The Stars.

1/2 Thought: maybe when Pentheus says, "your body isn’t unsightly, to women, which is what you came to Thebai for" he might not be in a Gay Panic mode. It might be a cross between him saying, "Well, Master of Roofies, welcome to Thebes! It seems like you have not obtained your spoils thru just drugs!" and "It looks like you're straight. Pity." He has no cultural context for the word "roofie" and the only phrase he can use to describe what Dionysus was doing

Anon, I fear I have to disappoint you - the Bakkhai post you're referring to is a complete shitpost based on the reading of this scene that makes me, personally, sensibly chuckle the most whenever I read this play. It's not a reading I would argue for in an academic paper. I'd love to see it in a modern production because I think it would fuck severely to make Bakkhai really damn queer, but that's it. Considering that ancient Greek conceptions of sexuality worked differently from ours, it wouldn't be a direct translation of the modern feeling of "Oh no I'm gay" (or "Oh no he's straight"!) anyways.

(Though I'd be really interested in having a conversation about this with an Euripides scholar - how valid is the reading that Pentheus is repressed and extremely into Dionysos, as a metaphor for what Dionysos represents?)

I'm also really not the right person to judge Bakkhai readings! I'm a historian, not a classicist, so literary analysis is only tangentially related to what I do or know anything about. I am currently working with Bakkhai as a source, but I'm interested in what it can tell us about real-life maenadic cult, not the play itself.

That being said, your reading is probably much closer to what this scene is about than my shitpost - Pentheus' whole deal is that he believes that maenadic rites are an excuse for illicit sexual acts and other awful things that disrupt the order of his polis (which, after all, kind of relies on the women taking care of their responsibilities in the city and not running off to the mountains to fuck people who are not their husbands). So, yeah, he sees Dionysos (or the "priest of Dionysos") as a seducer of women first and foremost, he absolutely believes that Dionysos is out to have as much sex as possible with these women, and that Dionysos looks like someone women would be very attracted to fits that image very well.

I'd also be interested in exploring the gender aspects of Pentheus' dialogue with Dionysos here? I know way more about Roman gender norms than classical Greek ones, so I can't actually explore that just yet in a Tumblr post at 4am, but could there be a correlation between Dionysos' appearance (good-looking in an explicitly feminine way) and the fact that Pentheus' reads him as a seducer? Idk man. Gotta read more about that. I also just know nothing about Euripides, like, as a person.

Anyways, I'm very sorry, anon, I'm quite far from being an authority on Euripides; I just enjoy thinking of Pentheus as a rich repressed frat bro.