Zeus then brings him to Olympus, where he serves as Zeus’s cup-bearer. In The Iliad, Homer describes Ganymede, a Trojan hero frequently referenced in Greek mythology, as “handsomest of mortals, whom the gods/caught up to pour out drink for Zeus and live/amid immortals for his beauty’s sake.” In one version of this myth, Zeus, smitten by Ganymede’s beauty, takes the form of an eagle and abducts the young boy. Behold: Literary Hub’s timeline of writing about the lives of queer men and women. In times when homosexuality was regarded as deviant-and even a crime-authors boldly published works about same-sex love. Writer Garth Greenwell called the book, which follows four men (three of them not straight) over three decades of friendship, “the most ambitious chronicle of the social and emotional lives of gay men to have emerged for many years.” While Yanagihara’s realistic and comprehensive depiction of gay lives is certainly a milestone in LGBT literature, it’s important to remember the great gay writing of the past. The Atlantic recently pronounced Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, which was released in March, the Great Gay Novel.
