Over 4 years old.
People in history by default are str8. :dubious:
They are also bt default male and white, too. :rolleyes:
Like Pocahontas or Shaka Zulu or Gandhi or Genghis KHAAAN! or Ho Chi Minh or Queen Elizabeth or any other of the non-white and/or non-male people that in many history books?
Gandhi was white, unless you happen to be posting from pre-Mandela South Africa.
Well, of course Genghis Khan was white. Don’t you watch the movies?
I sense a trap, but I was referring to this Gandhi, not the other one.
It’s interesting how times have changed.
When the Lord of the Rings movie mania hit full swing, I would peruse the fansights in search of rumors about the films. On them you could find endless chatboard threads discussing how very, very queer Frodo and Sam were. Despite the fact they were the inventions of a rather conservative Catholic Luddite who would probably have regarded Queer Eye as a Sign of the Apocalypse. Despite the fact Sam clearly had a robust interest in good ole’ hobbit nookie, as the brood of little hobbitses he sired with the lusty collaboration of one hot little Rosie Cotton clearly demonstrates.
Dunno about these Japanimation heros, but Frodo and Sam were just very good friends, OK? Yeah, they loved each other, but not that way, awright?
Depends on your definition of “white.” In the earliest racial classification schemes northern Indians at least were classed as caucasian.
- Tamerlane
Actually, Ben Kingsley is half Indian, half Jewish. His real name is Krishna Bhanji. Cite.
Oh and Gandhi, coming from Gujarat ( northwestern coast ), would almost certainly have been so classified by early racialist ( not necessarily racist ) ethnographers.
- Tamerlane
No trap. As others have noted, if “race” means anything besides skin color, the “Indo-Aryan” (yeah, yuk, but it’s the established term in antithesis to Dravidian and Munda) peoples of most of India fall into the Caucasian group. While we don’t need to get into another “three races is an erroneous categorization” discussion, if we accept the historical usage Gandhi is as Caucasian as Dag Hammarskjold.
What about Buchanan? The only president who never married. The case for him being gay is way stronger than that flap about Lincoln. However, John Updike, in Memories of the Ford Administration, theorizes that Buchanan failed to marry because of a broken heart, because his fiancée died before they could marry (and Updike further suggests she was planning to break it off, and he subtly hints that she accidentally committed suicide with an overdose of laudanum). How romantic, perfect for an author of novels. But if I had to pick one gay president, it would be Buchanan for sure.
Guinastasia, did you know that Rasputin was a member of a Russian sex-cult? He was a notorious seducer of women.
Have you looked under the couch cushions? Four years is a pretty long time for them to be lost…
No, under the cushions is where I keep Jesus. I don’t get why everyone is so confussed when I respond honestly to the question of if I had found Jesus.
Oh, and on the new topic, it’s interesting to note that the aborigenes of Japan, the Ainu are often called “Caucasoid”
Dude, did you even WATCH that movie? Sam obviously swings both ways. 
Johanna, yep, indeedy, that he was. He was also rumored to be…uh, how should I put this-very, very gifted.
I think a good deal of this comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of history. It’s foolhardy in the extreme to look simply at actions and judge them by modern standards because our culture has changed so much.
For example, one of the “homosexual” activites attributed to Abe was sleeping with another man. Anyone with basic knowledge of the times can tell you that this was an extremely common practice-- hell, it was less common to have a bed all to yourself. People thought of beds the way we do couches-- not necessarily as a private sphere (the concept of privacy in of itself wasn’t well established.)
The Victorian era was also one of purple prose and over-dramitization of emotional scenes. When a writer states that “He clasped me to his breast”, the writer could be describing a simple hug between friends. They tended to make things sound more passionate than they were.
Thirdly, in Lincloln’s case, I think that speculation about his sexuality has more to do with Mary Lincoln than anything else. That woman inspired more hatred than any first lady other than Hillary-- and was equally underserved. It’s my opinion that a lot of the talk of Lincoln’s “lost love” Ann Rutledge and potential homosexual lovers is a denial that Lincoln could have seriously loved Mary. To people who despise her, it’s unfathomable that The Great Emancipator could have chosen to spend his life with that. No, no, there must have been some tradgedy or some dark secret which kept him from what he really wanted, so he had to settle for Mary.
I’m guilty of this, I admit. Often times I have to have someone throw a brick at my head with a note wrapped around it saying “Gay” before I’ll get it. I believe this is mainly a combination of two things. One, I look at the world through heterosexual eyes and I tend to think everyone else I meet is heterosexual until shown otherwise. The other part is that characters in movies, television, and books don’t generally act naturally so I’m not sure if there’s suppose to be some subtext or whether it’s just poorly written.
Because being gay is wrong. Well, at least that’s been the popular opinion throughout a large portion of western history. If the powers that be view homosexuality as a deviant evil then you wouldn’t want to mention the sexual orientation of great men and women. After a while people get so used to omitting certain details that it just becomes second nature.
Since homosexuality has been considered a perversion by many it has also held value as a tool to attack rivals. The Greeks would insult other men by saying they “took it up the ass” and even in modern times H. Clinton is “accused” of being a lesbian by some of her more virulant critics. Sometimes it isn’t easy to weed out the truths from the slander. Ask poor Catherine the Great about her horse some time.
If anything people are becoming more aware. I don’t know if my parents ever learned that Julius Ceasar was a “husband to every wife and wife to every man.” I guess we’ll have to wait 20-30 years and see.
Marc
I dunno. Sometimes it seems like they could have written “Clutching my palpitating body against his, he transfixed me to my very core with his rampant organ of lust” and someone would say, “That’s just how men TALKED in those days!”
He was actually rather tanned. “White” if you consider “white” to be identical in meaning to “Caucasoid,” which I don’t. Albinoes are white, even if they’re from Polynesian stock. Finns are white. Anthony Fedorov is white. “Caucasoids” are often olive, tan, or brown (& Nubians, as I recall, are both Caucasoid & black).
Hmmm. I’m guilty of the opposite, to be frank. I look at the world through gay eyes and somehow assume every man is gay unless proven otherwise. Unfortunately, I am proven otherwise too often to my liking.
My gaydar is broken. I have a wishdar - instead of detecting gay men, the wishdar indicates that men I wish were gay are gay (unless proven otherwise, and I am proven otherwise too often to my liking, to beat a dead horse).
But I think the fundamental issue is that one cannot really classify people into gay or straight. Sexuality is a bit more fluid: it defies being categorized into two or three categories.
WRS - what if Catherine died because of a stallion of a man instead of just a stallion?