Did you ever wonder if any of your long-ago relatives were gay or lesbian?

Two grand uncles never married and were exceedingly nice people. I always wonder if they were gay

I also have a great uncle (1885-1973) whom I'd like to know about.

Due to the fact that he was a single male in his 30s, he was drafted into WW1. When he returned home from serving abroad, he lived with his then-widowed mother until she died. He continued to live in the same house alone until he himself died some 50 years later.

I remember hearing some older relatives refer to him as a "hermit," but the three times I met him when I was a young kid, he didn't seem like a hermit. He was very friendly and was always glad to see us. He also worked for the public works department of the small town that he lived in until he was retirement age. During the winter months he shoveled snow on the city streets. During the rest of the year, he was the gravedigger at the public cemetery. I guess the reason he looked fit and wiry is because he was always doing something with a shovel!

I remember my grandmother (his sister) used to say that the single woman who lived next door to him was always flirting with him. And even though, he wasn't having any of it, he wouldn't come right out and tell her that he wasn't interested (thinking he'd hurt her feelings). So grandma went over there one day and told her to just stop.

I do have a nice little photo of him that I framed and have in my house. I'd like to think he was gay, perhaps had a special friend that no one knew about, but don't know. Either way, he was a good guy,

I posted about this. My German great-grandfather's brother was gay and a drag queen in Berlin 1910-1930s. He disappeared with the Nazis and the family never heard what happened to him.

I have a photograph of him in a full costume, taken by a professional photographer.

The family was proud of him and thought it was wonderful he was "an entertainer in Berlin." Nothing negative ever suggested.

R3, sounds like he was a really cool person

My mother had a photo taken in the 1890s of my great-grandfather and three other handsome young men standing shoulder-to-shoulder with their arms draped around one another on the back of a train and looking drunk off their asses. The photo was inscribed with their first names, and we did not know anything else about them. My grandmother was born in 1899, so we knew he'd married and had two older children within at most 7 or 8 years from when the photo was taken. I was mesmerized by the looks on their faces and their obvious joy, and always looked at that photo when I walked down the gallery hallway toward Mom's room, wondering if he might have been gay and on his last hurrah before getting married and having a family.

I had a great uncle that would come out and visit us from his small town in South Dakota in the 70's. He never married and was always impeccably well dressed, but still wearing fashions from the 40's and 50's. I asked my dad at one point why my great uncle had never married, my dad said he had some accident and was kicked by a horse in the groin when he was younger, which seemed ludicrous to me. I'm pretty sure he was gay.

I've long suspected an uncle of my mother's, who died at the age of 98 a few decades ago. He was a pastor for 50 years and therefore had to be married. In fact, he married twice: after his first wife died, he got together with a much younger (20+) member of his congregation. By all accounts, it was a marriage of convenience: the couple that prays together, etc. He and his first wife adopted three children, one of whom died young in a freak shooting incident involving her older brother.

The BS story I was told as a child (similar to R6) was that he was molested by a female babysitter as a youngster, contracted an STI from her, and was rendered sterile as a result (you'd have to be under 12 years old to believe that). He may well have been abused, but the abuse was possibly committed by a man, which at the time was too shocking to say out loud (a female was bad enough). Anyway, I base this on the way he would sometimes stare at certain young men in his congregation, so full of longing and barely contained lust. Also: there was something about way he spoke of the camaraderie he experienced as a soldier during WW2, and he had a somewhat campy side that came out when he played the piano and sang. It may all seem a bit flimsy, but I got quite the closety vibe off him.

i had a great uncle, who I never met. His name was Pearl, and my mother told me that her father refused to let Pearl babysit the kids. Pearl made quilts. I have one of them which is a masterpiece: he cut out the crossword puzzles from the Burbank local paper, and recreated the pattern of the puzzle to create a duplicate in a charming muslin of solid off-white, and a calico pattern of a tiny red/pink print. This is a queen size quilt, so it probably had 20 or 40 different puzzles as the pattern.

There was Pearl, but there was also Ford, who owned an 2nd hand antique store, which was impeccably decorated. My mother had an assortment of these items and they were very charming. The feeling I get is that the family figured out they were gay and were uncomfortable with with it all at their core, but also accepting and loving. My grandfather ( brother in law) was a prominent politician in Los Angeles in the '90's to '40's. I think the family was both uncomfortable and accepting, but loving and inclusive. I think it was probably typical for gay men at that time.

One step up from he/she just never found the right gal/guy were the single men with mysterious groin injuries and spinsters whose irreplaceable one true love was killed long ago in an accident or war.

I had an aunt who was a nun. She was delightful and funny, and butch as all get out. Once the nuns no longer wore habits, she adopted a very short haircut (man's haircut, essentially). She was sports mad, often coached teams of both boys and girls at the various schools she taught at through the years. When I visited her (in her old age) at the central convent of her order, I met a number of her nun friends. One in particular I think was her "special friend". I would be surprised if they ever did anything physical, but I think they were as close as two women could be. When my aunt died, her friend called us to tell us. She was clearly distraught.