Frederick The Great: The Russian Military Genius
Public DomainFrederick the Great reportedly had numerous male lovers during his life.
Some of the LGBTQ soldiers on this list dodged detection for most of their lives. But Frederick the Great, the Prussian king and military leader, was widely acknowledged as gay by his contemporaries.
Accounts of Frederick’s homosexuality began in his youth when the 16-year-old prince had an affair with a 17-year-old male page named Peter Karl Christoph von Keith.
“We were unaware of my brother’s artifices,” Frederick’s older sister Wilhelmine wrote of the affair. “Though I had noticed that he was on more familiar terms with this page than was proper in his position I did not know how intimate the friendship was.”
Frederick subsequently had another affair with a young man named Hans Hermann von Katte. But when they were found out, his father the king had von Katte executed. Allegedly killed in front of Frederick, von Katte cried, “I die for you with joy in my heart!” before being beheaded.
Public DomainFrederick the Great as a young man of 24 years old.
In adulthood, Frederick the Great continued to enter into gay relationships. As he steadily built Prussia into a European power through military and other means, he filled his palace Sanssouci with homoerotic art and enjoyed relationships with the great, male minds of the day.
The king even embarked on an intimate friendship with the French philosopher Voltaire. Voltaire wrote extensively about Frederick the Great’s homosexuality — and the homosexuality of men in his circle — but he reportedly never meant for this writing to be made public.
However, Voltaire’s explicit account of Frederick’s sex life was later stolen and widely published.
Some denied that Frederick the Great was gay. His doctor, Johann Georg Ritter von Zimmermann, wrote after the king’s death that Frederick had a small deformity on his penis that had rendered him impotent.
Zimmerman offered the convoluted conclusion that to hide his impotence the king pretended to be gay “so that he would continue to appear virile and capable of sexual intercourse, albeit with men.”
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