marina. But Marina protests and asks to join him at the monastery. So she goes, and takes the (masculine) name Marinos, and presents as a boy.
Everyone loves Marinos. He's very popular and most people just assume he's a eunuch or don't ask (eunuchs would have been rare but not unheard of at this time). Supposedly he is gifted with the power to blast demons out of sick people. And everyone thinks he's really hot.
One day, Marinos is with a group of monks who stay at an inn with some Byzantine soldiers. One of the soldiers gets the innkeeper's daughter pregnant and blames it on Marinos, who is the most handsome of the monks. Marinos, knowing that if this goes to an investigation, may be 'found out', takes his punishment and is exiled from the monastery.
However, he is so beloved by the monks that they let him live just outside of the monastery, and it is there that he raises the boy who is not his until the boy becomes a man. He raises the boy as his son, no questions asked. Eventually, Marinos is re-admitted to the monastery and years later dies of old age surrounded by his friends.
It is only after his death that his sex is discovered, and the abbot who once exiled Marinos for believing that he impregnated the innkeeper's daughter falls to the ground begging forgiveness. He hears Marinos' voice saying that he did nothing wrong at the time and that he is forgiven, etc etc. Marinos' body does not decay and he is certified as a Saint.
As Heyam put it, obviously it's a bit difficult/impossible to 'read' direct queerness backward into the historical record and there's good enough reason to say "well, Marin/a/os was concealing their sex for practical reasons and not for 'identification' reasons" but also I generally agree that while it may be difficult to name this person as a queer person due to not knowing exactly how they would have identified, there's clearly an element of queer history here.
as far as can be ascertained through the legend, Marinos didn't identify as a woman outwardly from any time after they began identifying as a man, and seemingly was quite content to do so judging by the fact that he even re-entered the monastery after spending ~18ish years raising a kid that was not his own.
So what do you take from this? This is a legend of the 500s about a hypothetical person of the 400s. There are records of this legend through the medieval era. The legends around anything regarding women, gender, or sexuality, especially in the medieval European era, and especially in Eurasian christianity, are fraught with a lot of contexts that influenced their telling: could be titillation, could be arousal, could be some sort of proto-queer identity. It's pretty difficult if not impossible to interpret anything of this era with a degree of "authorial certainty" in terms of intention.
BUT, ALSO, I think it's pretty reasonable to say that this is an element of a queer history, which is a determination we make from this historical moment, not through a supposed identification of intention from the past. So that feels reasonable. And it's a good story, in that telling, I think.
