If I’d stayed on my academic fast-track to becoming a Brit Lit professor, my classes would have 100% covered what all those creative sorts were doing between the sheets because most of them WERE NOT as straight as we assume, as monogamous as we assume, as vanilla as we assume.

Never mind all the beliefs & practices of these traditionally WASP-y mainstays of Western lit - so many of whom were Christian only in name (and sometimes not even that).

And yet a white, straight, Christian & proper identity is often retroactively imposed on them due to fame.

(Except Oscar Wilde. It’s pretty much impossible to straight-wash Oscar Wilde, bless his big, gay heart)

(This is also a big reason why I realized I would NEVER be tenured as a professor working in the Midwest in the middle 90s, so I noped right out of it)

There’s this really bad habit that humans have of projecting our own (perceived) identities onto people from the past (especially if those people happen to look a little like us).

As a result we unfairly set them at our mainstream default religiously, socially, sexually.

This penchant is thrown into stark relief when tombs of partnered men or women are excavated and archaeologists and historians simply cannot conceive the possibility that these were anything other than siblings or “best friends.”

Hint: I’ve had “best friends” like that.

And I know some folks might be tempted to say, “But a poet’s sexuality doesn’t impact their art!” And I guess those folks have never created anything, because who you are & how you are & how (or if) you fuck & what you believe about the world all go into your art. All of it.

Art isn’t this pure, pristine ideal that exists somehow separate from the artist. It is raw & human & messy and is a distillation of their time, their culture, their psychology, their triumphs, their traumas, their politics, their spirituality ... everything that makes them them

Art is who we are as artists.

With each creation, creators pull themselves apart down to sinew and bone and reconstitute that essence in their medium of choice: a canvas, an instrument, a sculpture, a printed page.

To understand the art you must understand their context.

Erasing a creator’s sexuality or belief system or political stance simply b/c it is somehow inconvenient or undesirable through a modern lens means removing a piece of their puzzle. Often a very significant piece.

How will you ever truly understand their work around that void?

*Obscuring* these things - or worse, replacing them with something false (as in straight-washing) - is like replacing some of the notes in a Beethoven piano concerto with the xylophone. It is no longer what was intended. The changes may even render it absurd.

That said, you don’t have to *agree* with every aspect of a creator. Lovecraft is a great example for this. His racism informs his work. Some aspects of his work don’t make sense if you pretend he wasn’t racist.

You don’t have to approve of his racism to know it influenced him.

Poet W.B. Yeats is a good example of a creator whose work makes less sense because a piece of his puzzle is regularly erased or altered.

Because he was Irish, most traditional academics assume he was Catholic. But Yeats was an occultist into all kinds of weird shit.

If you erase or replace Yeats’s occultism with “standard Irish Catholic guy” you completely miss that his poem, “The Two Trees” is about a Western metaphysical understanding of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life & its dark mirror, the Qlipphoth.

And feel free to look up all of that because it makes the poem more profoundly cool. Years wrote it in two pieces that echo key images as through a glass darkly. He’s used his verse to show you the spiritual qualities of the tree of life and it’s dark reflection.