sapphixxx:

impostoradult:

adhd-ahamilton:

“Were there any straight people in this period of history?”

“Well…obviously
speaking, there must have been some people that nowadays we would
describe as ‘straight’, but we have to be very careful about applying
modern standards of sexuality to the past. I’m sure if you asked anybody
at the time if they were straight, they would have been very confused.
And there’s something quite dangerous about forcing identities onto
people who might not consider themselves that way. You also need to keep
in mind that some things that today would seem ‘straight’ to us – like
getting married, having children, etc. – were just the way things were
back then. Nobody would have thought twice about doing that, including
non-straight people. And there were plenty of people who undoubtedly got
married, had very intensely emotional connections with their spouse,
but then went off to go see their lover. Again, sexuality is a very
complex thing, so I wouldn’t presume to state definitively that anybody
was ‘straight’, and especially not without good, solid evidence that
they were exclusively heterosexual. To presume otherwise would not only
be making a lot of assumptions, it might even just promote harmful,
overdone stereotypes about what makes someone ‘have’ to be straight, you
know? So, yes, technically speaking there were, but I don’t see any
reason to specifically consider straight people historically.”

I know this is supposed to be facetious, but it is a genuinely sound approach to take. Calling people who lived 500 years ago “straight” IS inaccurate. They weren’t straight, not in the modern sense of the word. (references: X, X, X)

I’m glad someone finally addressed this. Because I see this post floating around occasionally, and as a lesbian historian of sexuality, most of the replies just make me so tired. The issue with historians ignoring, redacting, or outright falsifying historical examples of gender non-comformity and same sex attraction is a matter of them being homophobic. The practice of academic rigor to not introduce presentist bias is not in any way at fault. The way people behaved and thought of themselves hundreds of years ago is very different to how we behave and think of ourselves now. What’s important is to recognize the truth of history, which did in fact include TRUCKLOADS of same-sex sexuality and love, as well as a huge range of gender non-conformity, without assuming that those things looked the same and were experienced the same way as they are now.