I have issues with posts like this.

No contemporary historians, even very few historians of the last few decades, writing on AtG uphold this idea of a chaste “buddy” relationship between A and H. That line of thinking hasn’t been upheld for decades. Every modern researcher- 1/?

-of Alexander’s life will agree that there is an intimate or homoerotic aspect to their relationship.

Posts like these, while intended to be lighthearted I suppose, only perpetuate an outdated notion of Classical research that undermines the work of queer historians who- 2/?

-have been around, have been published, and have been held in high regard for decades. The days of “straight-washing” ATG died long ago. Perhaps the issue here is with history dude bros, who are NOT historians but are people who appropriate antiquity to uphold their own- 3/?

-often white suprematist and patriarchal views, and that is a related but separate issue.
As for historians, this is an old issue that has been rectified in scholarship long ago and it saddens me that people don’t acknowledge this in favour of pretending like it’s some kind- 4/?

-of closely guarded secret and that all historians loathe to admit to, and that historians/Classics as a whole still tow the homophobic/queer erasure line when the truth is more often opposite.

I feel like it undermines me, a Queer Classicist researching ATG, because I’m- 5/?

-always fighting against people who think they are very enlightened and clever unlike those nasty stuffy historians who are oh so homophobic and want to erase all evidence of queer people. That’s not to say Queer erasure has NEVER been a problem, it clearly has. But it’s not- 6/?

-a problem in the way these posts make it out to be. This undermines the work of not only queer historians, but also just scholars who work on this area who acknowledge queerness where appropriate, in favour of perpetuating the “old stuffy homophobic historian” stereotype. 7/7