In view of the fact that the long-running debate about Frederick the Great’s sexuality continues to rumble on, he’s perhaps not the best example to take. Indeed, given that, whether or not he was homosexual, there is general agreement that his deeply disfunctional relationship with his wife and his pronounced preference for male company were key factors in the court politics of his reign, he’s actually a good example of someone whose sexuality would be worth some sort of discussion, even in a school textbook.
On the general issue, it’s important to recognise the difference between references to homosexuals and references to homosexuality. Mentioning that someone was a homosexual just for the sake mentioning that he or she was a homosexual is no more than crude tokenism. Worse, on its own and out of context, it’s next to useless as a way of understanding homosexuality as an historical phenomenon.
On the other hand, an actual discussion of homosexuality as an historical phenomenon might well be entirely appropriate, most obviously if included as part of a wider discussion of social history. The real difficulty is doing justice to the complexities of the subject - is sexuality cultural and does it change over time, did partners of the same sex necessarily have any sort of ‘homosexual’ identity and can we avoid imposing anachronistic twenty-first-century assumptions on to the past? - within the simplistic conventions of a textbook.
It is a valid topic but I don’t quite know how to fit it into a high school curriculum. In Texas, and this may have changed, high school students take two semesters of American History and two semesters of World History. That’s roughly 9 months for each subject starting with Mesopotamia in World History in August and ending somewhere in the 20th century by May if everything goes according to schedule. I think everyone can agree that 9 months will only give you the bare bones account of what’s been going on for the last 2,000 years. I bet’cha they skip the Ottoman Empire though.
I don’t think they have the time to do the subject justice. We’re talking about basic history courses here and I don’t think they have the time to discuss Frederick’s icy relationship with father and the friend who was executed and what that all meant in his court. There just isn’t time.
Our premise is that other than missing gay part of history, that we are giving an accurate account. I dont think so. The ruling ,majority class has written the books in their image and likeness. There are women that would argue and a couple Indians that would feel slighted.We teach false history. In Japan after ww2 Pearl Harbor seemed to be skipped. In any country history is slanted.