#sorry for the sudden historical rant lmao

[seagodofmagic]

this is a tangent from the post i reblogged but i’ve also noticed a real problem in more mainstream, straight-authored biographies where a biographer will footnote to someone else’s secondary source discussion of their subject’s sexuality, but without any meaningful evaluation of the original source--even when that’s necessary for a reader to understand the information they’ve just been given. ron chernow does this in his hamilton biography in a big, bad way (the main source he footnotes for all the laurens stuff is a Hot Mess of freudian, misogynist garbage), and i’ve seen it happen in a fairly random range of other stuff i’ve read--including footnotes to a 1990s frederick douglass biography (why), some of the scholarship on pietro metastasio, and secondary source assumptions about some of the random 19th century people i used to read a lot about in high school (adam badeau, louis weichmann, and probably others).

obviously this is kind of how we Do History and of course historians should credit other people’s scholarship but there’s a difference between bullshit freudian sensationalism, actual queer theory, and homophobia masquerading as representation.  a lot of straight biographers just don’t want to wade into all this and make their own arguments (it’s safer to say james t flexner thinks something than to say YOU think it; and it’s easier to call a dude “ambiguously bisexual” than to discuss any of the sources that make you think so).

anyway it’s a process and the presence of pure-hearted queer historians doesn’t actually solve academic homophobia. and sadly not all scholarship that acknowledges our presence in history is all that it should be.