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I want to share some thoughts about how cultural prejudice has led to a dishonest accounting of queer people in history.
If that sounds dry we can call this long-ass thread, "Get in, loser, we're gaying Chopin".
If that sounds dry we can call this long-ass thread, "Get in, loser, we're gaying Chopin".
Polish piano god Frédéric Chopin was gay. We know this because he wrote about his sexual desire for other men in his letters, as reported by music journalist Moritz Weber. Hidden feelings, kissing, dirty dreams, even sex in public restrooms. https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/music/chopin-s-interest-in-men-airbrushed-from-history-programme-claims-1.4418979
This is awkward for the bigoted grandees of Poland for whom Chopin is a national hero. Poland is incredibly hostile to queer rights and would rather we NOT acknowledge that Chopin was gay, which means we should shout it from the rooftops.
Poland is brazen in its bigotry, with towns recently declaring themselves "LGBT-free zones", but even countries that recognize LGBTQ rights are in no hurry to recognize the queerness of national heroes like Lincoln, Shakespeare, and even Alexander.
In revisiting Chopin's letters, Weber noted that an archivist had changed a male pronoun to female to obscure the object of Chopin's desire. This sort of "correction" to "protect" the reputation of public figures is shockingly commonplace.
Writings by Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Brontë, Tchaikovsky, Dickinson, Aristotle, and more have been destroyed, edited, or omitted from the record by historians, interpreters, and estates, in order to obscure queer desire.
Henry James wrote letters about pulsing and throbbing and wanting a male friend's "inches". His family redacted the letters for fear of people -- and I quote -- "putting a vile interpretation on his silly letters to young men".
This has happened for generations, in art as well as biography. If you think the omission of Achilles and Patroclus's love from Homer's Iliad is a Victorian or contemporary invention, the first such edits we know of occurred at least 2300 years ago.
(Bigotry is actually one of the ways we know queer people have always existed. Those pricks don't acknowledge us when we do cool shit, but they will absolutely write it all down when they want to throw rocks at us.)
Anti-queer historical vandalism has also seen artefacts destroyed and sites desecrated to erase evidence of queer love. The problem is not just a lack of interest in preserving queer history, but an active desire to obliterate it from the record.
Then we get to the presumption of straightness. Same sex relationships are reflexively categorized as platonic despite any evidence to the contrary. Relationships between men and women are rounded up to "great romance" to plug apparent gaps in a biography.
In the case of Chopin, soprano Konstancja Gładkowska and artist Maria Wodzinska are conidered his great loves. The man he actually adored, activist Tytus Woyciechowski, was dubbed a "bosom friend". (Everybody needs a bosom for a pillow.)
The presumption of straightness is so endemic that it's given us the historical concept of "romantic friendship", which categorizes intense same-sex friendships as something other than queer. Except...
If we assume that queer people always existed (we'll get to that), any same-sex _romantic_ relationship is a queer relationship, even if chaste. "Romantic friendships" don't "protect" historical figures from being queer. Romantic friendships ARE queer.
(NB. The subreddit /r/SapphoAndHerFriend catalogues the many ways that straight people LOVE to mischaracterize queer relationships as "friendships". It's very entertaining if you can laugh through your enduring disappointment. https://www.reddit.com/r/SapphoAndHerFriend/)
There is an argument that queer people DIDN'T always exist, because queer identity is a modern invention. We can assess people's behaviours (where recorded), but we cannot know how they would identify if they were alive today.
You know what else is a modern invention? Straightness. In fact, queerness has been around longer than straightness. Straightness is MORE modern. No-one said they were "not like that" until some people were identified as "like that".
Here are some things that are not modern inventions: Men having sex with men. Women having sex with women. Same-sex love. Defiance of gender expectations. People who do not fit a gender binary. Diverse gender expressions.
Queer people exist even where queer identities are not defined. 'Queer' is not only a claimed identity, it's a radically inclusive term for a range of identities and relationships. An amazing word that does a lot of hard work. I'm comfortable applying it to historical figures.
I also think queer identity HAS always existed, albeit under many different names, and has been especially visible in worlds of art, dance, music, literature, spirituality and magic, and in people who were strange, flamboyant, defiant, eccentric. Queer.
One thing we CANNOT do, in fact, is presume straightness. There is nothing a straight person can do that rules out queerness. Got married? Had kids? Destroyed a civilisation? Sorry, doesn't prove anything. You want to prove you're a straight man? Name every car.
The people who want to erase queerness from history have a set of arguments they rely on. A big one is, "It was common in those times to..." and then they'll describe a queer behaviour and say "of course, there was no implication of anything sexual".
For example, we're told men shared beds to "save money", which sounds a lot like telling your parents, "he's my roommate". Shouldn't we look for evidence of queer behaviour being hidden in spaces where we expect queer behaviour might be hidden?
(The possibility of sexual acts also gets erased. One historian claimed that Alexander the Great probably never had anal sex because he would not have known about it. Buddy, I promise you, there are people "discovering" anal sex all the time without an instructional DVD.)
Another popular argument: "He may have experienced same-sex desire, but he was devout in his faith and never would have acted on those desires." Come on. Meet a person. Just last December a pious anti-gay politician had to resign when he was caught fleeing a gay orgy!
The worst argument is: "We should not tarnish a close bond by implying a sexual element." This is undisguised prejudice. A same-sex relationship does not lose intensity, profundity, spirituality, because of sex. Sex is not a moral stain.
There is a contention that inferring sexual intimacy is at odds with the necessary job of normalizing non-sexual same-sex intimacy, especially between men. I disagree; I think it's the same project.
Normalizing same-sex intimacy between men must include sexual intimacy. There should be no shame or evasion attached to the idea that two men who are "just friends" might be more than friends. It's OK if people think you're gay, even if you're not.
Queer people have always existed. The silences in our history are not absences, but omissions, and that's doubly true in queer women's history. The dead cannot identify as queer, but in order to claim our queer history, we can identify _with_ them.
Seeing ourselves in history, and seeing what people like us have accomplished and endured, can make a difference to queer people today. We have always been everywhere, since long before we had a name. And we have always been denied and erased. We need to embrace our past.
Final note about Chopin: He left Poland when he was twenty and never went back. Like a lot of gay men, he maybe didn't feel very welcome in Poland.
If you got anything out of this thread, please vote for JLQ in this poll and tell your friends, because we also need more queerness in fiction. Thanks! https://twitter.com/DCComics/status/1377289848780808194
For more of my thoughts on queerness in history, check out my Old Guard story with Jacopo Camagni, out later this month. https://imagecomics.com/comics/releases/the-old-guard-tales-through-time-1-of-6
