On the Gandhi drama - and famous GBLT people in history

[sparkindarkness]

We are erased from much of history. Many of our greatest individuals are presented as straight because they either were forced to hide during life or the great wave of homophobic historic editing has erased the fact or them entirely. Our people and our people's accomplishments, are stolen from us, hidden from us and pulled away from us. And that

Comments

[lepusdomesticus]

I've been thinking about this lately (not Gandhi, specifically, but BGLT erasure in history), and I have some mixed feelings.

What I don't like is that when scholars talk about people who are dead and never wrote about their own sexuality, they are relying on the person's behavior and subtext in their writing/actions to assign them an identity when among living people identity is something that individuals must assign to themselves, and what we (humans) do and who we think we are frequently do not match up neatly. I think it is very important (for the reasons you say) to mention when we know a historical figure had same-sex relationships (just as we mention their different-sex relationships), but I hesitate when people say "X person was gay or bisexual," especially if they lived in a time and/or culture (like Alexander) for whom those terms as we use them would seem pretty meaningless. And there's no guarantee that even a person whom we clearly see as having been L,G,B, or T would identify themselves as such if they lived today,

[sparkindarkness]

I'm less happy with that as a concept because for so much of history there has been no words for us - at least, no words that we would claim. That doesn't make them any less us or any less our people. If anything, the lack of any decent labels - let alone the reluctance of anyone willing to claim them - is part of the erasure of the closet

[eva_rosen]

I'm baffled at how this kind of thing gets pulled out again and again as "controversy".

And you're dead on, with people acting as if identifyng a historical figure as GBLT would demean them. Here in Argentina there's an historical figure (Manuel Belgrano) who seldom gets mentioned without stressing he was thought by some to be gay because he had a high voice and was something of a dandy, but really wasn't, because he fathered a lot of illegitimate children (which, aside from not really proving anything-haven't heard of bisexuality, it seems, the poor dears-it's not really something I would be too proud on terms of moral behavior, seems to me.) So he wasn't queer, he just didn't care about his offspring and never took responsability for them. That's not damaging to his memory, but implying he might have gotten it on with guys, spitting on his grave.

[sparkindarkness]

I'm honestly beginning to hate the word - because the very word implies that there's so much wrong with being GBLT

Which is such a thing it's like "he was a completer and utter arsehole? fine. But don't you dare imply he was gay!"