Maciste, Hercules and Gladiators: The Unexpected Gay Side of Italian Peplum

Sculpted muscles, barely-there tunics, oiled bodies, fights, chains, men facing each other in the arena, and male friendships pushed to the point of sacrifice. Watching them today, some Italian movies featuring Hercules, Maciste, Ursus, and gladiators can produce a curious impression: beneath their seemingly rock-solid celebration of masculinity, something far more ambiguous seems to emerge.

This is the world of Italian peplum, also known as sword-and-sandal cinema, the genre that, between the late 1950s and mid-1960s, turned Italy into a gigantic factory of heroes from the ancient world.

These movies were certainly intended to celebrate strength, courage, and virility. Yet, intentionally or not, they also placed something relatively unusual for the cinema of the time at the center of the screen: the male body as a spectacle to be watched.

And that is precisely why peplum can also be revisited today through a gay lens.

Before Hercules, There Was Maciste

To understand this story, we need to go back much further than the 1960s. One of cinema’s first great muscular icons was actually born in Italy.

In 1914, Giovanni Pastrone directed Cabiria, a spectacular epic set during the Second Punic War. The movie introduced a character destined for extraordinary success: Maciste, played by Bartolomeo Pagano, who had worked as a stevedore at the port of Genoa before becoming an actor.

Gabriele D’Annunzio, whom Pastrone involved primarily in writing the intertitles and naming the characters, described Maciste as a freedman symbolically connected to Hercules. Pagano, chosen precisely because of his extraordinary physique, quickly became a celebrity.

Maciste soon escaped the confines of Cabiria to become the protagonist of a long series of movies. His name even entered everyday Italian: to this day, calling someone “a Maciste” means describing a man of extraordinary strength.

A model had been born that would return again and again in Italian cinema: the hero whose defining characteristic is not what he says, but his body.

Italy Becomes the Home of Muscle Men

The real boom, however, arrived in 1958 with Pietro Francisci’s Hercules (Le fatiche di Ercole).

Hercules was played by Steve Reeves, an American bodybuilder and former Mr. America and Mr. Universe. Reeves looked almost like a classical statue brought to life: enormous shoulders, a narrow waist, perfectly defined muscles, and costumes designed to conceal as little as possible.

The movie became a huge success outside Italy as well, opening the door to the near-industrial production of mythological adventures. Dozens of movies featuring Hercules, Maciste, Samson, Ursus, and gladiators followed.

Alongside Reeves came bodybuilders such as Reg Park, Mark Forest, Gordon Mitchell, and Gordon Scott, while some Italian actors adopted English-language stage names: Adriano Bellini became Kirk Morris, and Sergio Ciani became Alan Steel.

The stories changed, but the formula remained instantly recognizable.

There was a tyrant to defeat, a population to liberate, a few monstrous creatures, a beautiful woman to rescue and, above all, a protagonist who constantly found excellent narrative reasons to show off his physique.

When the Male Body Becomes the Real Spectacle

And this is where things get interesting. The plots of peplum movies are generally heterosexual: the hero loves or rescues a woman, and the happy ending almost always restores the traditional order. But the camera often seems interested in something else.

It is the hero’s muscles that are lit, framed, and put to the test. He lifts boulders, breaks chains, fights hand-to-hand, gets captured, restrained, tortured, and eventually freed.

The male body is not merely there to serve the story: it becomes one of the movie’s main attractions in its own right.

Robert A. Rushing, who has devoted several studies to the genre, has observed how muscles, abs, skin, and sweat quite literally fill the screen in peplum movies. The paradox is particularly fascinating: these films create highly eroticized worlds in which sexual desire itself is almost always kept off-screen.

The viewer is therefore allowed to contemplate the male body at length because, officially, they are simply admiring its strength and heroism. But of course, that gaze can be far less innocent.

An Imaginary World Perfect for the Gay Gaze

It is hardly surprising, then, that peplum was later reinterpreted by gay culture.

Scholar Robert A. Rushing explicitly examined how these movies negotiated their obvious non-heteronormative attractions: half-naked, oiled bodybuilders constantly offered up to the viewer’s gaze, within stories that continued to formally insist on their heterosexuality.

And this is not simply a contemporary reinterpretation. Scholar Maria Wyke has recalled a particularly revealing episode: in the late 1960s, an Italian peplum released in the United States as My Son, the Hero was screened at the Apollo Theater in Los Angeles as part of one of the early film programs aimed at a gay audience. The evening was even advertised as an opportunity for a major “camp out.”

In other words, some gay audiences had already learned to watch these movies differently.

Gladiators, Chains, and Very Intense Friendships

The subtext does not concern the protagonists alone. The world of peplum is populated almost entirely by men: soldiers, slaves, gladiators, warriors, and brothers-in-arms. Men fight together, save one another, embrace, are imprisoned together, and build relationships based on intense male solidarity.

Film studies often describe this as homosociality: intense relationships between people of the same sex that are not necessarily sexual, but that can easily produce a homoerotic subtext.

In 2022, Andrea Meroni devoted an essay specifically to the subject, Sottotesti omoerotici tra peplum e spaghetti western(“Homoerotic Subtexts in Peplum and Spaghetti Westerns”), published in Quaderni del CSCI in an issue dedicated to the history of eroticism in Italian cinema.

And all it takes is watching many of these scenes again through contemporary eyes to understand why.

Half-naked bodies wrestling against each other. Gladiators sharing cells and training grounds. Heroes chained up with bare torsos. Warriors constantly measuring themselves against other men through physical strength.

All of these elements make perfect sense within an adventure story, yet they can take on a completely different meaning depending on who’s watching.

The Paradox of Virility

This may be the most fascinating aspect of peplum. In attempting to create the most virile man imaginable, Italian cinema ended up constructing one of the most explicit spectacles of the male body in 20th-century popular cinema.

The hero had to be so masculine that he became almost unreal.

It is no coincidence that many of the leading actors came directly from bodybuilding. Their physiques were not simply those of athletic actors: these were bodies deliberately built to be looked at.

Steve Reeves is probably the perfect example. His presence helped create an aesthetic model that would survive long after the decline of peplum, from the muscle-bound fantasy movies of the 1980s to today’s superheroes. The principle remains remarkably similar.

The hero’s body must be desirable while pretending to be nothing more than powerful.

They Weren’t Gay Movies. But They Could Be Watched That Way

Of course, it would be wrong to retroactively turn Hercules or the Maciste movies into LGBTQ+ works.

They weren’t. In fact, when historical movies of the period portrayed explicitly or implicitly queer characters, they often associated effeminacy and sexual ambiguity with villains, setting them against the supposedly unquestionable masculinity of the hero.

But that contradiction is precisely what makes the genre so interesting.

On the one hand, peplum constantly attempted to define what it meant to be a “real man.” On the other, it exposed that real man to the viewer’s gaze with an insistence rarely afforded to the male body in mainstream cinema at the time.

The result is a fascinating contradiction. Hercules rescues the girl. Maciste liberates the oppressed. The gladiators fight for freedom. Meanwhile, the camera keeps showing us chests, legs, backs, sweat, and bodies touching one another.

A Piece of Queer Culture Hidden in Italian Cinema History

Today, peplum can therefore also be rediscovered as a curious chapter in Italian gay cultural history, without needing to attribute intentions to these movies that they probably never had.

Instead, it demonstrates how an image can take on a life independent of the purpose for which it was originally created.

Italian cinema of the 1950s and 1960s wanted to bring the heroes of antiquity back to the screen. To do so, it filled Cinecittà and other Italian film sets with American bodybuilders, gladiators, temples, sandals, tunics, and half-naked bodies.

And almost without realizing it, it created an imagery that, decades later, remains perfectly suited to a queer reading.

Perhaps that is the little paradox of Hercules and Maciste: created to embody the absolute ideal of virility, they also became irresistible objects of the male gaze.

And once you notice it, it becomes almost impossible to watch an old Italian peplum the same way again.

Cover image: Steve Reeves in Hercules (Le fatiche di Ercole, 1958) – Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons