Every LGBT+ History Month, we come together to celebrate queer culture and our many achievements.
But while it’s relatively easy to find icons and heroes to look up to nowadays, it can seem like there aren’t many queer figures to connect to who lived before the 20th century.
In many periods of history, LGBT+ people weren’t exactly welcomed out of the closet, so it can be difficult to find openly queer idols.
Fortunately, historians have done the hard work of uncovering lots of prominent figures’ sexualities, so you can have a whole new batch of people who you learned about at school – but who no one mentioned were members of the LGBT+ community.