berlynn-wohl:

collaterlysisters:

berlynn-wohl:

knitmeapony:

@slothlorien has good thoughts

I’ve got an example:

T.E. Lawrence was a homoromantic sex-repulsed asexual masochist. Having this vocabulary helps contextualize many of the things he did and wrote. But a lot of people today – let alone 30-70 years ago – cannot comprehend that those four identities are a situation that one can even be in all at once, so most of his biographies, when they’re trying to explain his behavior, are just like

*historical gay figure hates self* sex-repulsed homoromantic! sex-repulsed homoromantic!

Cite my sources, you say?

Okay, here we go:

Indications in Lawrence’s writings that he had homoromantic
inclinations:

In Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence does not waste any
time, referring lovingly on page TWO to male Arab “friends quivering together in the
yielding sand with intimate hot limbs in supreme embrace…a sensual
co-efficient of the mental passion which was welding our souls and spirits in
one flaming effort.”

His supervisor at an archaeological site in Carcemish wrote
that Lawrence had gotten “Dahoum [a young Arab whom Lawrence, to be brief,
cared for deeply] to live with him and got him to pose as a model for a figure
which he carved in the soft local limestone.”

Later, Lawrence would admit in a letter to Charlotte Shaw that his
affection for Dahoum was one of his motivators for leading an irregular army in
Arabia in the first place: “I loved a particular Arab very much, and I thought
that freedom for the race would be an acceptable present.”

Lawrence scholars do not all agree that the poem at the beginning of Seven Pillars of Wisdom (which begins “I loved you…”) is about Dahoum, but no one has been able to come up with a more convincing alternative.

Indications that Lawrence had a positive (for the time) attitude about homosexuality:

This is a tricky one, but you have to remember that Lawrence was born in the Victorian era, so the bar for what constituted “positive” was much lower.

In a letter to Robert Graves, Lawrence wrote of Siegfried Sassoon, “S.S. comes out very well. I’m glad of that, for I like him: homosex and
all.”

In a letter to E.M. Forster, Lawrence contradicts Forster’s assertion that his (Forster’s) story The Life to Come is unpublishable because it too overtly gay: “I incline to consider it quite fit to publish. Perhaps other
people’s improprieties come a little less sharply upon one? It doesn’t feel to
me nearly so bad as my true story.”

Indications from Lawrence’s writings (and those who knew
him) that he was asexual, and was not just indifferent to sex but repulsed by
it:

Vyvyian Richards, Lawrence’s best friend at Oxford, said in
his biography of Lawrence that he was “sexless” and “unaware of sex.” “He had
neither flesh nor carnality of any kind; he just did not understand.”

In a letter to F.L. Lucas, Lawrence wrote, “For myself, I haven’t
tried it, and hope not to.” Similarly, in a letter to Robert Graves, Lawrence wrote, “I
haven’t ever: and don’t much want to.”

In a letter to Lady Astor, Lawrence complains about the fan
mail he receives: “Two men and four women have sent me fervent messages of
love. Love carnal, not rarefied…and I am uncomfortable towards six more of
the people I meet, therefore.”

In a letter to Lionel Curtis, Lawrence describes his disgust
at his fellow soldiers’ libidinous behavior: “It’s man’s misfortune that he
hasn’t a mating season, but spreads his emotions and excitements throughout the
year…I lie in bed night after night with this cat-calling carnality seething
up and down the hut.”

Lawrence speculated in the same letter about why people have
sex: “I believe it’s we who led our parents on to bear us, and it’s our unborn
children who make our flesh itch. A filthy business, all of it.”

E.H.R. Altounyan, in T.E. Lawrence By His Friends, wrote:
“Preoccupation with sex is…due either to a
sense of personal insufficiency and its resultant groping for fulfillment, or
to a real sympathy with its biological purpose. Neither could hold much weight
with him.”

To allosexuals, sex is a way to use one’s body to feel good,
but Lawrence was certain that people could only really want to have sex to
perpetuate the species, because the idea of using his own body to feel good was
anathema to Lawrence.

Which brings me to…

Indications that Lawrence was a masochist:

Lawrence spent much of his youth pushing his body to its
limits: when a river in the town he lived in froze over in the winter, he dove through the ice to swim
in it. He would bicycle for hundreds of miles, working himself to exhaustion. He would test himself to see how
long he could go without eating or sleeping.

In Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Book VI, Chapter XXX, Lawrence wrote an extended recounting/fantasy of being beaten and sexually tortured by Turkish soldiers at Deraa. I say “recounting/fantasy” because there are no corroborating sources. THAT DOESN’T MEAN IT DIDN’T HAPPEN. But it is the subject of much speculation. The
account is finely detailed, especially Lawrence’s descriptions of his wounds (which
were on his back and could not have been visible to him) and the whip used. The date that Lawrence
claims it happened conflicts with Lawrence’s own diary, as well as British
military records. Lawrence’s purple prose about the incident may indicate that the story is
completely made up, or it may be a case of him having an intense inner conflict about having found the physical
torment appealing (Lawrence writes, in the middle of the incident, “I felt a
delicious warmth, probably sexual, swelling through me”).

In either case, it is evidence that Lawrence
was seeking a way to atone for his failings as a military leader, as a friend to
the Arabs, or as a human being, a way to self-flagellate, as the medieval monks did.

Later, when Lawrence was in the RAF, he apparently paid a
fellow soldier to administer beatings, using a flimsy story about an uncle who
was disappointed in Lawrence because he rang up some considerable debts. We
have only one source for this story – the fellow soldier himself, who revealed
it to biographers decades later. Read The Secret Lives of Lawrence of Arabia if
you want the details.

To sum up: my belief is that Lawrence was not consumed with self-loathing because he was
gay; he was consumed with self-loathing because he had a physical body. Like
those aforementioned medieval monks, whom he admired, from a young age Lawrence
wished to see his body gone, but failing that, he wished to see it punished for
being so weak and vulnerable.

This self-hatred, evident in his youth, was compounded as the war ended and he
realized that his exploits in the desert had only delivered the Arabs from one
empire to another. For years after the war, wracked with shame and suffering from catastrophic PTSD,

Lawrence insisted on (re-)enlisting
at various military branches at lower and lower ranks, to re-live over and over
the agony of boot camp and the daily indignities of military life.

Lawrence fetishized suffering. He wanted to suffer only at the
hands of other men, but he never indicated that he wanted to suffer
specifically because of his identity or orientation. Rather, he wished to suffer because of
what a crashing disappointment it was that he had manifested physically on this
sinful planet, and had not (by his own standards) managed to do anything to redeem himself for it.

Hope this helps!

Excellent research here and based on my own time reading his works I can only say: YES THIS.