Tennyson wrote The Two Voices during a deep depression after his bff Arthur Hallam died. Mainstream scholarship says they were friends.
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But I mean, look at this verse from "In Memoriam A.H.H.", as one of many examples:pic.twitter.com/WUT0CZPaBr
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For real, I am in active relationships with people where, if I told them that, they'd be like "woah this is escalating a bit."
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At one point, Hallam and Tennyson went on a "secret mission to the Pyrenees to deliver a message to a General written in invisible ink."
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Yeah, okay. And my best friend in college and I were definitely writing code for the CIA in secret. Definitely that.
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Mainstream scholarship goes to absurdist lengths to even acknowledge what we'd today call queer love. "Oh, there's no evidence."
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Because leaving evidence could ruin your life. In some 20+ US states today, it still can.
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There are some more modern takes that look at Tennyson as "androgynous" or possibly "bisexual," but even these are clunky.
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The point is, multi-faceted gender and sexuality dynamics have *always* been present in our art, media, and culture.
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And academics have historically gone through exceptional lengths to erase these interpretations to hold up their heroes as normative.
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This still happens in technology, which fancies itself as academia-adjacent. The CoC battles in *every* language community make this clear.
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When we trend toward the default, we erase the beautiful details of a person's life that caused them to create in the first place.
End of conversation
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