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When it comes to discussing historical people's sexuality's, I have a few rules as a history student. I know there's a lot of debate over whether to use labels for historical people or not and frustration with straight historians being heteronormative. So here's a thread!
1) I think it's important to differentiate casual discussion/non-academic discussion with academic/official discussion. I think Sappho was totally a lesbian and say so on twt and support others saying so! But I would not in an essay, because even though she lived on Lesbos and-
is the reason why the term Lesbian exists, in her lifetime she'd have understood it to refer to people who live on Lesbos, which she did. I would write about her love for women and exclusion of men-but I'd want to be historically accurate to how SHE would have understood it.
Same with Alexander the Great! He had three wives and at least two male lovers. While his marriages were political, all sources say he loved his wife Roxana. So I'm pretty sure he was bisexual and I say so in casual discussion-wouldn't use the term bisexual in academic work.
2) Sometimes you have to reckon with different social standards. Sometimes, things that seem romantic to us were not at the time of writing. Female friends in the 19th century would write VERY romantic sounding letters to each other, but they weren't actually romantic.
So sometimes things seem very romantic and historians talk about friendship and that's because, as far as we know, it was, because that was how friends communicated at the time.
Of course there's a problem of homophobia and heteronormativity among straight historians! But it's not always the case. I'm writing about sapphic women in Victorian England-I can tell you, historians have worked so hard to study how sapphic women wrote to each other.
For example, one of my sources writes effusively in romantic language to a woman who was a platonic friend. Of the woman she lived with and called her wife? She wrote a paragraph in her autobiography that was circumspect. If you know what to look for, you know what she was-
talking about, but it takes a lot of knowledge of how language and customs worked in that period. Approaching it through today's standards would likely lead you to believe that the friend was the wife and the wife was her roommate/friend.
BY THE WAY: In Victorian England, middle class artist/prominent sapphic women lived with their female romantic partners and called them their wives or husbands I cry over this all the time, thought you should know!
Also, in Victorian England, women who loved women used words like "sapphic" to describe themselves. "Lesbian" also existed but did not yet describe a sexual attraction until at least the late Victorian period.
3) Sometimes things are murky, but sometimes things are clear. Anne Lister was VERY clearly a lesbian, and she lived at a time when I would say so in academic writing. James Barry very clearly a trans man-didn't have that terminology, but it's very very clear.
And to be clear-we've always existed, whether we had modern terminology or not. There have been women who only loved women, people who were attracted to same and different genders, people who disagreed with their gender assigned at birth, who were non-binary-
and men who were only attracted to men. In cases like Lister and Barry, it is incredibly clear who they were and people who try to deny that are fools. Sometimes, though, it is tricky to know if a woman was bi or a lesbian-whether her marriage was out of necessity-or,
if she really did love her husband while also loving women. A woman being married to a man was NOT an automatic sign that she was bi-women married men for a variety of reasons and marriage wasn't primarily for love anyway.
And many didn't have the power to create a code out of ancient Greek to write that they only loved women like Lister did to clear it up for us. There are many historical figures where we don't know how they would identify as gay/lesbian or bi/pan today and we never will.
4) In academic writing, I'm also careful not to apply modern LGBT terms to historical periods where it didn't exist not only because I want to understand historical people as they understood themselves, but I'm careful about Western hegemony.
This is NOT against the terminology itself-it's so important, and I love calling myself bi and it's important to queer poc too. But it IS language that developed in Western countries that were colonial powers that denied us the ability to create our own language.
For example, there are Indigenous Two Spirit people and in South Asia we have the Khwaja Sara. I also love being called bi, but often wish I had a term that was popular for the same thing in Urdu.
This thread became very long and it rambled, but basically my point is, calling Alexander the Great bi casually is great! But an academic paper that doesn't use the term isn't wrong UNLESS the historian denies Alexander had any attraction to men which would be ridiculous.
And to be more cognizant of when and when not to use terms. The historical evidence tells us that Anne Lister was a lesbian. Sometimes it's more murky than that.
And while there are many straight historians that DO deny and erase queer history, don't tell queer history, etc-sometimes it's more complicated.
