King James I: *builds secret tunnel connecting his room to the room of a man he calls his husband*
Historians: it’s very hard to tell what kind of relationship they would have had, let’s not look at this through a 21st century lens
i mean, no. there wasn’t this whole late 80s-to now trend of “no homo” in the 17th+18th cent (as a whole–let’s let the Puritans be anti-homo bastards who will rot in unread history books). homosocial/same-sex friendships were a lot more affectionate at the time than they are now. i mean, shit, pick up any shakespearean play and see how many times a man says “you know i love you” to another male character, that didn’t mean he was gay. now, that’s not to say that he wasn’t or that he didn’t have what we’d think of as gay desires, but he wouldn’t have have the words that we have today. sexual queerness has had a long and storied history and to ignore that in favor of going ‘uwu they’re gay!!!’ borders on homonormative, it’s just the reversal of insisting that someone is straight.
but sure, let’s just automatically point at stuff like this and call it gay. because fuck history and studying sexual queerness, right? let’s just slap our modern labels without considering why other historians might be so hesitant to do so. (and deconstructing that hesitation would be a more solid case than just saying LOOK HE SAID HUSBAND HE MUST HAVE BEEN GAY.) fuck’s sake.
@currently-madeoflove maybe he was bi =)) He did after all, have female lovers.
Given how fucking HARD HISTORIANS HAVE TRIED TO ERASE HOMOSEXUALITY in figures like Da Vinci and Michelangelo, ie, trying to erase and burning most of Da Vinci’s sketches for being too homoerotic, you really think historians haven’t tried their damned hardest to erase how gay as all fuck this guy was?
Especially given there’s three major recorded instances of him falling in love with men, publicly, with written evidence, from his own writings and the observations of others.
Fuck you, dude. You’re just as bad as all the straightwashing historians who thought two lovers in Egypt were, like, bros or whatever.
ONE GOOGLE SEARCH AND MULTIPLE SOURCES COULD HAVE TOLD YOU YOU WERE WRONG but nah you just wanna be a dumbass.
But here, to soothe your whole “can’t be too modern” issues about this post:
HE WAS MORE IN LOVE WITH MEN THAN WOMEN. GIVEN THE SETUP OF HIS CHAMBERS AND HIS INTERACTIONS, HE LIKELY FUCKED THEM, ROLLING IN HIS OWN HYPOCRISY.
There you go. Facts. No labels. No modern takes. Just observations from historical sources.
JAMES LOVED VILLIERS MORE THAN HIS OWN WIFE, WHO HE TREATED LIKE SHIT. HE PREFERRED HIS SUPPOSED HUSBAND OVER HIS OWN WIFE.
Does that help?
If it doesn’t, there are a couple of people on this post who’ve already proved you wrong 🙂 Just check the notes.
Death By Catchphrase 