In a bygone, more sexually reticent age, it was understood that
one’s sex life wasn’t anyone else’s business. Even as they
undermined the traditions that had buttressed restraint (especially
among unmarried young women), those in the vanguard of the sexual
revolution appealed to Americans’ libertarian instincts. What
right, they asked, did the community have to know about peoples’
sexual status or behavior?
Apparently, we’ve come a long way, baby. People’s sex lives are
everyone’s business — especially when it comes to figures of
historical note. In California, the state Senate has just passed a
bill that would require school children to study the historical
“role and contributions of people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or
transgender.” Watch out, Leonardo da Vinci: You’re no longer just
an artist, inventor and mathematician — you’re about to become a
gay poster boy.
Obviously, it would be absurd to try to teach about the civil
rights movement without explaining that Dr. Martin Luther King was
black, or telling the story of the suffragettes to anyone who
wouldn’t understand that Susan B. Anthony was a woman. But in those
cases, the race or gender of the historical figures was uniquely
relevant to their achievements. Were textbooks to discuss the
history of the gay rights movement, the sexual orientation of its
leaders would be similarly germane.
Instead, the California law requires the insertion of sexual
preference into California and American history, even when the
information is completely superfluous. Ironically, the label often
serves to circumscribe too narrowly the achievements of those to
whom it’s applied. Ask yourself: Was Billie Jean King an
accomplished tennis player, or an accomplished gay tennis player?
Was Cole Porter one of America’s greatest gay composers — or just
one of America’s greatest composers? Sometimes, obviously, it isn’t
all about sex.
Time was that the proponents of gay rights insisted both that
they were simply ordinary Americans, who live, love, and work just
like everyone else — and that singling them out for any reason
based on their sexual behavior was the grossest form of injustice.
But now, liberals are requiring that gays, uniquely, be identified,
labeled, and studied in accordance with their sexual behavior when
it comes to the history books.
Certainly, the new bill will create more of the controversies
like the one that raged when a writer inaccurately asserted that
Abraham Lincoln had been a homosexual. And then — like too many of
today’s movies, books, and fashions — the discussion of history
will become rife with gratuitous sexual references.
But it’s worth wondering what many of the historical figures who
happened to be homosexual would think about the new effort to draft
them into the service of a gay empowerment agenda. Would they be
proud — or would they resent having their historical contributions
overshadowed by an irrelevant label that describes nothing more
than their private behavior in the bedroom?
