Fucking Plato.

Fascinating to see that we’re back to Plato. 

In some ways the big bang of the modern gay rights movement centers around a smattering of 19th century academics who started noticing and reading and putting together the queer and gender stuff in Plato. Back then, a formal education included study of the ancient Greeks, so scholars and scientists (which were pretty much the same thing back then) would all be well-versed in Plato. The sex and gender stuff was always in there, but 19th century scholars just overlooked it or “interpreted” the sex out of it. Like many things in Victorian times, it “wasn’t discussed.”

But then came a few scholars, grappling with homosexual feelings of their own, who started to see glimmers of themselves in Plato’s writing. Plato is full of actual gay sex. Once you acknowledge it, you can’t unsee it. (Not that Plato was a gay rights hero; his thoughts about same-sex relationships were conflicted and contradictory.) But in 19th century England and Germany, if you were found out writing, or worse publishing, about homosexuality, you could lose not just your livelihood but pretty much everything, including your freedom. Still, some of the braver ones wrote treatises and books and shared them with small groups of friends, these men eventually began finding each other and talking, and things grew from there.

So this business at Texas A&M with administrators demanding professors remove all discussion of sex and gender when they teach Plato is familiar. It’s just another of many liberating moments in history from the last couple hundred years — the Black Civil rights era and the Women’s Movement, the New Deal, the progressive reform era of the late 19th/early 20th century, among others, all of which have made society more fair, humane, and enlightened — that conservatives are determined to undo.