Questions of gender identity were just as pressing 300 years ago as they are today. This is not a discussion of whether Ludvig Holberg (1684–1754) was queer. Rather, it is the premise for demonstrating how, in his deeply original authorship in the first half of the 18th century, he wrote forth a transgressive public persona in dialogue with the gender codes of his time. Starting from depictions of “strange love” in Holberg’s most misunderstood work, Metamorphosis (1726), we follow Holberg’s playful and daring engagement with homosocial motifs and “obscene” ambiguities—his fascination with gender and sexuality and his circling around the one, unnameable sin. The resonance he used was that of ancient sexuality, set against the Enlightenment’s masculine, bourgeois national patriarchy. Holberg’s secret was not something he wanted to take to the grave—it was an open, demonstrative riddle he articulated again and again, as clearly as was culturally and aesthetically possible for him.