Was Nikola Telsa gay?
A genius inventor has to keep secrets
Published in
8 min readApr 15, 2021
He said he’d “never touched a woman,” and that he needed to be single for his work. Is that all there’s to say about the sexuality of Nikola Tesla?
I’m looking over biography of the genius inventer. A 1981 biography, Tesla: Man Out of Time, by Margaret Cheney, notes “whispers that he was a homosexual.”
Telsa was definitely ‘queer’—as in super strange.
To look over period descriptions of Tesla is to see people registering his unusual being. An 1891 newspaper profile:
“He is slender in body, nervous in his movements and intense in his application to the mysteries of electricity. His Greek face lights up and his black eyes gleam when he discourses on his favored theme.”
He seems to have been ‘different’ since he was a child in Croatia. That’s little Nikola—way off to the left.
Over the next years, he changed his style often—with hair, clothes, and body posture almost suggesting different men.
