Gay History in School Textbooks

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Wilde was not a tame lion.

AND something in human nature keeps people speculating about celebrity sexuality, present or past.

I think the speculation about ancient celeb's personality disorders ,may stem from the temporal voyeurism.

See? I told you that sexing up middle-school history would liven things up.

Here is one take on the story

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dp-6dHbszRQ&feature=related[/youtube]

No kissing and bowing, though. But, otherwise pretty accurate.

it it like a window thru time looking directly into the bible times.

NOT another verdoemd bloedig video from motl!

It matters not to me whether Jonathan and David actually existed, and whether or not they were actually gay.

What did matter to me, when I was a young gay man, was that the story was open to that interpretation, and that as a result I could realize that there was a place for me in the world.

All children who self-identify as different from the mainstream community will look for validation in the form of others like them, and history provides a valuable way of demonstrating that there are role models for all.

One cannot deny that Michaelango's David



is tinged with homoeroticism.

One wouldn't get away with placing this statue anywhere in 99.9999% of the USA.

Trying to ignore motl.

I do so get that. For me, it was fiction. Somewhere - maybe around 8th / 9th grade - I fell into Forester's Hornblower series. Besides a wealth of detail on the British navy of the Napoleonic period, I instantly instinctively recognized myself in Hornblower. Not blow by blow, but closer than anyone I met for years.- and enough parallels in history and personality to be a BIG source of support for a Green Monkey outsider.

And, there is no more gay-sounding name than "Hornblower"

Bump.

I'm hoping I can get back to this thread later. Some very inaccurate assumptions about history have been made here.

my view is that no one was gay before 1950 and that no one was homosexual before 1870.
because those are socially constructed identities.
Of course there was tons of man on man doings before that.
and not just in ancient Rome and Greece but consistently and constantly thru the ages.
But the people involved in said man humping did not see it as their primary identity and marriage was about joining families and producing heirs, something that dude who prefer dude love are as interested in as anyone else.
only after the marriage decayed into companionship and something you do for Love
did the Idea of gay marriage even make sense.
So Gay history should start with the sodomy trail of my hero Oscar and go through Stonewall, AIDS, and Gay civil rights and not really go back to biblical times.

In history class, the point is to learn about past mistakes so we don't do it again. Blacks, Chinese, Mexicans...the list goes on. Apparently, it is the age of the gays and a whole bunch of old white people are going insane. Let them do what they want and eat your hard candy!

"Queer Theology" seems to be making a few ripples

http://americansfortruth.com/issues/queer-theology/

I disagree on a number of scores.

Firstly, there were same sex marriages performed in the classical age. There were a sufficient number of them that Constantine saw fit to prohibit them in the Theodosian Code which would not have been necessary had they not been going on (or had there not been significant demand for them).

From my perspective homosexuality exists well before any social coining of the term. But, what I will grant you is that prior to the 19th century the legal view of homosexuality was one of behavioural determinism. It might be that no one conceived of "sexual orientation" prior to that time, but there were no fewer men whose primary sexual attraction was for other men, (and mutatis mutandis women as well).

The real change comes, I argue, not with psychological understanding in 19th century, but with economic freedom in the 17th century. Up until that point, people were born into their place in the economy. Most wealth was tied up in land, and one was very much tied to the land that one owned, one farmed, or on which one laboured. The merchant class was extremely small, and even here, children born to merchant families had very little mobility.

But with the growth of cities in the 17th and 18th century came the ability for men to leave the places where they were born and to exploit their labour for wages. This gave men, for the first time, the ability to live independently of paternal control, and the need to marry and have children. The growth of "Molly Houses" in London in the 18th century is ample demonstration of a subculture rooted in male-male sexuality that goes beyond simple behavioural determinism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fa%27afafine

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hijra_%28South_Asia%29

I am pretty sure I have heard of a transvestite society in some Amerindian culture but I cannot find it fast.

Children shouldn't have sexuality forced on them in the first place.

There is nothing sexual about gay rights.