Gay History in Human History

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Gay History in Human History

Fascinated by Stadlover's article "Gay History = Human History" (Guest, 01-09-2007, 4:36)

http://forums.eunuch.org/showthread.php ... an-History

(I could not contact the author, I just quote him ... I was advised to create a new thread).

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The following is from the Androphile Gay History Project: The World History of Male Love website. This is being offered for your thoughts, opinions and hopefully discussion and research. How much of this actual fact, conjecture, twisting the facts to fit the theory or can be backed with full documentation? You be the judge.

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Gay History = Human History

Brief gay history survey and guide to highlights

History is written by the victors. They choose what will be remembered, and what covered up. So it has been with male eros. Looking at any history textbook, one would think that never has a society praised love between men, never has a painter, a poet or a pope shared his bed and his heart with another male. Evidence of same-sex love has been either quietly suppressed, as with the Greeks and Romans, or quickly destroyed, as is still done with newly unearthed Inca and Mayan art. The result of this deception has been a needless polarization of society and untold suffering for those people who happen to fall in love with others of their own sex.

Uncensored, the historical record reveals an opposite reality: the male love instinct is a universal constant. Only society's attitude towards it has varied. All cultures have regulated male love, weaving varied tapestries of ritual around it. And a few have tried - to no avail - to regulate it out of existence.

As a rule, male love was part of the social and religious fabric. From the city states of ancient Greece and Rome with its emperors (Trajan and Hadrian among others), to the Siberian shamans and Native American two-spirit medicine men, from the African tribesmen to Chinese emperors and scholars, people the world over understood and made space for men's vulnerability to the beauty of other males. They accepted that - whether married or not - men fell in love with men or youths, dreamt about them, wrote about them, fought over them, and took them to bed. And they usually understood that boy children were excluded from the game of love, to the same degree that they understood that girl children were excluded as well.

In Ancient Greece love between males was in many ways analogous to the marriages of the time, seen as equally important in the life of the individual, and enshrined in Greek mythology. It was the cornerstone of a cultural tradition that 2500 years ago provoked the awakening of democracy, theater, philosophy, mathematics, history, and so on. Male love was thought to bring out the best qualities in a youth, especially manliness and courage. In warfare soldiers often fought side-by-side with their beloveds, as in the renowned Theban band; later, led by Alexander the Great and his boyfriend Hephaestion, the Greeks conquered the known world. Greece, of course, was no Utopia: prostitution and rape, often attended by slavery, were common.

In Japan,apprentice Samurai paired up with older warriors to be trained in love and war, and even the shogun had - besides his concubines - many boyfriends, their "nanshoku" loves recorded by writers and shunga painters who immortalized "shudo," the Way of the Young. They likewise immortalized the hard lives of the "tobiko" or fly boys, traveling young kabuki actors who had to labor on stage by day and please their clients in bed by night.

In the Moslem lands, famous Iranian and Arab poets such as Hafiz i-Shirazi and Abu Nuwas praised and rued the charms of boys (whom they sometimes plied with wine and seduced). Sufi holy men from India to Turkey sought to find Allah by gazing upon the beauty of beardless youths. Storytellers enshrined gay love tales in the Thousand and One Nights. Artists like Riza i-Abbasi amused kings and princes with exquisitely wrought Persian miniatures and calligraphies. Mullahs and censors railed against male love, but men of all walks of life, from Caliphs to porters, delighted in it and all looked forward to being attended by "unaging youths as beautiful as pearls" once in paradise.

In North America and Siberia, shamanic traditions dating back to the stone age recognized the special spiritual powers of those men and women drawn to same-sex love, as we still see in the Native American two-spirit tradition, which survives to this day.

In the pre-modern west, male love survived mostly underground, visible only when the lovers were unlucky enough to get caught, or when hinted at by artists brave enough to flout convention. Many writers, musicians, painters and poets depicted male love, but always in coded form: Michelangelo, who adorned the Sistine Chapel with vibrant male nudes; Shakespeare, who serenaded his darling boy in his sonnets; Blake who railed against priests "binding with briars my joys and desires;" Whitman, who sang the body electric. The list of luminaries, artists, statesmen, men of the cloth, knights and knaves who felt the pull of male love - by itself, or alongside the love of women - is endless.

The big lie that same-sex love is "against nature," a fiction which flies in the face of both biology and history, depends on censorship for its survival. We at the Androphile Project, gleaning the work of scholars in gay studies, aim to undo that censorship by publicizing gay love's role in man's spirit and culture: its successes, its failures, and the controversies it has given rise to over the millennia. We hope the prose and poetry, religion and mythology, art, philosophy and history collected here from around the world will serve to deepen understanding of male love's place in human nature. As this is being written (winter 2004), it could also illuminate the growing debate about gay marriage, a tradition documented the world over for thousands of years, but nowhere as widely or as recently as in North America, where it was practiced and honored by many of the First Nations.

The documents gathered here are the footprints of the Gay Muse, who has inspired men and women on every continent since the dawn of time. They bear witness to the fact that male love is irrepressible. Where forbidden, it has prevailed over stonings, burnings, lobotomies, schoolyard homophobia, the gallows and the gaol. Where welcomed, it has openly blossomed into the highest achievements of the human mind.

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LGBTQ+ VOCABULARY GLOSSARY OF TERMS

The following list is neither comprehensive nor incontrovertible, but it’s an ever-improving list of definitions for terminology relating to LGBTQ+ identities & people, sexualities, and genders.

https://thesafezoneproject.com/resources/vocabulary/

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Global Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) History in 3 vol.

https://jp.b-ok.africa/book/5617664/23bd5e

Preface

To say that compiling an encyclopedia of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and the history of fluers on a global scale is no easy task, to say nothing. First, it is, of course, the absolute effectiveness of the coating. The Encyclopedia of American Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History (published by Charles Scribner's Sons in 2004) is filled with three volumes containing 545 articles per country, albeit with a highly developed fleur history. In contrast, this new global encyclopedia of lesbian, gay, bisexual, History of Transgender and Queer (LGBTQ), has some 450 articles and sidebars that address issues across continents except Antarctica. Nearly 70 countries have significant coverage in the suite; in addition, editors have demonstrated their commitment to highlighting places with less developed historiography, such as Africa and Asia, by including more articles on these regions.

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Howard Chiang "Transtopia in the Sinophone Pacific"

Columbia University Press, New York, 2021

Howard Chiang proposes a new paradigm for doing transgender history in which geopolitics assumes central importance. Defined as the antidote to transphobia, transtopia challenges a minoritarian view of transgender experience and makes room for the variability of transness on a historical continuum.

(free download pdf, 17.58 MB)

https://jp.b-ok.africa/book/12002185/dea531

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Alan Turing

His ideas led to early versions of modern computing and helped win World War II. Yet he died as a criminal for his homosexuality.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/05/obit ... ooked.html

LONDON — His genius embraced the first visions of modern computing and produced seminal insights into what became known as “artificial intelligence.” As one of the most influential code breakers of World War II, his cryptology yielded intelligence believed to have hastened the Allied victory.

But, at his death several years later, much of his secretive wartime accomplishments remained classified, far from public view in a nation seized by the security concerns of the Cold War. Instead, by the narrow standards of his day, his reputation was sullied.

On June 7, 1954, Alan Turing, a British mathematician who has since been acknowledged as one the most innovative and powerful thinkers of the 20th century — sometimes called the progenitor of modern computing — died as a criminal, having been convicted under Victorian laws as a homosexual and forced to endure chemical castration. Britain didn’t take its first steps toward decriminalizing homosexuality until 1967.

Only in 2009 did the government apologize for his treatment.

“We’re sorry — you deserved so much better,” said Gordon Brown, then the prime minister. “Alan and the many thousands of other gay men who were convicted, as he was, under homophobic laws were treated terribly.”

And only in 2013 did Queen Elizabeth II grant Turing a royal pardon, 59 years after a housekeeper found his body at his home at Wilmslow, near Manchester, in northwest England.

A coroner determined that he had died of cyanide poisoning and that he had taken his own life “while the balance of his mind was disturbed.”

At his side lay a half-eaten apple. Biographers speculated that he had ingested the poison by dousing the apple with cyanide and eating it to disguise the toxin’s taste. Some of those who studied his personality or knew him, most notably his mother, Ethel Turing, challenged the official verdict of suicide, arguing that he had poisoned himself accidentally.

To this day Turing is recognized in his own country and among a broad society of scientists as a pillar of achievement who had fused brilliance and eccentricity, had moved comfortably in the abstruse realms of mathematics and cryptography but awkwardly in social settings, and had been brought low by the hostile society into which he was born.

“He was a national treasure, and we hounded him to his death,” said John Graham-Cumming, a computer scientist who campaigned for Turing to be pardoned.

Above all, Turing’s name is associated for many people with the top-secret wartime operations of Britain’s code-breakers at Bletchley Park, a sprawling estate north of London, where he oversaw and inspired the effort to decrypt ciphers generated by Nazi Germany’s Enigma machine, which had once seemed impenetrable. The Germans themselves regarded the codes as unbreakable.

At the time, German submarines were prowling the Atlantic, hunting Allied ships carrying vital cargo for the war effort. The convoys were critical for building military strength in Britain and eventually enabled the Allies to undertake the D-Day landings in Normandy in 1944, heralding the collapse of Nazi Germany the next year.

Only by charting the submarines’ movements could Allied forces change the course of their convoys, and for that they relied on the cryptologists of Bletchley Park to decode messages betraying the Germans’ deployments.

The enduring fascination with Turing’s story inspired the 2014 movie “The Imitation Game,” starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley. But his scientific range went far beyond the limits of cinematic drama: He laid down principles that have molded the historical record of the relationship between humans and the machines they have created to solve their problems.

Even before World War II, Turing was making breakthroughs.

Credit for the creation of the first functioning computer in 1946 went to the researchers John Presper Eckert and John W. Mauchly for their machine the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, or Eniac, which they had developed at the University of Pennsylvania during World War II.

But Turing’s notions preceded the Eniac. He conceived what became known as the universal Turing machine, which envisioned “one machine for all possible tasks” — essentially computers as we know them today, Andrew Hodges, Turing’s biographer, wrote in a condensed version of his 1983 book, “Alan Turing: The Enigma.”

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Martine Rothblatt: A Founding Father of the Transgender Empire

https://uncommongroundmedia.com/martine ... er-empire/

At the heart of the emerging “Gender Identity” industry is a man in a dress, donning women’s breasts with the confidence only a man could acquire after a lifetime of being a first class citizen. Martine Rothblatt, born in 1954 is an exceedingly accomplished entrepreneur and lawyer. As the founder of United Theraputics, he was the top earning CEO in the biopharmaceutical industry. He identifies as a transsexual and transhumanist and has written extensively on the connections between the two. Rothblatt believes that human sexual dimorphism is tantamount to South African apartheid and that transgenderism is an onramp to transhumanism – which is for him an exercise in overcoming “fleshism.”

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His purpose is everlasting life for humanity by continual replacement of organs as they wear out.

He has written extensively on the need to overhaul our system of labelling people as either male or female based only on their genitalia...

Rothbaltt not only believes we can live indefinitely, but after meeting Ray Kurzweil of Google and being enamored with Kurzweil’s Singularity theory, created a religious organization, Teresem Movement to promote the geoethical (world ethical) use of nanotechnology for human life extension. Teresam conducts educational programs and supports scientific research and development in the areas of cryogenics, biotechnology, and cyber consciousness. He has worked in partnership with Kurzweil promoting a screen adaptation of The Singularity Is Near.

The Singularity Is Near

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singularity_Is_Near

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Gay Conversion Therapy's Disturbing 19th-Century Origins

ERIN BLAKEMORE

https://www.history.com/news/gay-conver ... th-century

In 1899, a German psychiatrist electrified the audience at a conference on hypnosis with a bold claim: He had turned a gay man straight.

All it took was 45 hypnosis sessions and a few trips to a brothel, Albert von Schrenck-Notzing bragged. Through hypnosis, he claimed, he had manipulated the man’s sexual impulses, diverting them from his interest in men to a lasting desire for women.

He didn’t know it, but he had just kicked off a phenomenon that would later be known as “conversion therapy”—a set of pseudoscientific techniques designed to quash LGBTQ people’s sexuality and make them conform to society’s expectations of how they should behave. Though it’s dismissed by the medical establishment today, conversion therapy was widely practiced throughout the 20th century, leaving shame, pain and self-hatred in its wake.

Homosexuality, especially same-sex relationships between men, was considered deviant, sinful and even criminal for centuries. In the late 19th century, psychiatrists and doctors began to address homosexuality, too. They labeled same-sex desire in medical terms—and started looking for ways to reverse it.

There were plenty of theories as to why people were homosexual. For Eugen Steinach, a pioneering Austrian endocrinologist, homosexuality was rooted in a man’s testicles. This theory led to testicle transplantation experiments in the 1920s during which gay men were castrated, then given “heterosexual” testicles.”

Others theorized that homosexuality was a psychological disorder instead. Sigmund Freud hypothesized that humans are born innately bisexual and that homosexual people become gay because of their conditioning. But though Freud emphasized that homosexuality wasn’t a disease, per se, some of his colleagues didn’t agree. They began to use new psychiatric interventions in an attempt to “cure” gay people.

Some LGBTQ people were given electroconvulsive therapy, but others were subjected to even more extreme techniques like lobotomies. Other “treatments” included shocks administered through electrodes that were implanted directly into the brain. Robert Galbraith Heath, a psychiatrist in New Orleans who pioneered the technique, used this form of brain stimulation, along with hired prostitutes and heterosexual pornography, to “change” the sexual orientation of gay men. But though Heath contended he was able to actually turn gay men straight, his work has since been challenged and criticized for its methodology.

An offshoot of these techniques was “aversion therapy,” which was founded on the premise that if LGBTQ people became disgusted by homosexuality, they would no longer experience same-sex desire. Under medical supervision, people were given chemicals that made them vomit when they, for example, looked at photos of their lovers. Others were given electrical shocks—sometimes to their genitals—while they looked at gay pornography or cross-dressed.

“Although proponents of aversion therapy claimed ‘cure’ rates as high as 50 percent,” notes historian Elise Chenier, “these claims were never satisfactorily documented.”

LGBTQ people had long protested these cruel and scientifically dubious forms of “treatment,” but the concept that homosexuality was a disease was accepted by the majority of the medical establishment. This included the American Psychiatric Association, which considered homosexuality to be a psychiatric disorder.

But in the 1960s and 1970s, as a vocal gay rights movement took to the streets to demand equality, the profession began to turn its back on the concept that people could be “converted” to heterosexuality. In 1973, the APA removed homosexuality from the DSM, its influential manual of psychiatric disorders, and medical professionals began to distance themselves from techniques they had once embraced.

That wasn’t the end of attempts to turn gay people straight. As LGBTQ visibility increased, self-proclaimed “experts” and faith-based groups took over the practice themselves. They called their techniques “conversion” or “reparative” therapy, or advertised themselves as “ex-gay” ministries. Their methods varied, and included everything from talk therapy to exorcisms.

At “gay conversion” camps and conferences, LGBTQ people were isolated from family and friends, hypnotized, told to pray until their homosexuality subsided, instructed to beat effigies of their parents, mocked, coached on “proper” gender roles, and told their sexuality was unnatural and sinful.

For the people who underwent conversion therapy, shame and pain were an undeniable part of the process. “I read books and listened to audiotapes about how to have a ‘corrective and healing relationship with Jesus Christ,’” writes James Guay, a gay man who attended weekly therapy and conversion seminars as a teen. “These materials talked about how the “gay lifestyle” would create disease, depravity and misery. I was convinced that doing what I was told would change my attractions—and confused about why these methods supposedly worked for others but not for me.”

In some cases, people were psychologically and even sexually abused. Others committed suicide after “treatment.” Meanwhile, evidence that any of the techniques were effective remained nonexistent.

Though the concept of gay conversion still exists today, a growing tide has turned against the practice. Today, 13 states and the District of Columbia have laws that ban gay conversion therapy practices. Victims of facilities like JONAH, or Jews Offering New Alternatives for Healing, brought lawsuits for fraud. And Exodus International, an umbrella group that connected various conversion therapy groups and gay ministry organizations, closed down in 2013 after nearly 40 years of operations after its president, Alan Chambers, decided it’s impossible to change someone’s sexual orientation.

His opinion is shared by the medical establishment, which now accepts that homosexuality isn’t a matter of choice. For the 698,000 LGBT adults in the United States who have received conversion therapy—many against their will—the aftereffects of the practice are all too real. Studies have shown that attempts to change someone’s sexuality can result in everything from poor self esteem to increased suicide risk and mental health problems.

“These practices have no basis in science or medicine and they will now be relegated to the dustbin of quackery,” said California governor Jerry Brown as he signed a bill banning gay-to-straight therapy in the state in 2012. But for those who have been on the receiving end of the “therapy”—and those who still face pressure to receive it—its aftereffects can linger long past any bill or executive order.

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"Same-sex love versus nature" is a fiction and a big lie that challenges both biology and history.

Modern science is exposing this fiction by examining animal behavior. I found the following article very interesting:

"1,500 animal species practice homosexuality"

https://www.news-medical.net/news/2006/ ... ality.aspx

Homosexuality is quite common in the animal kingdom, especially among herding animals. Many animals solve conflicts by practicing same gender sex.

"One fundamental premise in social debates has been that homosexuality is unnatural. This premise is wrong. Homosexuality is both common and highly essential in the lives of a number of species," explains Petter Boeckman, who is the academic advisor for the "Against Nature's Order?" exhibition.

The most well-known homosexual animal is the dwarf chimpanzee, one of humanity's closes relatives. The entire species is bisexual. Sex plays an conspicuous role in all their activities and takes the focus away from violence, which is the most typical method of solving conflicts among primates and many other animals.

"Sex among dwarf chimpanzees is in fact the business of the whole family, and the cute little ones often lend a helping hand when they engage in oral sex with each other."

Lions are also homosexual. Male lions often band together with their brothers to lead the pride. To ensure loyalty, they strengthen the bonds by often having sex with each other.

Homosexuality is also quite common among dolphins and killer whales. The pairing of males and females is fleeting, while between males, a pair can stay together for years. Homosexual sex between different species is not unusual either. Meetings between different dolphin species can be quite violent, but the tension is often broken by a "sex orgy".

Homosexuality is a social phenomenon and is most widespread among animals with a complex herd life.

Among the apes it is the females that create the continuity within the group. The social network is maintained not only by sharing food and the child rearing, but also by having sex. Among many of the female apes the sex organs swell up. So they rub their abdomens against each other," explains Petter Bockman and points out that animals have sex because they have the desire to, just like we humans.

"We're talking about everything from mammals to crabs and worms. The actual number is of course much higher. Among some animals homosexual behaviour is rare, some having sex with the same gender only a part of their life, while other animals, such as the dwarf chimpanzee, homosexuality is practiced throughout their lives."

Animals that live a completely homosexual life can also be found. This occurs especially among birds that will pair with one partner for life, which is the case with geese and ducks. Four to five percent of the couples are homosexual. Single females will lay eggs in a homosexual pair's nest. It has been observced that the homosexual couple are often better at raising the young than heterosexual couples.

When you see a colony of black-headed gulls, you can be sure that almost every tenth pair is lesbian. The females have no problems with being impregnated, although, according to Petter Boeckman they cannot be defined as bisexual.

"If a female has sex with a male one time, but thousands of times with another female, is she bisexual or homosexual? This is the same way to have children is not unknown among homosexual people."

Indeed, there is a number of animals in which homosexual behaviour has never been observed, such as many insects, passerine birds and small mammals.

"To turn the approach on its head: No species has been found in which homosexual behaviour has not been shown to exist, with the exception of species that never have sex at all, such as sea urchins and aphis. Moreover, a part of the animal kingdom is hermaphroditic, truly bisexual. For them, homosexuality is not an issue."

Petter Bockman regrets that there is too little research about homosexuality among animals.

"The theme has long been taboo. The problem is that researchers have not seen for themselves that the phenomenon exists or they have been confused when observing homosexual behaviour or that they are fearful of being ridiculed by their colleagues. Many therefore overlook the abundance of material that is found. Many researchers have described homosexuality as something altogether different from sex. They must realise that animals can have sex with who they will, when they will and without consideration to a researcher's ethical principles."

One example of overlooking behaviour noted by Petter Bockman is a description of mating among giraffes, when nine out of ten pairings occur between males.

"Every male that sniffed a female was reported as sex, while anal intercourse with orgasm between males was only "revolving around" dominance, competition or greetings.

Masturbation is common in the animal kingdom.

"Masturbation is the simplest method of self pleasure. We have a Darwinist mentality that all animals only have sex to procreate. But there are plenty of animals who will masturbate when they have nothing better to do. Masturbation has been observed among primates, deer, killer whales and penguins, and we're talking about both males and females. They rub themselves against stones and roots. Orangutans are especially inventive. They make dildos of wood and bark," says Petter Boeckman of the Norwegian Natural History Museum.

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U.S. issues first passport with 'X' gender marker

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-iss ... 021-10-27/

WASHINGTON, Oct 27 (Reuters) - The U.S. State Department said on Wednesday it had issued the first American passport with an "X" gender marker, designed to give nonbinary, intersex and gender-nonconforming people a marker other than male or female on their travel document, according to a statement.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced in June that the X marker would be offered as an option on passports, following other countries including Canada, Germany, Australia and India, which already offer a third gender on documents.

State Department spokesperson Ned Price said in a statement that the United States was moving toward adding the "X" gender marker as an option for those applying for U.S. passports or Consular Reports of Birth Abroad.

Price did not identify the holder of the first "X" gender passport, but civil rights organization Lambda Legal said its client Dana Zzyym was the recipient.

"I almost burst into tears when I opened the envelope, pulled out my new passport, and saw the 'X' stamped boldly under 'sex,'" Zzyym, an intersex and nonbinary U.S. Navy veteran, said in a statement on Wednesday. "It took six years, but to have an accurate passport, one that doesn’t force me to identify as male or female but recognizes I am neither, is liberating."

Zzyym, who uses gender-neutral pronouns "they," "them" and "their," was born with ambiguous sex characteristics. Lambda Legal said in the statement that Zzyym underwent several "irreversible, painful, and medically unnecessary surgeries" after their parents decided to raise them as a boy.

After serving in the U.S. Navy and attending Colorado State University, Zzyym came to understand they were born intersex, according to the statement.

Zzyym's previous applications for a passport were denied as they required the applicant to select either "male" or "female" as a gender marker.

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The 200-year-old diary that's rewriting gay history

https://www.bbc.com/news/education-51385884

A diary written by a Yorkshire farmer more than 200 years ago is being hailed as providing remarkable evidence of tolerance towards homosexuality in Britain much earlier than previously imagined.

Historians from Oxford University have been taken aback to discover that Matthew Tomlinson's diary from 1810 contains such open-minded views about same-sex attraction being a "natural" human tendency.

The diary challenges preconceptions about what "ordinary people" thought about homosexuality - showing there was a debate about whether someone really should be discriminated against for their sexuality.

"In this exciting new discovery, we see a Yorkshire farmer arguing that homosexuality is innate and something that shouldn't be punished by death," says Oxford researcher Eamonn O'Keeffe.

The historian had been examining Tomlinson's handwritten diaries, which have been stored in Wakefield Library since the 1950s.

The thousands of pages of the private journals have never been transcribed and previously used by researchers interested in Tomlinson's eye-witness accounts of elections in Yorkshire and the Luddites smashing up machinery.

But O'Keeffe came across what seemed, for the era of George III, to be a rather startling set of arguments about same-sex relationships.

Tomlinson had been prompted by what had been a big sex scandal of the day - in which a well-respected naval surgeon had been found to be engaging in homosexual acts.

A court martial had ordered him to be hanged - but Tomlinson seemed unconvinced by the decision, questioning whether what the papers called an "unnatural act" was really that unnatural.

Tomlinson argued, from a religious perspective, that punishing someone for how they were created was equivalent to saying that there was something wrong with the Creator.

"It must seem strange indeed that God Almighty should make a being with such a nature, or such a defect in nature; and at the same time make a decree that if that being whom he had formed, should at any time follow the dictates of that Nature, with which he was formed, he should be punished with death," he wrote on January 14 1810.

If there was an "inclination and propensity" for someone to be homosexual from an early age, he wrote, "it must then be considered as natural, otherwise as a defect in nature - and if natural, or a defect in nature; it seems cruel to punish that defect with death".

The diarist makes reference to being informed by others that homosexuality is apparent from an early age - suggesting that Tomlinson and his social circle had been talking about this case and discussing something that was not unknown to them.

Around this time, and also in West Yorkshire, a local landowner, Anne Lister, was writing a coded diary about her lesbian relationships - with her story told in the television series, Gentleman Jack.

But knowing what "ordinary people" really thought about such behaviour is always difficult - not least because the loudest surviving voices are usually the wealthy and powerful.

What has excited academics is the chance to eavesdrop on an everyday farmer thinking aloud in his diary.

"What's striking is that he's an ordinary guy, he's not a member of the bohemian circles or an intellectual," says O'Keeffe, a doctoral student in Oxford's history faculty.

An acceptance of homosexuality might have been expressed privately in aristocratic or philosophically radical circles - but this was being discussed by a rural worker.

"It shows opinions of people in the past were not as monolithic as we might think," says O'Keeffe, who is originally from Canada.

"Even though this was a time of persecution and intolerance towards same-sex relationships, here's an ordinary person who is swimming against the current and sees what he reads in the paper and questions those assumptions."

Claire Pickering, library manager in Wakefield, says she imagines the single-minded Tomlinson speaking the words with a Yorkshire accent.

He was a man with a "hungry mind", she says, someone who listened to a lot of people's opinions before forming his own conclusions.

The diary, presumably compiled after a hard day's work, was his way of being a writer and commentator when otherwise "that wasn't his station in life", she says.

O'Keeffe says it shows ideas were "percolating through British society much earlier and more widely than we'd expect" - with the diary working through the debates that Tomlinson might have been having with his neighbours.

But these were still far from modern liberal views - and O'Keeffe says they can be extremely "jarring" arguments.

If someone was homosexual by choice, rather than by nature, Tomlinson was ready to consider that they should still be punished - proposing castration as a more moderate option than the death penalty.

O'Keeffe says discovering evidence of these kinds of debate has both "enriched and complicated" what we know about public opinion in this pre-Victorian era.