Do you think the most important people from literature and history were fully respectable, dull people? Then you were fooled.
Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker and Walt Whitman were tangled in a love-triangle. Lord Byron is responsible for Twilight and his...
Hi! Welcome to Room Number 1 in the Museum Of Secret History.
Since I decided to make a collection of the most scandalous, fabulous, interesting queer escapades of literature and history, why not start it with the most scandalous, fabulous and interesting queer escapade ever to live.
I'm talking about Christopher 'Kit' Marlowe.
This will not come as a surprise because really, I love talking about Kit Marlowe.
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Here you see the only surviving portrait of him - with absolutely fabulous hair.
Kit was baptized on February 26th 1564 in Canterbury, just a few months before our beloved William Shakespeare is born. His father was a shoemaker.
The family soon decides that little Christopher should best become a priest to live a long, peaceful and piteous life.
He achieved nothing of this.
1580, Kit enters the Corpus Christi College in Cambridge to further complete his religious education (however his rather modest family achieved this, nobody knows) - and this is where the drama starts.
You see, most religious texts were written in Latin around that time, so the students had to learn it to understand the Bible. But Kit decides that translating psalms is boring and rather translates Ovid's absolutely filthy love poems. For the Elizabethans, those poems were almost pornographic - Kit couldn't care less. he even published his translations a few years later.
He also becomes part of a group called the 'University wits', a number of students that will all become famous writers later on, including Robert Greene and Ben Johnson. No, Shakespeare wasn't part of this group, because Shakespeare never visited a university.
After a few years, Kit starts ominously disappearing from Cambridge. Most scholars agree that this was the time were Kit became a spy for her Majesty's secret service, because he always disappeared for a short time and came back with mysteriously large amounts of money. And we know that because we have records about when he started buying drinks for everyone.
You see, the thing is that we know most facts about Kit's life from his criminal record, that is rich and detailled.
Kits absences become so frequent, that the college starts thinking about not giving him his degree. Also, rumours start that Kit wants to leave to France and has secretly converted to Catholicism, which was punishable by death. This is solved when Kit rolls in with a certification of the Privy Council of the Queen that says that all those rumours are untrue and that he has done the Queen 'good service', a euphemism often used for spying.
That's a little like excusing not making your homework with an E-Mail from the FBI and the signature of the President, okay?
As soon as Kit has his Cambridge college degree, he goes to London to become a playwright, leaving his family's expectations disappointed. Theatre's didn't have the best reputation back then - Kit was doing the Elizabethan equivalent to 'throwing away your Ivy League education to become a porn star'.
