Re: The recent passage of a bill to put gay history into textbooks (which already require textbooks that note the contributions of women, blacks, Native Americans, Mexicans, Asians and Pacific Islanders. )
Will famous people’s histories become less accurate or more accurate when people have to guess about the nonpublic parts of their lives?
I do have to admit it would be fun to read that the Mayflower was a gay cruise ship.
Agreed, but this is a silly question. Having false history is like having false truth. There’s no such thing. History, like the Truth, just is.
If people are gay, then they are. Their accomplishments and works aren’t fundamentally changed because of it.
I detest PC-ism as much as anyone, and I don’t think that idle speculation about the sexual orientation of historic figures has much place in basic history education. On the other hand, discussion of ancient Greek and other classical-era topics would probably benefit if the censorship of the past couple hundred years was reversed.
I agree with the others. It’s a big leap from “including gay history in textbooks” to “outing” historical figures there are rumors about in some misguided move to provide equal time. Where their sexuality is clearly relevant to their contributions to history, OTOH – that ought to be in the open. Oscar Wilde, Walt Whitman, the Stonewall riots, Barney Frank, etc.
Is there historically significant information that is currently being omitted from history books because it involves gay people, and this bill will add that information to the books? Or will this keep the books essentially the same but just add info like “Plus, Ben Franklin was gay”?
My only objection would be if the book “outs” people who weren’t actually gay, which, from the quote, seems possible.
Eleanor Roosevelt probably did have a lesbian relationship with the reporter mentioned, but to think that Abe Lincoln might have been gay because he shared a bed with another man shows a fundmamental misunderstanding of the way life was back in the mid-1800s. (People frequently shared beds at that time-- it was actually more rare to have a bed all to yourself.)
If the authors of the proposed textbook have such a shaky understanding of history that they would interperet something so harmless as evidence of homosexuality, I have strong objections to using their work to teach students.
I swear, 90% of the debate and conflict in this ole world could be resolved if people really understood what is meant by the terms others use.
Before my message causes me to be typecast as a blazing homophobe, let me start by saying I am a gay man who has fought for gay equality and rights for more than three decades, and who recently got legally married here in Canada to his same-sex partner of 30 years (you know how it is with those gay relationships, they never last 
)
But what exactly is “gay” history? How about left-handed history, or the history of beautiful people, or ugly people, or whatever?
There cannot be such a thing as “gay history”* per se*, because gays have always lived in and among the rest of society. There has never been a society that has no homosexual members, nor has there ever been a society that was majoritively homosexual. There have been huge differences in the extent to which sexuality in general and homosexuality in particular were regarded and treated.
So much for “gay”. Now about “history.”
There is no such thing as perfectly objective history and there never will be. For example, I was seriously told by teachers, when I was a kid in school, that the continent on which I live was “discovered” in 1492, and that before that there were “only” Indians.
I was also given the impression that the Native people in the Americas numbered maybe a few tens of thousands of extremely primitive wretches who were completely unworthy of possessing such a wonderful rich continent, when white people from Europe could make such good use of it.
Only in recent years have I learned that there were many millions of native persons in the Americas prior to 1492.
Everything we are taught in history is tinged with our prejudices and fears and nationalism. American kids are given the impression that Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation represented great new advances in human freedom. This may make a lot of my American friends angry, but the ugly fact is that the US was one of the last western countries to abolish slavery, in the mid 1860s!
If you had waited four more decades, you could have had delivered your human merchandise by air!
Did you ever read some of the racist and insulting remarks Abe Lincoln made about blacks? In fact, he clearly said that if he could have preserved the Union without abolishing slavery he would have done so. What if the Southern States had not seceded? Would the US stock markets be giving us quotes for “prime healthy negroes” in 2006?
The fact is that at the time of the Emancipation Proclamation and even decades earlier, slavery was a scandal that disgraced the US in the eyes of most other countries. For example, if you visit the Thomas Jefferson Memorial in Washington, you will note an engraved quotation in which he says that nothing is so certainly written in the book of history as that black persons must someday be free. Look up the rest of the context in which he wrote that. He basically wants to ship free blacks back to Africa, and allow the lynching of white women who have sex with black men (which did not keep him from fathering three children with Sally Hemmings, a slave woman of his).
All we can hope to do is identify the prejudices and bullshit in our history and try to make it more balaced. You do not accomplish this by teaching “black” history or “gay” history. You do this by ensuring that you get as close to the impossible objective of “objective” history as you can, knowing that you will never reach it.
You identify the bullshit and the falsehoods introduced by nationalism, prejudice and ignorance and correct them.
When it comes to gay people, the main form of prejudice in our teaching of history has been to make them invisible. Alexander the Great and Hephaestion were just “real good friends”, for example.
Now, I am not saying that we should make a point of mentioning everyone who was gay whether it is relevant or not. But the deep and most likely sexual love of Alexander for Hephaestion helps us make sense of why Alexander went apeshit when H. died.
The fact that FDR died in the presence of his mistress, who had to be whisked away by the secret service, is probably not necessary to mention in a schoolbook, for example. Not because it is sexual but because it is a minor detail. But it might be worth mentioning in a detailed biography of FDR.
On the other hand, if kids are studying the poetry of Walt Whitman, it could be mentioned that Whitman was gay. After all, this allows us to understand and appreciate his references to his “friend” who will come to visit him, and how he will lie next to him, etc. Whitman did not write porn, but he DID write some poetry that has erotic content, and it was a gay erotic content. When we castrate Whitman and hide his sexuality to please the religious right, then what we are in fact doing is teaching “straight” history.
So I say, if “gay history” means some sort of separate chapter in the history books we use to teach kids in school, it makes no sense. But if the government bill means identifying and correcting historical inaccuracies introduced by bias and prejudice, then I’m all for it. I just woinder why we need a government act to tell us to strive for the most objective history possible.
“Homosexuality” didn’t exist until the later half of the 19th century (the word was coined in 1869). Sure before that there were men who had sex with other men and women who had sex with other women as well as those who did both.
There’s no reason to think “homosexuality” has existed for any shorter period than the human species. It took us a long time to recognize the nature of human sexuality, however, and that’s an ongoing process. Just because we lacked a word for it doesn’t mean it wasn’t real.
I’m rather in favor of doing away with the sundry “histories” in favor of historical accounts that give weight to the individual players according to the importance of their contributions, glossing over nothing that is salient, nor exaggerating nothing that should be irrelevant. No one can agree on what’s important, however, so history, like everything else, will be balkanized, distorted, and hence, never wholly accurate.
The actual bill doesn’t seem to have that as an objective. It appears to be mostly a “don’t ignore gays who helped, and don’t denigrate them purely because of their orientation” type thing.
And I’d be cool with that. It’s a great idea, however, in reality, it only works as well as the cirriculum associated with it. I’m just hoping that it will be written by real historians who know the subject.
This is no big deal, but the final clause in your parenthetical statement seems highly improbable; might it be an exaggeration?
More to the point, I certainly hope that you don’t believe (as you appear to imply) that the only or even primary reason that some historians strongly suspect Lincoln was gay was merely because he shared a bed with Joshua Speed. That indeed was not uncommon for those with low incomes in places with minimal space.
But when we realize that Lincoln – a man who certainly knew his way around wood – slept in Speed’s bed for four years and never built his own bed or cabin to put one in, this becomes that much more questionable. In fact, from what I’ve read, for two of those four years there were two other empty beds in the same room that Lincoln could have slept in but chose not to. Of course, it could be that both Lincoln and Speed slept together for four whole years merely to share body heat (even in the summer?), and while that is certainly not exceptionally unlikely, it does begin to provide the grounds for a reasonable belief that they may well have been homosexuals/bisexuals.
Note that Lincoln had a history of sleeping with other men. For example, he slept so intimately with Billy Greene in a single-sized bed that Greene declared “'When one turned over the other had to do likewise”. And Greene also curiously noted that ‘‘His [Lincoln’s] thighs were as perfect as a human being could be.’’
For what it’s worth (which I believe is virtually nothing), both Lincoln and Speed eventually married (not each other, though!). But both his own and Speed’s weddings were so incredibly stressful to Lincoln that it wouldn’t be too unfair to argue that he nearly went insane in doubts and second thoughts. And his relationships with women bordered on – or in the case of his wife were truly --horrific. To say that he was distant with his women is quite an understatement.
But there is more. Arguably the strongest evidence that Lincoln was gay/bi comes from an official regimental history of Soldiers’ Home in the District of Columbia, which reports that while he was President, he often slept with another man together in the same White House bed when his wife was away. There is no way to explain this away as various hard skeptics of Lincoln’s homosexuality have all-too-eagerly done with the other cases, such as Greene’s and Speed’s.
Now, of course none of this is proof. We simply do not have enough evidence to know Lincoln’s “true” sexual preference. But we can’t dismiss the possibility and we should not downplay the probability that he was gay/bi. Certainly not as easily as the poster’s comments suggest!
I don’t think so, no. Only the very wealthy had their own beds, and often they would have a servant sleep in the bed with them.
People in the past though of beds like we think of couches-- that they weren’t “private” places (unless, of course, the couple was married) and that they were intended for multiple people to use them.
But it wasn’t only the poor who had this practice. My museum has in its colllection of buildings an upper-middle class home from the early 1800s. It has only one bedroom, shared by the entire family. There is a loft, and these people could have certainly afforded to put on additional sleeping rooms, but they didn’t see the reason why they should. It would have seemed very odd to them if you insisted you wanted your own private room-- why are you being so secretive?
The concept of privacy back then was virutally unknown. Outhouses were designed for multiple users to share, and so were beds.
It’s hard for we modern people to put ourselves in the mind of people back then, but Lincoln may not have understood why he should put effort into building a seperate bed when there was plenty of room beside Speed, and even if there were other beds available, why be so reclusive? Speed may have been offended if Lincoln chose to take himself across the room-- what’s wrong with this bed here? They saw no sexual connotations in two men sharing the same bed. Likely, both had shared their bed with brothers all of their lives, and it may have seemed a bit lonely or stand-offish to sleep alone.
As I’ve read, Mary Lincoln used to bring her sons into her bed when Lincoln was riding the circuit. We certainly wouln’t accuse her of child molestation because of it. She just didn’t want to sleep in the bed alone. Anyone who is used to sharing a bed with a companion knows that when you find yourself sleeping alone, there’s a bit of emptiness. Putting aside any emotional attatchments, there’s a companionship and comfort in having another person in the bed that doesn’t have to have sexual connotations. It’s simply the human dislike of being alone.
In modern times, we put a lot of emphasis on having our own beds and own rooms, to the point where we pity anyone who has to share a bed with siblings. I know of a local judge who refused to overturn a child custody ruling because the mother intended both of her daughters to share the same room, whereas the defendant could give the child her own room. We automatically put sexal connotations on two adults sharing a bed, and will even put one person on the floor in order to avoid it. But people in the past didn’t have these hang-ups and would probably be bemused by our way of thinking.
Several of my close friends are public school teachers hereabouts, and all are frustrated with the way political correctness has gutted useful content, not just of history and civics books, but of math and science books, as well. When the local school district recently researched biology textbooks, the textbook committee rejected all of the major texts because none of them presented zoology within the evolutionary context. The teachers decided to buy a combination of cheaper “supplemental” books, then teach from a classroom guide, which they wrote themselves. It was a lot more work, but the kids are learning real biology. We’re now floating the idea of creating advisory committees from the community to help teachers write similar classroom guides for English, history, civics and earth science. It’s a radical idea, especially considering the conservatism of the local community, but as one parent angrily told the school board, “If I wanted my kids to grow up ignorant, I’d have raised them in Kansas!”
The other thing to consider is that a federal law mandating curriculum elements is only as good as the local district’s addiction to federal funds. Here in rural Colorado, local districts are tired of being addicted and want the federal monkey off their backs. We’ve seen some bitter fights over funding lately, including hard-fought (and won) elections for mill levy increases to replace federal funds.
Apologies to all – on my third read through the indicated hyperlink I realized this was a California legislature bill. :smack: Although I can’t imagine any teacher in Colorado saying, “Well, Lincoln was a fag, so he doesn’t count,” and keeping his job more than ten minutes. I guess my question about the whole thing is the same as putting a warning on hemorrhoid cream saying it’s not for oral use: Is this really a problem?
I find the idea of identifying ‘gay history,’ other than as a specialized college course or a compilation of reading matter for the young gay person coming out and relieved to know that he or she is not alone and is in the company of a lot of historically significant figures, is merely further marginalization of gay people.
However, the careful avoidance of the romantic and sexual as a motivating force in history, whether that be straight or gay, is a needless excrescence from older and darker days. There’s a remarkably good reason why Buckingham’s ouster became a Crown vs. Parliament clash and a contributing factor to the English Civil Wars, and being honest about it is a good thing. What were the problems with William II, Edward II, and Richard II? The answers are informative.
Heck, democracy itself derives from the idealization of Harmodius and Aristogeiton as the proximate cause for the overthrow of the Athenian tyranny.
I personally don’t much care what Honest Abe did in bed, or what “My Day” was honestly like for Eleanor. People are entitled to their private lives. When that relationship, however, impinges on public history, frankness about it is important, for a wide variety of reasons.
I just keeping thinking of A Beautiful Mind, which somehow managed not to mention that having sex with men played a notable role in John Nash’s life. Even in modern times, society is perfectly willing to “de-gay” whatever they can.
How about “gay history?” It’s taught in schools how black people were enslaved and Jews were harrassed and murdered and American Indians were slaughtered and women were denied any legal rights–how abour teaching how gays have been burned and jailed and discriminated against for centuries, and why that’s wrong?
Well, it’s no more wrong than any other focused program of historical education, but again, it could be argued that pre-collegiate history education is compressed enough without fixating on subgroups. Certainly, it does presently (e.g. Africans and slavery), but perhaps a good balance can be struck where the race, creed, orientation, etc. of various historical players enters into the discussion in a way that is proportional to its importance to historical developments. Maybe Abe Lincoln was a poof, but simply throwing that out there when it seems to have had little impact on his historical significance one way or another might make Abes sexuality simply irrelevant. One might want to avoid mere acknowledgement to serve some political agenda. If the importance of a particular marginalizing trait can’t be established in context, it’s not terribly relevant to a pre-collegiate study of history, perhaps. I would imagine the relevance of orientation will prove less easy to establish than, say, West African heritage, for the simple reason that latter is relatively difficult to hide from both contemporaries and posterity.