14. A Gay Emperor Who Stepped Beyond the Bounds of Social Convention
Elagabalus (203 – 222) ruled the Roman Empire from 218 until his death four years later. He was not as vicious or cruel as many of Rome’s worse emperors, but the Romans nonetheless saw him as one of their worst rulers, ever. Chiefly because he deviated greatly from the day’s intimacy norms. Elagabalus was gay, and although that was not a deal-breaker for Romans in of itself – as seen above, Emperor Hadrian was openly gay, yet greatly respected – Elagabalus took Romans way past their comfort zone. He was not just gay, but flamboyantly gay. He was also a religious zealot who followed eastern religious practices that weirded out the Romans, whom he shocked with illicit conduct viewed as unseemly in an emperor.
Nobody had expected that Elagabalus would ever become emperor, so he grew up training to become a priest of the Syrian sun god Heliogabalus. However, after the assassination of his cousin, Emperor Caracalla, Elagabalus was the nearest surviving male imperial relative. So his grandmother was intrigued to have him succeed Caracalla as emperor at the age of fifteen. The teenaged priest-turned-emperor took his deity’s name as his own, and brought its worship to Rome, where he built Heliogabalus a great temple. Then he shocked the Romans by dancing around the deity’s altar amidst a cacophony of cymbals and drums – not the kind of stuff that Roman emperors normally do. That was bad, but what really sank Elagabalus was that he might have been history’s most flamboyantly gay ruler. As seen below, it did not end well for him.