These are the ones I found easily, but this is just a very surface-level look at the topic. This was partly inspired by Hades 2, which I’ve been playing quite a bit lately, and it’s predecessor.

Recently, there has been this weird puritan drive to make media sexless. How many sex scenes have there been in all of the Marvel movies? As far as I remember, exactly one. There used to be sex in mainstream movies all the time. Now, a little bit of physical affection causes people to push back on it. However, Greek myths were a big fuckfest. While this might not be the way it’s handled in movies that take inspiration from it, those deities fucked their way around the world. Especially Zeus, but we’ll get to that.

Starting with Hades and Hades 2 Hades’ kids are pretty obscure characters and the games follow their own takes on the myths. For example, they are really Hades’ kids, not just the result of Zeus raping Persephone at different times. They have also toned down the incest. However, they do try to maintain positive aspects of the myths. While they don’t follow everything to the letter, they try to follow certain spirit of the myths. So (spoilers), Zagreus, the player character in the first game, swings both ways with Megaera and Thanatos, and Melinoë, the protagonist of the second one, seems to be going into that direction, but I have thusfar only had her have an encounter with Nemesis. I suspect, there’s another with Moros, but that remains to be seen (and someone might be aware of this already).

If you’ve seen any meaningful amount of Xena episodes, you have likely encountered Callisto, the kind of archnemesis of Xena out for revenge. It was a pretty different take on Callisto of mythology. Callisto of mythology is a nymph which is kind of a personificaiton of nature. They are gods, but very minor in comparison to the big guns, like Artemis, who I bring up because Callisto was one of Artemis’ followers. Callisto made a promise to remain a virgin, but then she got the eye of Zeus (like so many other beings, because Zeus would fuck anything). In order to seduce Callisto, he changed form to Artemis for whom Callisto was willing to break her oath (also, virginity was probably seen differently in those days), meaning that Callisto was a lesbian.

Speaking of the complexities of virginity… what about Artemis? Virginity might have been tied to marriage. You were a virgin until you were married. Artemis avowed to stay unmarried or a virgin and she actually murdered some men who dared to ever desire her. Does this mean she was lesbian or perhaps asexual? There’s a tiny little tidbit that Aphrodite, as the god of love, did not have any power over Artemis, which would point to asexuality, but maybe there’s a reason she had her own group of followers, who were mostly women.

And yeah, Zeus. He did not believe in consent and went around just fucking everything, often going to ludicrous lengths do to so. He’s the pansexual guy the homophobes are afraid would just rape them, because he can’t control himself, and in this specific case, they would be right. Not a good role model.

And somehow Hera, his wife, is seen as the villain (and she often is, as she often punished the people Zeus had raped). Well, she was harsh in many ways. Take Teiresias. He was a shepherd who displeased Hera. So, Hera punished him by changing him into a woman. However, turned out Teiresias was very happy to be a woman and ended up having plenty of male lovers as well as eventually becoming a priest of Hera, because she loved her new existance so much… which, of course, caused Hera to end the “punishment” to Teiresias’ disappointment.

Pasiphaë is less known than her sister, Circe, or her child, Minotaus. She did not like her husband, Minos, having affairs, so she cursed him, but at the same time, I’ve also seen claims that she had her own affairs with women.

How about Apollo? Again, one of the Olympians (one of the twelve gods who lived on Mount Olympus) and one with an army of lovers, mostly male.

Another Olympian (sometimes, sometimes he’s subplanted by Hestia) is Dionysos. Or maybe I should use they/them pronouns, because he was more or less genderfluid. He was basically the god of partying and as such, he had no limits, which clearly meant that it was all about hedonism for him, however that could be reached.

Remember Achilles? The guy who was invulnerable except for a small patches over his ankles. Well, before he was killed, he had a “servant” called Patroclus. I put the servant in quotation marks, because they were clearly lovers.

Hermaphroditus… do I even need to explain?

And Hecate. Well, this is not obvious, because she’s a complicated being. She had hundreds of epithets, which were often dissonant, as she was in some ways a god of familial love, but also dreadful. Depending on the cult, she was the a goddess of the moon, the goddess of witchcraft, a goddess of the underworld and, most importantly for this topic, the goddess of boundaries. Most importantly, because she didn’t have any. She was the one at the crossroads giving others the options. If she wasn’t LGBTQ+ herself, she was definitely the one who enabled that, but then again, she was also a shapeshifter, which is inherently queer.

There’s probably obvious ones I’ve completely forgotten right now, but that’s a start.