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Notes -
Hard to say of course, but my default is to assume that claims along the lines of 'ancient person/place/thing was totally gay/trans, acktualy' are bullshit promoted not so much by grand conspiracies to discredit the ancient things as a weird form of validation for the specific gay/trans people promoting the claim.
Like, it's fine to be gay -- the need to justify it by claiming that Apollo was also gay (or the odd plains Indian was 'two-spirited' in the case of trans stuff is really strange.
In the case of that specific article, the user who added the stuff about Apollo being super-gay (around 2020; before that the article talks about Dionysus as the patron of gayness) is Adiga77 -- who based on the edit history seems hyperfocussed on adding gay references to the Ancient Greek pantheon every time some male is said to have 'loved' another.
Dollars to doughnuts Aidga77 is also super-gay, and for some reason feels better if everyone thinks this has a vast historical pedigree -- is what it is I guess. But Wikipedia is not a good reference for anything gay.
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When I looked into this, I came away with the idea that scholars had zero evidence for the view that “male love” was homoerotic rather than platonic. In cultures that rebuke homosexuality, like Arab culture, men traditionally held hands and have even written love poems to male friends. Even terrorist groups were doing that. Male handholding and lap-sitting was also common in England and America before homosexuality became a valid thing in anyone’s minds — can find lots of 19th century photos of this. The most evidence that I have found for homosexuality accepted in Greece are that there are some depictions of it on vases, like 0.01% of vases depicted it. But this may very well have been vases made as jokes or insults.
So when you read about “the sacred band of Thebes” formed by elite military pairs of lovers, it’s silly to think there were any homosexuals in it. In no culture do homosexuals comprise the top fighters.
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Not quite- think of it more like Spiderman or James Bond. You get many reboots or episodes with different writers, who all have different artistic interpretations and motives. And "what becomes canon" often becomes hotly debated among the followers of that mythological figure. And characters change with the time, Juliet is going to be black in an upcoming movie.
If some writer gave James Bond a male lover in a new James Bond "myth" that would also become "canon", but a lot of followers of James Bond would consider that to be a subversive myth within the broader myth body. It's entirely possible that James Bond, created with the intention to be a masculine symbol of English chauvinism, gets transformed by writers in the future who do not like that original message. It happens all the time.
So if someone wanted to reboot James Bond and reset the canon, they would pick and choose what remains canon and what does not because it was not created wisely, or it was created subversively. In practice this happens all the time, for example a huge amount of Star Wars canon was ejected because it wasn't aligned with Disney's plan for the mythos. There's no contradiction there as they openly admit this is what they are doing.
It should also be noted that the Old Testament is another example of comic-book literary fiction becoming religion. Their observation of the way symbols and myths inspire us and direct our behavior is a powerful one. How can we harness it? I doubt a revival religion around Apollo is the answer but I think it's the right question.
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