Gay History in School Textbooks

Post Reply New Topic

Well they can't really leave those things out of it, as they are all things that exist.....but trying to create different histories to teach people is kind of ridiculous. They should include stuff about those issues in history to begin with....instead of teaching a horribly dumbed down version of history.

I've a suspicion that most of what will be presented as "Gay History" will be mostly along the lines of "... Professor Giordi Schmuccatelli (who was gay) first proposed this principle in "Der Scientia Abominaliste" (which was owned by a gay couple) ..."

In other words, I suspect that most "Gay History" will amount to little more than identifying or "outing" historical figures as LGBT in a mostly vain attempt to imply that non-heterosexuality is the primary or sole cause for scientific achievement.

I am hopeful that people will eventually realize that an individual's sexuality has little or no bearing on their intelligence or creativity.

Of course, "hopefulness" and "suspicion", being opinion, prove nothing.

Quite frankly, I found the black history segments of my courses to be fairly interesting at the time. I've discovered since that George Washington Carver found a lot of uses for peanuts, but none of them was peanut butter. Just goes to show ya...

Oh, and I also got my fill of the American South's version of the American Civil War, and quite frankly I have since discovered two things: 1) slavery figured into it more than the Southerners like to admit, and 2) most of the people actually fighting in the war did indeed believe that the North side was invading them without provocation, but the political leaders were a little bit duplicitous in this regard.

And a third thing, most of the generals were, as usual, just working stiffs if you want to own the truth. And, quite frankly, I would trust a working stiff before I would trust a politician, and the only reason I would trust a CEO before I would trust a politician is that I can expect the CEO to reliably behave like a selfish ass. Politicians are at best conflicted between self-interested crookedness and common moral decency, at worst psychotic and unaffected by either. Neither quite catches my fancy, but I have had very good luck at capturing and taming the better natures of people I know in the first place are corrupted as*holes.

Oh, but off that tangent, I never actually minded the diversity-minded classes all that much. In fact, I found the whole affair to be amusing. However, I wondered occasionally if the black people might have felt uncomfortable with the whole affair. I have realized since that most black male teenagers are really more interested than anything else in either music or sports, only one of which I particularly approve of, and I think the ones who do the music crap would make better use of themselves if they used their talents for honing their hacking skills. They obviously have the intelligence for it, but a dysfunctional culture has led a lot of promising young men down the wrong path.

But that's neither here nor there.

Here is a list of famous homosexuals in history

http://www.lambda.org/famous.htm

Some of them must be pure speculation. Others, like Julius Caesar, probably just occasional homosexuals.

I've read a lot of Herman Melville's works, and it never occurred to me that he might be queer. Although I do recall a college English professor who could see a phallus in just about anything, and who reputedly went wild with Moby Dick.

Eleanor Roosevelt? Why? Because her husband was semi-paralyzed?

A lot of the others I never would have guessed. But, then again, I never would have guessed Rock Hudson, either, until he became one of the first major celebrities to die of AIDS.

I suspect that eventually some homosexuals will be identified from among the Continental Congress. Just like Thomas Jefferson, who is now widely celebrated for having fathered many of his own slaves, among his other accomplishments. There must have been some that were buggering their male slaves. Because they could.

We should probably go with people that expressed to be homosexual . My best example since I am a CS guy is Alan Turing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing) and he was prosecuted for it. Gasp.

And can I ask - believe me, I am really glad I got out of school before any of this fix the text book stuff got going -

Why should I - Joe Typical middle schooler - need or want to know George Washington's favorite breakfast, what John Adams and the Missus did in bed, whether Lincoln was constipated, and that Jackie Kennedy had to get undressed in the dark?

I do not see why it matters [except for some desperate History grad's dissertation] what percentage of the Union troops were Russian Jews, Polish Jews, Swiss German, French German, Colored passing for White, Sikhs, Libertarians, chain smokers, KKK members, spies from Tennessee, or aliens from the Zorbon system.

Frankly, the only reason the Gettysburg campaign mattered to me was that my sparkling teacher had me write a serious research paper on it which helped train me to think WHICH IS WHAT WE SHOULD ALL DO AND WHAT EDUCATION SHOULD BE ABOUT, not memorizing a poem written by one of Thomas Jefferson's slavdes.

That's an interesting list there, I think a lot of it is pretty speculative. Those people are taught in history tho, it's not like they're non-persons. I don't think sexual preferences are relevant to their achievements.

They are not relevant to their achievements, but you often get to read biographies of characters.

I don't think a black/gay history month solves anything. But I really think that a character being homosexual is as relevant to history as the character being a man or a woman or as the country of origin of the character. Or whether the character lived in poverty or not. Those are all a bunch of items that are common tropes among biographical bits that you have to go through in school, so...

Specially if the character has been a direct victim of prosecution for such aspects of his/her character.

James Buchanan might be celebrated as our first homosexual president, except for the fact that he was such a lousy president.

Jimmy Carter says we'll soon be ready for another homosexual president

http://www.moonbattery.com/archives/201 ... er-ti.html

Certainly Rush Limbaugh's name should be added to the list of prominent queers.

If it's relevant they should be teach it but I don't think they should go out of their way to speculate on which historical figures might of been gay or bisexual. Even then, I don't see how it's anything besides a passing reference. I'm hoping their teaching more of the civil rights struggle rather than that.

Most kids nowadays don't even know basic history so I wish they would work more on that rather than every interest group mandating that they get their equal time.

Why not, we speculate about Columbus' origins a big deal.

But I guess, yeah, speculation is rather dumb, same with Aspergers and stuff. It is not like there weren't enough confirmed homosexuals in history. Like von Steuben, Michael Angelo or Jesus.

First you say Jesus didn't even exist now you're claiming he's homosexual.

You wonder why people get angry towards atheists and homosexuals a lot, its cause you start implying a religious icon was something to support a lifestyle that is considered sinful.

In reality all of this is nothing more than an attempt to push the homosexual lifestyle onto children, and that is wrong. Kids are supposed to be kids, not sex objects.

Takataka has to have a minimum proportion of possible sense before it is worth commenting on.

We have passed the point where we can wonder whether Vexillifer's utterances are of more value than a mynah bird's.

Let us assume for the moment that Josh, the son of Joe and Miriam Christ existed. If the stories told about him are true then he hung around with guys an awful lot and he never seemed to have a girl friend. One may, therefore, wonder. But soft. Even a butch guy like King David, who was a murdering thug, had the warms for Saul's son Jonathan. There is no biblical text ever indicating they were physically intimate but they definitely had an emotional attachment to each other.

ruveyn

Don't call Josh "Christ" unless you mean it, partner.

I guess, if you are obsessed like the panda is and like he says Evangelicals are, you can wonder.

But me - I guess too many people have wondered about me and my ways and my friends and my absence at orgies for me to put that much stock in such "wonderings":

I thought Christ was the family name.

ruveyn