This male skeleton was buried facing east and surrounded by jars, instead of facing west and surrounded by hammers, knifes and other weapons which was the customary way to bury men.
Archaeologist Kamila Remisova Vesinova said, according to Time.com, "From history and ethnology, we know that people from this period took funeral rites very seriously. so it is unlikely that the positioning was a mistake. It is much more likely that he was a man of a different sexual orientation, that he was gay or transsexual."
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Reading this story I was struck by two things.Firstly that the cavemen seem to have been more accepting and respectful than some of my contemporaries, and secondly by the narrow-mindedness of the archaeologist in believing that being a gay male means you are something in-between a man and a woman or even that you are more of a woman than a man.
I wonder what Ms. Remisova Vesinova would have made of "The Sacred Band of Thebes", which was a troop of picked soldiers, consisting of 150 gay male couples that formed the elite force of the Theban army in the 4th century BC.
The Sacred Band was originally formed of hand-picked men who were couples, each lover and beloved selected from the ranks of the existing Theban citizen-army, the rationale being that lovers could and would fight more fiercely and cohesively than strangers with no ardent bonds.
As a gay man myself it is totally horrendous being told that I am somewhere in-between because I sure as hell am not. I am a masculine man who falls in love and am emotionally and sexually attracted to other men who also are masculine men. Neither of us ever fall in the category of being in-between.
To me it is quite obvious that the caveperson was a transsexual, but there is not enough basis to draw any conclusions concerning her sexual orientation.
