One bit in particular, I would imagine (though Bagoas was an “all the way” eunuch, so maybe not).
I’m quite aware that ancient and modern notions of sexuality are different (my BA was in ancient history with emphasis on ancient culture) and in some ways that’s the point of the research I’m doing, but that’s another topic. Also, I’m arguing a recent Fundie article about homosexuality not being genetic as “gays don’t have children” with the rebuttal that for most of history, many if not most of the people we would now classify as gay did marry and beget children (which still doesn’t prove it’s genetic, but at least cancels out that particular argument) and I wanted to give examples of gay parents (Alexander, Oscar Wilde, Thomas Mann, Richard the Lionheart [his marriage was unconsummated but he had at least two bastards], etc.).
snort He only said so in an interview, in that kind of “everyone’s bisexual”, and “I’m bisexual at spirit.” It sounded a lot more like he was trying to be “cool” and “different”.
Still, sleeping with Courtney might have turned him off of women. shudder
I think it’s pretty safe to say that the multimarried Lord Laurence Olivier was bisexual (and he was married to Vivien Leigh, who had episodes of nymphomania, which wasn’t good). Lord Byron also diddled with both genders but was married (his only legitimate daughter being the only child of his he never met).
I personally think Ralph Waldo Emerson was gay (for one thing his youthful journals about his fixation with a particular classmate whose name, ironically, was Gay) but whether it was consummated or not I don’t know. Henry Adams was married* (no children) and I’m almost positive he was gay (he spent way too much time describing beautiful men and nude statues of men in his books and letters.)
*His wife, Clover, was a photographer and committed suicide in an odd matter- she swallowed developing fluid. I’ve wondered before if he was informed of the event by friends saying “There’s been a horrible development with your wife.”
And while the jury is out on Langston Hughes, several key players in the Harlem Renaissance (both male and female) were gay, including Countee Cullen, who married Nina Yolanda DuBois (the pampered and beloved daughter of W.E.B. DuBois) in one of the great Harlem social affairs ever. (DuBois didn’t approve of her true love, a bandleader, and thwarted the romance, essentially arranging her marriage to Cullen who, as an intellectual, he approved of.) The marriage was an unqualified disaster and soon over. (I know she had a daughter but I’m not sure if it was Cullen’s.)
On the DVD special features of The Hours, the son of Vita Sackville-West is very frank about his mother’s affair with Woolf.
I think it’s more fair to say that Leigh suffered from bipolar disorder. I don’t even think that nymphomania is even a credible diagnosis anymore, is it?
Poor Vivien Leigh. You know he broke the news that he was leaving her on her birthday?
She actually died by swallowing potassium cyanide, a crystaline chemical used in the formula for developing fluid.
As to whether Henry Adams was gay, read some of the hundreds of letters Henry Adams wrote over a period of 35 years to Lizzie Cameron, the younger woman he was enamored with.
Dorothy Parker’s second and third husband Alan Campbell, who apparently married the much older Ms. Parker for her income, writing talent (he was a second rack hack) and as a beard.
They divorced and later remarried, inviting the same people to the second wedding as the first. A wedding guest remarked to Dorothy “You know, most of the people in this room haven’t spoken to each other in years,” to which she replied “Including the bride and groom.”
My understanding was that there were no bastards known to have existed - unusual for a nobleman, let alone a king, at that time. But admittedly the last info I had on this topic was over twenty years ago - what is your basis for believing this?
I find the Wikipedia article to be suspect, simply because they define Richard the Third as the club-footed, hunch-backed king. Other than the Tudor-era Shakespearean play (and he was a hell of a playwright, but not an historian <yes, I do tend to slip the ‘h’ on historian, hence the ‘an’>) based on the even MORE Tudor era Sir Thomas More’s biography (and the man was five when Richard III died, so we’re not talking first hand experience here), there’s no evidence to suggest anything more than one shoulder a bit lower than the other. This has been debunked for a very long time - if Wikipedia couldn’t be bothered to get that right, why should I believe anything else they said?
I also think there’s a big difference between someone who is truly bisexual, and someone who has had a single affair or experimented with people of the same sex. The latter two don’t really say anything about one’s sexuality except that one is not absolutely, rigidly against the idea of having sex with a person of the same sex. It really doesn’t demonstrate a preference.
Similarly, I don’t think you can realistically discuss people who came from cultures where bisexuality was the expected norm - I’m thinking ancient Athens here. If everyone around you does it, you tend to automatically do it yourself.
As people have said, I guess I’m just saying you can’t attach much significance to many of these people even assuming that every one of them had at least one homosexual experience. Given how fashionable bisexuality has been over the past twenty years (and in artsy circles, make that the last hundred years), it’s impossible to know how many of the modern people listed as bisexual engaged in such out of actual sexual attraction rather than curiosity and a sense that ‘all the beautiful people do it.’
He had a son, Philip de Cognac (fictionalized as Philip Faulconbridge in Shakespeare’s King John) by an unknown mother who was mentioned by chroniclers in his own lifetime. About a generation after his death he was said to be the father of a son named Fulk (a common name in the Angevin house) by a woman named Joan de St. Pol, but these sources may be less reliable (or it’s even possible that Philip and Fulk were the same man). He had no children by his queen Berengaria and was admonished by a Cardinal to quit practicing “Eastern vices” and return to his wife at one point. Many historians refuse to accept Richard’s homosexuality in a manner much like the denial of Sally Hemings among Jefferson biographers.
Sampiro, I have had two American history professors completely dismiss the idea that Eleanor R. was gay. They argued that the letters themselves can’t really be used as evidence - everyone back then wrote in a similar style.
They had other arguments, but I can’t recall them. There was a book published a few years ago that claimed to “prove” that she was a lesbian, but both professors knocked it pretty damn hard.
AFAIK, the professors have never met (graduated from different states and currently work at different colleges), and both gave the strong impression that the historical community dismisses the rumors as rubbish.
That Lorena Hickok was a lesbian is not up for debate- she was quite open about it. That Eleanor Roosevelt was by the 1930s locked in a very unhappy marriage with an unfaithful husband with whom she probably has not had sex in well over a decade is well established. Remembering these things, read the following:
Now, honest answer, does this sound like “two good friends” talking, or the correspondence between lovers? Are you familiar with any correspondence between Lou Hoover or Bess Truman, both of whom were writing letters in the 1930s, in which they discussed how much they longed to kiss or cuddle or how they couldn’t speak their true feelings because their grown child* was present?
I honestly don’t think that I’m reading between the lines on blank paper when I say that the above, which is just a few randomly chosen excerpts from a lengthy correspondence, is between two people who have been physically (romantically) and emotionally intimate. And trust me: if the letters mentioned putting on snorkels and looking for each others G-Spots, there are academics and biographers out there who would dismiss it as “snorkeling was big at the time, and the G-Spot was slang for ‘gravy boat’, which people collected at the time and used to keep their snorkels in”.
*Jimmy was Eleanor’s son, James (1907-1991)
