achilles: when I die, mingle our ashes together so that we may be together for eternity
historians: f is for friends who do stuff together
We’re seriously escalating the astronomically out-of-touch “academia is hiding all the gay from you*” meme on this forsaken hellsite to “Academics Who Study Ancient Greece Are No-Homoing Achilles?”
reALLY? *REALLY???* That is not remotely a current or mainstream school of thought. I mean, fuck, if you go to JSTOR and search for “Patroclus” your third result is an article called “Achilles and Patroclus in Love” from 1978.
This shit is dangerously anti-intellectual. It’s hard enough for the humanities to retain funding as it is, the last fucking thing we need is an erosion of the perception of its authenticity/necessity coming from the Left as well. And believe you me, that is exactly where this road leads. It’s the exact same playbook that the far right uses but with a different hat.
Also - unless you’re somebody who spends a lot of time studying primary sources - if you learned about a queer historical figure, it’s probably because a HISTORIAN studied and wrote about them. I’ve seen people pull the ‘all historians are homophobes’ on a secondary source about James I that said very openly that he was gay, which is some real big irony.
I think a lot of the people who make posts like the above are confusing actual historians (who write papers about gayness in antiquity) with high school history teachers (some of whom will deny almost all academic work in whatever history period they’re presenting the Spark Notes version of, especially if it involves queerness)
