The internet thinks Albert Einstein was gay after this viral post, but there’s a catch - INTO
E=MC Queered

The internet thinks Albert Einstein was gay after this viral post, but there’s a catch

Jude Cramer

Albert Einstein was many things: The father of relativity. The creator of the world’s most famous formula, E=mc2. The breakout star of Oppenheimer. One thing he was not, as far as history knows, is a gay man. But the internet has other ideas, thanks to a viral post about an entirely different historical figure.

The post shows a screenshot from Wikipedia, showing three homoerotic sketches and the line, “There have been debates about Eisenstein’s sexuality.”

Folks across the internet who didn’t read carefully were quick to marvel at Einstein’s apparent queerness, connecting it to one infamously fruity photo of the physicist and celebrating that such a brilliant mind can be counted among the LGBTQ+ community.

But of course, the post was never about Einstein in the first place. Those sketches and speculation are from the Wikipedia page for Sergei Eisenstein, not Albert Einstein. 

Eisenstein was a Soviet filmmaker, best known for his silent films like Strike and Battleship Potemkin, released in the 1920s. He and Einstein have similar names and were alive at the same time — but that’s about where the similarities stop.

Where Einstein was arguably a ladies’ man, having two wives (and several affairs). Eisenstein also married a woman — though notably, he did so just seven months after homosexuality was criminalized in the Soviet Union in 1934 — but was largely considered by historians and his contemporaries to be a gay man. He once told a journalist, “I’m not interested in girls,” and infamous muckraker Upton Sinclair told biographer Marie Seton that Eisentsein’s associates were “all homos”: “Men of that sort stick together,” he added.

Then, of course, there are those viral homoerotic sketches, which show that Eisenstein had queer curiosities as an artist, if nothing else. We can still count a famous historical figure among the queer community — just not Albert Einstein.

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