Achillean

Achillean is an umbrella term for men and masculine-aligned people who are attracted to men, encompassing gay, bisexual, pansexual, and otherwise queer men, along with nonbinary and transgender people who identify with manhood or are attracted to men (UWM LGBTQ+ Resource Center). It functions as a broader alternative to "men-loving-men" (MLM): the LGBTQ+ glossary Identiversity defines MLM narrowly as men "romantically, emotionally and/or sexually attracted to other men" and notes the acronym "originated and [is] used most often within the Black community" (Identiversity), whereas Achillean is used more expansively to also cover people who do not identify as cisgender men but do identify with masculinity or are attracted to masculine-aligned people (PinkNews).

The label does not specify a single orientation. An Achillean person may be exclusively attracted to men (as in homosexuality) or attracted to men alongside other genders (as in bisexuality, pansexuality, or polysexuality); the term groups these together by the shared fact of male-directed attraction rather than by its exclusivity, which mirrors the structure of "Sapphic," the parallel umbrella term for women-loving-women identities (PinkNews). It also differs from the clinical sexological term "androphilia," which describes attraction to men without attaching any identity label or self-conception and is applied irrespective of the attracted person's own gender identity; Achillean, by contrast, is a self-selected community label that centers the attracted person's own masculine alignment, and by definition excludes cisgender, heterosexual women who are attracted to men (Wikipedia: Androphilia and gynephilia).

Examples

Achillean is an affinity label covering several orientations at once, so its edges are set by who it includes rather than by any single pattern of attraction.

What the term covers. A gay man; a bisexual or pansexual man, since exclusivity is not required; a trans man attracted to men; a non-binary person who identifies with manhood or is drawn to masculine-aligned people. It usually sits on top of a more specific label rather than replacing it: someone is gay and achillean, in the way that queer works as a layer of shared identity.

What the term does not cover. Sapphic is the structural counterpart for women-loving-women, and the two are built the same way. Androphilia is a research term for attraction to men that carries no identity and applies to anyone, including heterosexual women, which achillean explicitly excludes. "Men-loving-men" (MLM) overlaps heavily but originated and remains most used within Black LGBTQ communities, and is generally read more narrowly as cisgender men.

How the word is used. It is community vocabulary popularised on Tumblr from 2016 as a masculine counterpart to the already-established "Sapphic", with a flag whose central carnation nods to Oscar Wilde. The adjective is far older in other senses: John Addington Symonds wrote of an "Achilleian" ideal of comradeship in 1883, and a 1959 literary essay used "Achillean" in place of the then-pejorative "homosexual". "Vincian" and the nineteenth-century "Uranian" are occasional relatives.

History

The word derives from Achilles, the central hero of Homer's Iliad. The poem itself does not label Achilles's relationship with his companion Patroclus as romantic, but ancient and modern commentators have long read their intense mutual devotion (Achilles describes Patroclus as the man he "loved beyond all other comrades, loved as my own life") as encompassing a romantic and sexual bond, and later classical writers such as Aeschylus treated it explicitly as such (PinkNews).

The word's use to denote this reading of Achilles predates its current identity-label sense by more than a century. In A Problem in Greek Ethics (1883), one of the first extended English-language studies of ancient Greek same-sex love, John Addington Symonds describes an "Achilleian" ideal of manly comradeship modeled on Achilles and Patroclus, distinguishing it from effeminate love and centering loyalty and companionship in war (Symonds, A Problem in Greek Ethics, Project Gutenberg). The word resurfaces later still as a piece of academic vocabulary: a 1959 scholarly article by A. C. Hamilton on the poetry of Edmund Spenser used "Achillean" in place of the then-pejorative "homosexual" (Grindr).

Its use as a contemporary self-identifying label is unrelated to that academic lineage: it was popularized within LGBTQ+ communities on Tumblr starting in 2016, built explicitly as a masculine counterpart to the already-established "Sapphic," with an accompanying pride flag (two light-blue bars framing a pale sage-green stripe and center carnation, the carnation referencing Oscar Wilde) created by Tumblr users that same year and spreading from there into wider queer usage as shorthand for men-loving-men identities (PinkNews; Grindr).

Terminology & related identities

Achillean overlaps heavily with, and is often used interchangeably with, "men-loving-men" (MLM); the clearest documented distinction is that MLM emerged and is used most often within Black LGBTQ+ communities specifically, while Achillean was coined later as a general-purpose, Sapphic-style umbrella that more readily includes trans men and nonbinary people who identify with manhood, not only cisgender men (Identiversity; UWM LGBTQ+ Resource Center).

Some sources also list "Vincian" (after Leonardo da Vinci) and "Uranian" as related or occasionally interchangeable labels for male-directed attraction between men (Wikipedia: LGBT slang). Uranian is the older of the two by more than a century: the German lawyer Karl Heinrich Ulrichs coined "Urning" (anglicized as "Uranian," from Aphrodite Urania in Plato's Symposium) in a series of booklets published in 1864–65 arguing that male same-sex attraction was an innate, non-pathological condition rather than a crime; English writers including Symonds and Edward Carpenter later adopted "Uranian," and the term fell out of common use once the more assertive gay-liberation vocabulary that followed the 1969 Stonewall riots took hold (Wikipedia: Uranian (sexuality)).

As an umbrella rather than a specific orientation, Achillean does not replace more specific labels such as gay, bisexual, or pansexual; an Achillean person will typically also use one of those terms to describe the shape of their attraction, using "Achillean" as a broader affinity or community label rather than a stand-alone orientation category. In this respect it behaves the same way "queer" or "Sapphic" do elsewhere in LGBTQ+ vocabulary, as a layer of shared identity and community that sits above, rather than instead of, a person's more specific orientation label.