- If you heard this, what would you think?
- [Reader] I had had these kinds of feelings subconsciously
before I came here because I remember that once
when I slept with a girlfriend,
I had a strong desire to kiss her,
and I did do so.
I could not help being terribly inquisitive over her body
for she had always kept it hidden from me.
I asked her whether as proof of our friendship
we should feel one another's breasts,
but she refused.
Now, I come into ecstasies
every time I see a naked figure of a woman,
such as Venus, for example.
It strikes me as so wonderful and exquisite
that I have difficulty in stopping the tears
rolling down my cheeks.
If I only I had a girlfriend.
- Would you think that that was said by a girl
who was straight,
or maybe a girl who was questioning her sexuality,
or maybe a girl who was coming into
a lesbian or bisexual identity?
This is the mystery of Anne Frank's sexuality,
which I want to talk about today
in as far as it is a context for a wider conversation
about how we label LGBTQ plus people throughout history.
When you talk about these things
or you look at the comments sections on websites,
there's always a couple of ideas that come across.
One, we can't know for certain.
Two, we can't impose an identity on someone
that they didn't use when they were alive.
Three, well, that seems pretty obviously not straight to me.
Four, acknowledging LGBTQ plus people in history
is super important.
So, if we listen to what everyone is saying,
it's both impossible to label people
but also very important that we label people.
So, what is going on?
So, some people might have an issue with labelling people
who didn't label themselves,
or, at least, didn't seem to label themselves.
A counter argument to that is that historically,
and even in a lot of places today,
it was impossible to label yourself
even because specific words or labels weren't available
or didn't exist in the language
or because to do so openly would mean execution,
ostracization, or imprisonment.
For those people, we might turn to private thoughts.
So, for example, letters or diary entries,
such as the ones that Anne wrote,
but then, those are often rejected with things like,
"You're confusing romance with friendship,"
or, "That's just how people spoke to each other
in those days," and in that case,
maybe we want to look at public records,
for example, court cases.
People who had admitted or were found guilty
of things like buggery, but then, is that just an act
and not necessarily an identity?
Those people still haven't necessarily identified themselves
as a gay man or a bisexual man
just that they have had sex with men.
Can we label those people?
Consider, if you will, the example of James Barry.
Barry was a military surgeon born in the 1790's,
and actually, rose to the second highest medical position
in the British Army.
Barry's entire adult life, spanning 56 years,
was lived as a man.
However, they were seen as female enchanted.
Not a lot of information about Barry outside of the medical
and military documents exists.
We don't actually know the date and year
that they were born, for example,
and Barry asked to buried in the very bedsheets
that they'd died in,
and no one would examine the body.
Assumedly, so that they would be remembered as a man.
So, is this evidence that Barry is a trans man?
Can we call them that?
If trans man is too prescriptive,
might we say that they're just definitely part
of the LGBTQ plus spectrum,
or is it an example of a cis woman
who had to pretend to be a man
in order to get ahead in terms of education and occupation?
And if we argue that, is it possible to say that anyone
of any time period in which woman were underserved
in terms of education or occupation
could even be a trans man
because there was such an obvious societal reason
why a woman would dress like a man?
Some people might say that the labelling of historical people
as LGBTQ plus is some kind of modern agenda,
but I think it is just as much an agenda
to want to keep these things out of history.
Ken Burns has said of his documentary about the Roosevelts,
"This is an intimate history and not a tabloid history,"
and I think that equation of sexuality of historical figures
with the tabloid, the grubby, the scandalous
is kind of problematic.
The idea that the discussion
of sexuality and gender identity
is somehow below historians,
I think, betrays an agenda, too, quite clearly.
I think it's an issue if we fail to mention these things,
if we fail to bring up the evidence,
if we fail to talk about this
because it creates the idea that LGBTQ plus people
just sprung out of the earth less than a hundred years ago
and that they didn't exist before then,
but more importantly,
that they didn't contribute anything before then,
that they weren't people worth remembering.
Well, I think that this is the kind of argument
that we see in a lot of different marginalised identities.
The idea that the entirety of our society
was created by straight, cis, white men
who were able-bodied, it's clearly not true,
and yet, if we say that we can't call anyone in history
LGBTQ plus, where does that leave us?
To my mind, the crux of the issue and its solution
is in two parts.
One, the problem comes when the evidence is buried,
or destroyed, or willfully ignored.
Each piece of evidence, each source in history,
is a tiny part of the totality of a person,
and they all need to be brought forwards,
and the second part of the problem
is when people are assumed to be cis and straight.
That the onus is on proving that they were otherwise.
To my mind, if you say that,
"Well, we can't prove 100% that someone was gay,"
then, you can't prove 100% that they were straight, either.
So, I'm really excited to hear your thoughts
on Anne and James specifically
or this topic more generally
in the comments below.
As always, you can help support me make these videos.
I'll leave a link to my Patreon in the description
along with links to all my social media
so you can find me all over the internet,
and until I see you next time, bye.