[codebreaker]

Lincoln, Robin Hood..who next?

[codebreaker]

http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_107.html?menu=

[Dog Gone]

Shouldn't you have posted this on the cheese forum?

[Alas]

There is a huge differance in being gay and being a homosexual. I have no doubts that Good ole Bill was gay, but find it next to impossible to think of him as a perverted sodomite homosexual.

[aristeides]

There are reasons for thinking that Shakespeare was what we would now call bisexual. This was not a concept that existed in Shakespeare's day, so not only would he not have not identified himself on that basis, he wouldn't even have used such a word for himself.

This was the era of the wars of religion, when persons with the wrong views, like Catholics under Elizabeth, were threatened with persecution and worse. We know Shakespeare's father was a Catholic even after that became illegal, and there is good reason to believe that Shakespeare himself was educated as a Catholic when that was illegal. He was certainly not an open Catholic during his adult career, but I think there is no way to know what his real private opinions were. The sympathy he exhibits for Catholic kings of England in his history plays and for Catholic priests in plays like Romeo and Juliet suggests to me he remained a Catholic at heart. But, whether or not that is true, his family history and his youth gave him reason to sympathize with Catholics, who were regarded as the arch-traitors in Elizabeth's England. That gave him skepticism and sympathy for all sorts of characters, including villains.

And, in his day, religious loyalties and sympathies counted for far more than sexual orientation. Even a semiopen pederast like Christopher Marlowe identified himself more as a freethinking atheist than as a pederast.

[Torie]

The link is inoperative, but if "Shakespere" was in fact Lord Oxford, than he was most certainly gay.

[MoJo2001]

Abraham Lincoln and William Shakespeare are gay?? Jesus Christ will be next. This totally reeks of Tina Brown and her ilk!

[ATOMIC_PUNK]

NEWS FLASH

William Shakespeare is DEAD

[The Duke]

BFD

[gcruse]

 New Evidence Emerges to Prove William Shakespeare may be Gay

You don't prove 'may.'

[Merdoug]

Oh no, here we go again. Won't the fairies ever give-up in trying to pervert our history? I wish these deviants would just shut up, lock their doors and b***er each other out of our sight.

[Thumper1960]

"Hom(e)o, Hom(e)o, where for art thou, Hom(e)o?"

[Gaston]

Shakespeare wasn’t gay although he was a thespian when he was younger.

[Physicist]

I do believe Shakespeare might have written this:

Or not.

[BradyLS]

Lincoln, Robin Hood..who next?

Don't you know the rule about historical figures? Once the autobiographocal gold has been mined by the first few generations of scholars, the late-comers "discover" that they were either gay, consumed by an STD, or were at the very least engaged in adulterous affairs.

[Joe Boucher]

There is a war going on, who cares if Bill was a fag?

[Kevin Curry]

Such salacious garbage is vitally important to the pro-buggery set.

The fact that the Bard is quite possibly the greatest writer of the Enlgish language ever to have lived is not nearly as important to these twits as the tenuous possibility that he got perverse satisfaction from rear-ending other men.

[Intolerant in NJ]

New Evidence Emerges to Prove William Shakespeare may be Gay...ain't the post-modern deconstructionist movement great? Find one little item about some character and from it spin a complete fantasy "proving" whatever you want others to believe about your subject - I'm betting this is all based on the fact that Shakespeare is depicted as wearing a fluffy collar in some his supposed pictures....

[weegee]

Well, let's see. Robin Hood was fictional (and therefore had no sexual relations). They aren't even positive of who Shakespeare was but someone claims to know that he was gay?

Let me guess, anything to do with the fact that women's roles were played by men?

[Clint N. Suhks]

Evidence shows more filth and degradation posthumously bestowed upon people who can’t defend themselves. Alexander the Great, Abraham Lincoln, Aristotle, Socrates and Jesus Christ all lumped in to making the same base and repugnant behavioral choices in order to justify perversion. Sad people desperate for validation.

[DonQ]

This is by no means new. Someone was coming up with strange theories about whether the "dark lady" of the sonnets was a man more than 50 years ago. Considering that the facts solidly known about William Shakespeare could barely fill one typed page and include (1) he never spelled his name that way, (2) he was married, and (3) he had children, I would have my doubts about this theory.