Or so it seems: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/PEstory/TGAM/20030123/RVPINK/Arts/thearts/thearts_temp/2/2/19/.
You get this a lot in musicology too, with endless analyses showing how Beethoven or Schubert or whoever must have been gay because he used this chord in that way.
It’s not that I particularly care whether these people were gay or not, but it’s tragic to see the proliferation of bad historical scholarship and hacks profiting thereby.
It’s just scandal for scandal’s sake, and silly, since the definition of gay is different in each historical period. Most cases are based on the assumption that the historical figure is living today. However, behavior that we consider a sure sign of homosexuality today may have had absolutely no sexual connotation.
The Lincoln story is based on the fact he shared a bed with another man. But in his time period, that didn’t mean anything sexually; beds were scarce and central heating was nonexistant. It made sense to share a bed for warmth and comfort, and the idea of sexual relations between the two sharers would have been repugnant to both.
Remember, too, that our model of homosexual behavior was not the model at other times. As pointed out in the book “Gay New York,” a history of homosexuality in 20s and 30s New York City, certain sexual practices that we now consider clear signs of homosexuality were not, and if you told some of the people involved they were gay, they would have thought you were nuts. The dichotomy wasn’t “gay” and “straight,” but rather “fairies” and “normal men” and the definitions of the terms were quite different; a “normal” man could take part in certain types of what is now called homosexual behavior.
The people who hunt homosexuals in the past usually make the fatal (though common) assumption that people in the past thought exactly the way we do now. It’s sloppy scholarship to assume so, the equivalent of assuming that after work, Lincoln sat down to watch TV. No one would make such an assertion, but nearly everyone has that unspoken assumption.
It’s that zeitgeist thing.
“The past is a different country, they do things differently there.”
Cannot for the life of me remember who is credited with that saying but it is so true.
It’s the person who wrote “The go between”
Forgotten his name
I’d have to say it’s a reaction to the idea that “nobody is gay” that’s permeated history books and classroom materials for ages.
It’s a difficult task, sifting through history to find out about the private lives of famous people, especially when the tenor of their times forced them to hide who they were, especially when recent historians have ignored or eradicated evidence of any alternative sexuality.
When I can get through both high school and college without hearing it once mentioned that Michelangelo was probably gay, it’s a good sign that such information is being suppressed. Here’s a good summary of the evidence that supports that contention, along with an interesting exploration of how the artist’s sexuality was suppressed in posthumous records.
Homosexuals have a hidden history, a story which has been concealed, both by the gay people themselves in self-defense, and by prudish historians. The process of understanding homosexuality must necessarily include a historical perspective. Like all historical research, some of the conclusions drawn are bound to be suspect. But there is no one correct perspective on history.
Personally, I’m grateful that the contributions of gays to culture is being acknowledged. A system of education in which Walt Whitman can be studied with no reference to his sexuality whatsoever, deserves a little backlash.
Weird. I thought everyone famous was black.
In some cases, yes. But in others, it seems to be the scholarly equivalent of tabloid news – “LINCOLN IN TWO MEN IN A BED SHOCK!”.
I’m not arguing that there isn’t a case for looking into the private lives of historical public figures. There just seems to be a lot of shoehorning going on to make the facts fit into whatever boxes the researchers want.
Were you told that he wasn’t? I’ve studied both art and music history, and at the basic survey level we didn’t really get into the character of the artists/composers. If anything, we talked more about who was financing the art.
I’m not sure gays are being done any favors by slapdash labelling. As I said, my main complaint here is bad scholarship, not historical muckraking.
Please enlighten me. It’s easy to imagine some NON-sexual forms of behavior that might be indicative of homosexuality now and not then or vice versa. What sexual behavior did “normal” men do then that is considered homosexual today?
The problem is that our definition of gay is narrow and would apply to people in the past who had no sexual attraction whatsoever to people of the same sex.
It also oversimplifies matters. Was Oscar Wilde gay? He did have sex with other men. However, he also had a lusty sexual life with his wife and showed no sign he wasn’t attracted to her sexually and plenty that he was. But it was a different world, and men would have relations with other men solely as an experiment and not as a lifestyle. So putting a name on the list of gay people in history doesn’t tell the truth, and calling him “bi” means you think he lived in the 21st century.
I have no problem with identifying people as gay, but there has to be both clear evidence plus an appreciation of the sexual attitudes of the time period involved.
Even though I’m not sure when the term was invented, I’ve never heard it said or implied that the term bisexual applies only to people of the 20th century, let alone the 21st.
I’m sure there were times and cultures in the past that were more accepting of, or uncaring of, individual sexual behaviors. I don’t see why the terms we’ve developed since those times, that describes such behaviors, shouldn’t be applied to them.
An appreciation of the time period, however, entails a recognition of the fact that homosexual behavior had serious penalties associated with it. For pretty much any time period in history, including this one. So, the history that you’re trying to unearth has been deliberately hidden, first by the subjects of the research, and then by earlier researchers who may have obfuscated evidence of homosexual activity so as not to offend their readership.
Keep in mind, there’s still enormous debates raging about who discovered America; if an event that momentous can be lost in the fog of history, it’s got to be enormously difficult to figure out who was diddling whom.
RealityChuck, when you say:
What do you mean? My definition of homosexual is someone who is attracted to people of the same gender. What definition are you going by? And what definition do you think these researchers are going by?
jr8, college gave me a lot of information about artists’ wives, their lovers, their models of the opposite gender, and no information about the personal lives of gay artists, even when their sexual orientation was a major part of their life histories. That seems pretty unfair to me.
Exactly. And that’s a late 20th century definition. In the first half of the century, a homosexual was a “female” personality in a male body. Nowadays, a man who thinks he’s a woman is called “transgendered,” but that was what they meant by “homosexual” in the 1930s (if they used the word “homosexual” at all, that is).
Further, heterosexual (using modern terminology – the word originally described a type of abnormality, akin to “sex addict” today) men thought nothing about having sexual relations with other men under certain circumstances. In the thinking of the time, an unmarried man had to have sexual release and if a prostitute wasn’t available, you could get it from a “fairy” and be perfectly normal as long as you didn’t “play the woman.” That was certainly preferable to masturbating, which was the worst perversion possible.
So if some male in 1927 picked up a male prostitute in Riverside park and had sexual relations with him, no one would necessarily consider him homosexual. Homosexual was a behavior pattern, not a sexual incident.
The researchers are using the current definition. Worse, they are assuming that the people involved were aware of the current definition. Nowadays it’s unthinkable that a heterosexual male have sex with another man, but in the past that sort of hard-edged dichotomy didn’t exist. Further, behavior that would clearly be considered a clue to homosexuality today (for instance, remaining a lifelong bachelor) is not a sign of it in the past, when sexual desires were not as center stage as they are today.
One of the most difficult concepts for someone to grasp is that people in the past thought differently from us. And that is where the difficulty comes in. Add that to the fact that there is an incentive on the part of gay groups to find as many historical homosexuals as possible (as a way to refute gay bashing) and there’s plenty of opportunities for self-delusion.
Yojimboguy The word “bisexual” meaning attracted to both sexed appeared in 1914. The word “homosexual” was coined in 1892. By using the words, you are putting people into categories that they were unaware of. It’s like trying to sort the Founding Fathers into Democrats and Republicans – their beliefs and attitudes were not our own and to assign them to exiting political parties is putting square pegs in triangular holes.
It’s the same with “homosexual.” Saying definitively that someone in the past is homosexual or heterosexual is both a false dichotomy and a vast oversimplifiaction of the sexual aspects of the culture – and it’s assuming their culture was no different than ours.
At best, you can say, “if he had lived today, he would have been considered gay,” which really says nothing.
I really find it hard to believe that masturbation was considered a worse perversion than male-male sex in 1920s/30s USA, as long as one wasn’t the ‘catcher’, and that sex with a male prostitute was regarded as perfectly normal. I think I might need to see a cite for those ones.
I have heard that Greeks didn’t/don’t regard the ‘giver’ as a homosexual, however.
This thread has become a very good debate. Let’s move it to Great Debates.
Cajun Man - SDMB Moderator
Well, maybe those historical figures don’t want you snooping into their private lives just to advance some political agenda. Or perhaps if they’d known how important it was to some gay people to demonstrate that a litany of famous influential people was also gay they’d have left that information in a time capsule or something. They didn’t. So perhaps they valued their privacy and so might we.
Well, perhaps it meant enough to somebody to conceal it, if you’re right, but why does it mean anything to us now? If Michealangelo hid his sexual orientation at the time, maybe he wouldn’t want you to know either, so the historians covering it up are really doing him a posthumous favor. I could only see it mattering if his sexual orientation was necessary in interpreting his art, and since he’s been judged a genius already by people who could care less about his orientation, I’d say it isn’t really relevant.
Well, there is one correct perspective on history, the one that describes what actually happened. We may be practically unable to determine that in alot of cases (as I’m well aware, I hold a BA in history and actually got involved in the subject and its theories rather than just take the classes), but still there’s only the truth and the untruths. People’s perspectives throughout history are important in understanding how people thought about certain issues, but they can’t be allowed to taint what true and what’s false.
For example, it’s pretty interesting that 1920’s French politicians perceived a great threat of disintegrating gender roles due to the influence of la garconne, an image of a woman who rejected traditional gender roles to go out and have fun all the time. Only problem: there was no such breakdown in gender roles, only the fear that one was occuring, driving politicians into making some reactionary speeches. Cultural historians are right to pay some attention to such things, as they do reveal alot about a historical period, but we can’t lose sight of the fact that there’s a truth out there that exists independently of what people’s perspectives and attitudes were.
Again, does a study of Walt Whitman require that one think “hmmm, now while he was writing this, was he thinking about his boyfriend?” Probably not. I’ve read Whitman, it’s pretty dry stuff. If you find something to take from it when viewed in the light of his sexuality, then that’s good for you, but clearly people have found something in his work independent of that.
Sometimes a historical figure’s sexuality matters, sometimes it doesn’t. Oscar Wilde was involved historically with anti-homosexuality laws, so clearly that’s relevant to a study of him, though I would hope his irreverantly witty writing would hold up for most people whether or not they knew anything about the way he was treated by English society.
I understand the desire to “normalize” homosexuality in the minds of people who perceive it as abhorrent, and understand that some good might come of saying “that guy was gay, and you love his works, don’t you see how unfair your attitude towards gays is?” All the same, it ultimately shouldn’t matter unless that person made an issue of his sexuality through his own actions. If he or she preferred to leave his private life out of his work and legacy, then perhaps we ought to extend the courtesy and do the same. These people may or may not have wanted to be used as part of a political agenda, no matter how just, and we can’t go up and ask them now.
Not that I buy the gay Lincoln argument, but claiming that it rests on nothing more than sharing a bed isn’t exactly a sincere and complete account of the claim you are refuting.
Perhaps not, Apos, but if the allegations of those who claim Lincoln was gay rest on nothing more than alleged passages from a diary no one else has seen -
and when requests to have a peek at the actual document cause the alleged historian to have a case of the vapors -
not much refutation is required.
Regards,
Shodan
It means a lot to me. Why wouldn’t it? That’s what’s being accomplished through this field of study; the realization that gay people have always existed, and have made considerable contributions to culture. In order to do that, the sexual orientations of these people have to be evaluated using modern terminology.
It’s perfectly valid to use contemporary terminology to describe the past. If you found evidence that a tribe of hunter-gatherers in Europe circa 7000 B.C. were using a system of colored stones to elect their leaders, you’d say they had a democratic society. Or a proto-democratic society. Sure, they wouldn’t know what the heck you were talking about, but then they wouldn’t have known they were in Europe, either.
History is looking at the past from the perspective of the present; all we have to go on is how we see things now. Sappho probably didn’t know what the term lesbian would mean a couple thousand years down the road, but she sure was one. What’s wrong with calling her that?
Add that to the fact that there is an incentive on the part of straight groups to find as many historical heterosexuals as possible (as a way to perpetuate gay bashing) and there’s plenty of opportunities for self-delusion.
I was told that Vittorio Colonna, a chaste widow, was the romance of Michelangelo’s life.
I’m afraid that you’ve just shut down all history departments in all universities everywhere. How valuable is a history that takes things at face value, that never looks behind the accepted version, that doesn’t pry into the lives of the people in history? How excited would King Tutankhamen be about the fact that he’d spend his afterlife as an upscale side show freak? How thrilled would Thomas Jefferson have been to know his relationship with Sally Hemmings would make headlines in a couple of hundred years? Should their right to privacy have been honored posthumously? It’s a whole other debate.
Besides which, back in the 80’s the Supreme Court ruled that the constitutional right to privacy didn’t apply to homosexuals, and so sodomy laws were kept in place. If contemporary gay people can’t expect their sex lives to remain private, what chance do historical figures have?
That’s true, as far as the simple litany of facts goes. Motivation, however, is as fascinating a part of history as fact. What would a study of King James I reveal if all information about his homosexuality were suppressed? How would one make sense of the rise of George Villiers, later Earl of Buckingham, if you omit all mention of their love for each other, and the controversy it caused in the nation?
If we’re to understand history, we need to understand the people involved in it.
If you’re researching the life of Walt Whitman, then you’ll find that he was fired, for reasons unknown, from the New Orleans Crescent. If you look around, you can find a rumor that he had an affair with a married society woman, and that the poem *Once I Pass’d Through A Populous City * was making reference to her. If you dig further, and find the original draft discovered in 1925, you’ll find that he changed the poem for publication, making all the pronouns female. Here’s the first draft:
What can we learn from this? That Whitman may have had an affair with another man? That he may have gotten fired for it? Possibly. But it definitely tells us that the artist felt the need to change his work to portray a heterosexual inclination. There’s plenty more evidence that Whitman enjoyed the company of men in a carnal, lusty fashion. But this piece speaks to me; it tells me that even as heroic a figure as Whitman, as big and bold a man as there ever was, felt intimidated into changing his poems to fit the heterosexual norm.
How did his struggle with his homosexual tendencies, and society’s views of them, affect his work? Isn’t that as important a question as any we can ask about his life?
Who knows what works have been lost to the censors throughout history; who knows what works and diaries and plays we’ll never see, because they were considered too ribald for simply mentioning the fact that men do, sometimes, have sex together.
I agree that the Lincoln story is questionable, and I’d like to point out the fact that it’s currently being laughed out of academic circles. The Hitler claim has considerably more evidence to support it; it’s being examined carefully. That’s how historians ply their trade, from what I understand; they come up with theories and evidence for them, and see if their theories gain wide acceptance. Most papers on gay history are bound to be crap. Most papers on anything are. But some papers will be borne out by the weight of evidence, and contribute to the sum of human knowledge.
History is ultimately the record of human endeavors, written by humans to reflect upon the events of the past from the perspective of the present. The rediscovery of the forgotten history of an oppressed people may not be high on everyone’s list of important achievements, but I assure you, it matters to me.
Everyone who ever lived was gay. Children? Oh, those were just fleeting moments of curiosity and experimentation. I was just a kid, it was drunk, I was dark…
“Throw out your hands,
stick out your tush,
hands on your hips,
give 'em a push!
You’ll be surprised
you’re doing the French Mistake;
Voila!”