Oscar Wilde Tours

06/12/2026

From the archives: Here we continue our series celebrating gay, bis*xual, and straight movie stars wearing next to nothing at all.

06/12/2026

In 1886, Washington society believed it was meeting a “Zuni princess.”

That misunderstanding says more about Washington than it does about We’wha.

We’wha was Zuni, lhamana, a gifted weaver, potter, ceremonial figure, and one of the most remarkable cultural ambassadors of the 19th century. In Zuni life, lhamana people occupied a recognized gender role that did not fit neatly into the male/female categories Americans were determined to impose. We’wha moved between responsibilities outsiders labeled “masculine” and “feminine,” not as confusion, but as part of a tradition with its own authority and meaning.

When We’wha traveled to Washington, D.C., with anthropologist Matilda Coxe Stevenson, the capital was fascinated. They attended teas, social events, met members of government, and even visited President Grover Cleveland at the White House. Newspapers and society circles treated We’wha as exotic proof of their own sophistication, while missing the larger truth standing in front of them.

They thought they were observing We’wha.

In reality, We’wha was also observing them.

Here was a person who understood how to move through a foreign political world without surrendering the one they came from. We’wha shared Zuni knowledge, demonstrated artistry, represented their people, and carried a gender tradition that outsiders could only flatten into the language they already knew.

That is what makes the story so powerful. We’wha was not merely “accepted” by Washington society. We’wha was misunderstood by it, admired by it, studied by it, and still somehow remained larger than the categories it tried to use.

The capital thought it had discovered a curiosity.

What it had actually encountered was a cultural authority.

06/08/2026

Shi Pei Pu’s life sounds almost too strange to be real.

He was a Chinese opera singer from Beijing whose story became one of the most bizarre espionage scandals of the Cold War. In 1964, Shi met Bernard Boursicot, a young employee at the French embassy in Beijing. What began as an affair became a 20-year relationship built on secrecy, performance, desire, and deception.

Shi convinced Boursicot that he was a woman forced to live publicly as a man because of family pressure. Their meetings were hidden, intimate, and carefully controlled. Over time, Boursicot began passing French diplomatic documents to Chinese intelligence.

The story grew even stranger when Shi presented a child to Boursicot and claimed the boy was their son. Years later, French authorities discovered the truth: Shi was male, the child had been adopted, and the affair had been used as part of an espionage operation.

In 1986, both men were convicted of espionage in France and sentenced to prison, though they were later pardoned. The scandal inspired David Henry Hwang’s famous play *M. Butterfly*, which turned the case into a larger meditation on fantasy, race, s*xuality, power, and the stories people choose to believe.

But the part that still lingers is not just the spying.

It is the question of how much of this was deception, how much was performance, and how much was a lonely man believing the version of love he desperately wanted to be true.

Shi Pei Pu died in Paris in 2009, leaving behind one of the strangest love-and-spy stories of the 20th century.

06/07/2026

Most people assume medieval Europe had no image for bodies beyond the male–female binary.

Then there is this.

This 12th-century stone relief is known as “L’Ermafrodito” or “La Potta di Modena.” It is carved into Modena Cathedral in Italy and attributed to the Maestro delle Metope, the “Master of the Metopes.”

The figure is startling: seated, exposed, unmistakably outside simple categories. It depicts an inters*x person, or what medieval writers would have called a “hermaphrodite” — a term now outdated, but historically important.

For medieval viewers, this was not just anatomy. The figure could symbolize the union of opposites: masculine and feminine, body and spirit, earthly and divine. It belonged to a world where cathedrals were not only places of worship, but stone encyclopedias of fear, wonder, theology, and imagination.

And that is what makes it so powerful.

This carving is nearly 900 years old, yet it disrupts a very modern myth: that bodies outside the binary are new, invented, or somehow detached from history.

They are not.

They were discussed by physicians, argued over by theologians, recorded in law, and sometimes — as here — carved into sacred architecture.

Not always with acceptance. Not always with dignity. But undeniably with recognition.

History did not begin when modern language did.

Sometimes, the proof was waiting on a cathedral wall all along.

What do you see in this sculpture: curiosity, fear, reverence, or something else?

*xHistory

06/07/2026

For more than 500 years, people have argued about one question:

Was Michelangelo gay?

The answer is more complicated than a modern label, but the historical evidence is fascinating.

Michelangelo never married. He had no known relationships with women. Yet many of his surviving poems and letters reveal deep emotional and romantic affection for men, particularly a young Roman nobleman named Tommaso de' Cavalieri.

When Michelangelo met Cavalieri in 1532, he was nearly 60 years old. Cavalieri was in his early twenties. The artist became devoted to him, writing passionate sonnets filled with longing, admiration, and love. In one poem, Michelangelo described himself as "captured" by Cavalieri's beauty.

For centuries, editors tried to hide this.

When Michelangelo's poems were published after his death, male pronouns were often changed to female ones, making it appear that he had written about women. Later scholars compared the original manuscripts and discovered the alterations.

His art adds another layer to the story. Michelangelo filled the Sistine Chapel and many of his sculptures with idealized male bodies rendered with extraordinary attention and affection. While artistic admiration does not prove s*xual orientation, it has long been part of the discussion.

The truth is that we can never know exactly how Michelangelo would have described himself. Concepts like "gay," "straight," and "bis*xual" did not exist in Renaissance Italy in the way we understand them today.

What we do know is this: one of history's greatest artists left behind powerful evidence of profound love and desire directed toward other men, and generations of people worked hard to erase it.

What do you think: should we interpret historical figures through modern identities, or let them remain in the context of their own time?

06/07/2026

Beauford Delaney was born in 1901 in Knoxville, Tennessee, the son of a formerly enslaved father and a mother who encouraged his artistic talents from an early age. As a young man, he left the South behind and eventually settled in New York City, where he became part of the vibrant artistic community of the Harlem Renaissance.

Delaney was a gifted painter whose work blended portraiture, Expressionism, and a fascination with color and light. He painted musicians, writers, and everyday people, but some of his most revealing works were the portraits he created of himself.

Life was not easy for Delaney. He faced racism, financial hardship, and recurring struggles with mental illness. He also carried the burden of navigating his s*xuality during a period when openly living as a gay man could come at enormous personal and professional cost.

Yet he continued to paint.

Among his closest friends was the young writer James Baldwin, who looked to Delaney as both a mentor and a source of inspiration. Baldwin later reflected, “I learned about light from Beauford Delaney.”

The quote was fitting. Throughout his career, Delaney returned again and again to light—not simply as a visual effect, but as something emotional, spiritual, and deeply personal.

This Pride Month, Beauford Delaney deserves to be remembered not only as a pioneering Black American artist, but as a man who transformed struggle into beauty and left behind a body of work that continues to shine decades after his death.

06/07/2026

Two women kiss. Not in a painting from the 1960s. Not in a modern Pride campaign.

In 1870.

That image exists because of a remarkable artist named Simeon Solomon.

Today, he is often called "The Forgotten Pre-Raphaelite," but during his lifetime, Solomon was one of the most promising young artists in England. His paintings were admired for their beauty, symbolism, and emotional depth. Yet what made his work truly unusual was who he chose to portray.

In *Sappho and Erinna*, Solomon painted the ancient Greek poet Sappho sharing an unmistakably tender kiss with her companion Erinna. There is no coded symbolism, no plausible deniability, no attempt to disguise the intimacy. It is a quiet, romantic moment between two women, painted more than 150 years ago.

For many viewers today, that may not seem revolutionary.

For Victorian Britain, it was.

Again and again, Solomon filled his art with androgynous figures, same-s*x affection, and people living outside society's expectations. He used the lush visual language of the Pre-Raphaelites not simply to tell old stories, but to explore desire, identity, and belonging.

Then everything changed.

In 1873, Solomon was arrested for "attempted so**my," a criminal offense at the time. The scandal destroyed his career. Friends distanced themselves. Patrons disappeared. The artistic world that had once celebrated him largely turned away.

He spent much of the rest of his life in poverty and social exile.

But he never stopped creating.

Even after losing status, wealth, and acceptance, Solomon continued making art that reflected LGBTQ+ lives and experiences. He kept painting people whose stories were rarely allowed to exist in public view.

This Pride Month, his work reminds us that LGBTQ+ history did not begin in our lifetime. It has always been here—in studios, in poems, in paintings, and in the courage of people who refused to disappear.

06/07/2026

06/04/2026

Long before the modern closet, Rome had its own brutal way of separating s*x from identity.

Under Emperor Augustus, Roman soldiers were forbidden from contracting legal marriages while serving in the army. The idea was discipline. A soldier was meant to belong to the state, the legion, and the emperor—not to a wife, a household, or children waiting at home.

But Rome did not expect soldiers to be celibate.

That is where the story becomes more complicated, and far more revealing. Roman military life allowed s*xual outlets that did not threaten the legal structure of the army. Prostitutes, enslaved people, and people of lower status could be used without creating the obligations that marriage created. Same-s*x relations, especially with male slaves or prostitutes, could exist within that world—not as “gay rights,” and not as equality, but as part of Rome’s harsh hierarchy of power.

To modern eyes, it can sound startling: a society could ban soldiers from marrying women, yet tolerate s*xual contact between men under certain conditions. But ancient Rome did not understand s*xuality the way we do now. The central question was often not “Were you attracted to men or women?” It was “Were you the dominant citizen, or the person being used?”

A Roman soldier was expected to preserve his masculine status. S*x with another freeborn Roman male, especially if it compromised that man’s status, could be scandalous. But s*x with enslaved men or prostitutes was treated very differently, because Roman morality was built around rank, ownership, and control.

For older gay men looking back at history, this is a sharp reminder: same-s*x desire has always existed, but societies have repeatedly forced it into the shapes that power allowed.

Rome did not give us liberation. It gave us evidence.

Evidence that men desired men. Evidence that armies, empires, and laws tried to regulate that desire. Evidence that same-s*x life survived even inside systems that refused to name it with dignity.

06/04/2026

Italy’s history is not one story, but a thousand lives layered on top of each other.

Before it was a nation, it was a landscape of peoples: Etruscans building rich city-states, Greeks founding colonies in the south, and Latin tribes rising near the Tiber River. From that small settlement came Rome, a republic that turned into an empire and reshaped the ancient world with roads, law, language, architecture, conquest, and astonishing cruelty.

When the Western Roman Empire fell in 476, Italy did not disappear. It fractured. Byzantines, Lombards, popes, Normans, merchants, princes, and foreign armies all fought over its cities and ports. In the Middle Ages, Italy became a mosaic of power: Venice ruled the seas, Florence bankrolled Europe, Genoa traded across the Mediterranean, Milan built armies, Naples became a royal prize, and Rome remained the spiritual heart of Western Christianity.

Then came the Renaissance, when Italy changed the world again. Artists, scientists, writers, architects, and patrons turned cities into laboratories of beauty and ambition. Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Botticelli, Raphael, Machiavelli, and Galileo did not simply belong to Italy; they helped define how the modern world would think, see, build, and question.

But brilliance did not mean unity. For centuries, Italy remained divided and often controlled by outside powers. The dream of one Italian nation grew stronger in the 19th century, led by figures such as Giuseppe Garibaldi, Giuseppe Mazzini, and Count Cavour. In 1861, the Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed, though Rome would not become its capital until 1871.

The 20th century brought upheaval: mass emigration, World War I, Mussolini’s Fascist dictatorship, World War II, resistance, devastation, and rebirth. In 1946, Italians voted to abolish the monarchy and establish a republic.

Today, Italy is a country of ancient ruins and modern cities, sacred art and political drama, regional pride and national identity. Its history is empire, collapse, genius, violence, reinvention, and beauty that refuses to fade.