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Teaching DesmondisAmazing LGBTQ history

Posted by Sick Rose on 2022-August-15 18:50:32, Monday
In reply to DesmondisAmazing -- Uh, maybe not so... posted by Manstuprator on 2022-August-15 14:12:54, Monday

I watched the first few minutes of this.

He says "it's important for kids to be taught about LGBTQ history."

I couldn't agree more.

Let me take a stab at designing a curriculum.

Start, of course, with the Symposium and the Phaedrus (perhaps using one of Sb's videos?) juxtaposed with introduction to myths such as Zeus/Ganymede and Apollo/Hyacinth.

Proceed to love poetry of Virgil and Anacreon.

No neglect of the visual arts -- detailed study of kouros statues and Attic vases (with Camille Paglia's chapter on the Beautiful Boy in Sexual Personnae as the accompanying text?)

Some Bible study in which students are invited to ponder the words of David to Jonathan ("More wondrous than woman's love was thy own love to me") in light of Leviticus. Musing on the disciple "whom Christ loved?"

Immersion in the art of the Renaissance and early Baroque with particular attention to the work of Botticelli, Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Carvaggio, and Reni.

Biographical studies of figures such as Alexander the Great, J M Barrie, Oscar Wilde, James I (of King James Bible fame), Lord Baden-Powell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Alan Turing.

Readings in the poetry of Walt Whitman and Gerald Manley Hopkins, not to mention Melville's Billy Budd, Gide's l'Immoraliste, and Thomas Mann's Death in Venice and Tonio Kroger.

Music must not be neglected! Beginning, of course, with the man-and-boy choir that lies at the root of the Western classical tradition. Major emphasis on 16th century polyphony, with particular stress on the works of Nicolas Gombert, the greatest composer of the era (teachers advised to use discretion in discussing his arrest for dallying with a choirboy and release only under direct intervention of Charles V.) Brief look at leading composers of Baroque opera -- Jean Baptiste Lully, who was, like Gombert before him, rescued from charges of pederasty by monarchical intervention -- in his case, Louis XIV -- and Handel (might this be the time to bring in "T" issues by teaching on the role of the castrati in Baroque opera in general and Handel's life in particular?). Close examination of the life and lieder of Schubert (Who is the wanderer in Die Winterreisse really pining for?) and a study of Parsifal as the foundational work of the music of the last century ("spiritual nourishment for pederasts” as one contemporary called it – some discussion of the relationship between Wagner and Nietzsche?). Not to mention the operas of Benjamin Britten.

Now, it is important in this era of diversity and inclusion not to ignore the history of non-Western cultures. Suggest, therefore, a rounding out of the curriculum with required readings of Saikaku's Great Mirror of Male Love (“the love of boys went into ascendancy and that of women into precipitous decline; boys without older male lovers were looked on with pity”), healthy dollops of medieval Persian love poetry, and discussion of the “Passions of the Cut Sleeve” from classical Chinese literature.

And, to finish it off, introduction to anthropology with specific attention to male initiation rites in Papua New Guinea and aboriginal inhabitants of Australia and the Americas.

That ought to provide youngsters with a good, solid grounding in LGBTQ history. After all, the purpose of education is to free one from the prejudices of the ignorant – that the mores and standards of one's own time and place are universal rather than simply the product of the prejudices of a particular moment in human history.

SR
Sick Rose

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