Gays in History

One of the things straights do to make us appear unimportant and irrelevant is to minimise our contribution to culture, to history.  Gay or bisexual artists, scientists, writers, and the famous are made out to be straight.  Gay kids growing up -- and for that matter gay men and women who are grown up -- are deprived of role models which will make us know we are not alone; more, that we have made the world a better place.

Have a look at this video:



Jules Verne?  Gustave Flaubert?  Laurence Olivier? Vincent van Gogh?  Sergei Eisenstein?  Botticelli?  Leonardo da Vinci? Good grief!

Now one may quibble:  some of these were clearly bisexual.  All the same, the moral still applies.  I didn't know the people I've mentioned were even gay-shaded, and I'm nearing 60 and have spent a lifetime finding out.  What chance does some poor gay teenager surrounded by hate have when it seems to him that he is the only person like this in the world.

And the video doesn't even mention Julius Caesar, or Alexander the Great, or Alan Turing (without whose genius we wouldn't even have computers or this blog or the video).  Do the Christian-Fascists realise that it is because the very gay-shaded Alexander the Great conquered the near East and brought Greek culture and dominance that it was possible to write the New Testament in the Greek of the time, called Κοινή (koine -- which means  "common"); that Christianity itself is a fusion of Jewish religion and Greek philosophy and all the "good" philosophers were at the least bisexual (Plato and Aristotle definitely, emphatically, were.)  And let's not even start on Shakespeare, central to the creation of English as a great language.

Tcha!  Ignorance and bigotry.  Next time a troglodyte sounds off to you about how unimportant (and coincidentally, how evil) gays are, remind him of just how many of us there are and always have been, and how much we have made the world.

[My thanks to Rockhunter for sending the video link to me]