Was Sir Isaac Newton gay?

That really didn’t help the first time nor did a reread.

It seems to be a pretty clearly written OP; BrainGlutton read fiction that portrayed Newton as gay, he was curious if there was a factual basis for that.

I could buy that Newton had little or no interest in sex with either gender, finding the nature of matter and energy to be more compelling.

This biographer says Newton was brilliant, but also a vindictive, flaming asshole and possibly gay (but who really knows).

Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer

One could just as easily say: “He weren’t no str8. He just got stuck on certain matters before men could take hold.”

It seems to me that Newton was about as attracted to men as he was to women, and that in both cases it amounted to “myabe a wee bit, but I’m more concerned with other things.” He seems to have left very little evidence that he ever fucked anyone.

Um . . . I’m not sure how to react to this.

Well, during his long feud with Leibniz I understand that he did once say “Hey Willi, I got something that rhymes with monads right here, and you can lick 'em!”, but he didn’t mean it literally. Then there was his fourth law of motion, which was “An object with a decent job, well endowed who likes cats, long walks on the beach, gladiatorial role playing and velvet can around 7 of the clock behind the loo of Trinity College bring some of that over here in a westwardly direction. Of fatties, let there be none” was sexually ambiguous.

To summarise my long post answering this the last time it was asked: the suggestion was probably first widely aired in Frank Manuel’s 1968 Freudian biography in connection with Newton’s turbulent friendship with Nicolas Fatio de Duillier, but even he didn’t regard this as the most plausible explanation. Even if there was a homosexual infatuation on Newton’s part, the relationship probably wasn’t physical. None of the academic biographies of him since have argued that he was gay.

Some of his private writings, particularly from his adolescence, indicate that he was far too guilty about sexual thoughts for him to be usefully called asexual. He could however repress these thoughts and so, apparently, remain celibate.

So did Thomas Jefferson, and he was quite the heterosexual horndog.

Jefferson was noted for not wearing a wig.

i think he is, just look at his hair :stuck_out_tongue:

Perhaps he wasn’t gay but maybe a zombie? Zombie Newton (as opposed to the fig variety) would be both scary and highly predictable…

Moderator Action

Welcome to the SDMB, bigveggieboy.

Around here, we tend to refer to very old threads that have been revived as zombies. We also ask that you only revive old threads in the General Questions forum if you have something new or significant to contribute to the discussion.

Since this zombie revival adds nothing factually to the original thread, I think that it’s best if we put this poor zombie back into his grave.

Thread closed.