would it kill historians to say “yeah these ancient romans wouldn’t have thought of themselves as ‘gay’ in modern terms” (sure, whatever) without calling the existence of gay people “our current cultural baggage”
Also, these ancient romans would not have thought of themselves as ‘straight’ because the concept ‘straight’ didn’t exist yet.
They did not call the places where their empire met other empires ‘borders’ because the concept ‘borders’ didn’t exist yet.
They would not have found us ‘normal’ or ‘abnormal’ because because those words and concept didn’t exist yet.
See also the roman concept of a chair, of a family, of very damn near EVERYTHING. And that’s before you start considering all the concepts they did have that we don’t. You can either put a disclaimer of EVERYTHING, every damn time, or you have to wonder why only sexual and gender diversity are contextualized out of existence.
Well, historians DO put a disclaimer on pretty much every social concept they use to talk about ancient peoples… Like it’s a basic thing if you want to study past societies in themselves… EVERYTHING is contextualised, it’s… the basis of historical science as we know it?? I wrote something about what I think of these issues, would answer the same thing here.
Sorry for the passive agressive tone, I agree with the OP about the denying of the very existence of same-sex relationships and I know that historians are often liberal/centrist/socdem fucks and that their obsession of nuance with every issue that’s a bit political IS extremely painful, but I’m also getting a bit fed up of the kind of claims that don’t take in account how history is actually studied and what is the aim of the historical approach.
Hey, I’m a historian so yeah, I know that. My point was that only the ‘the concept of gay did not exist back then’ makes it into public history, documentaries, schoolbooks, Tumblr etc. The fact that almost none of the concepts we know today existed back then… not so much. And the fact that this contextualisation is so selectively applied to public history serves the purpose of erasing queer history.
QueerAnarchism 