You ask whether he liked boys or girls, same as you can ask about Alexander the Great (preferred boys), Julius Caesar (liked both), Shakespeare (unclear, maybe both), Marlowe (probably boys), Casanova (are you kidding?). It's the most rigid and unhelpful kind of Kuhnian-Foucauldian snobbery to insist that we can't even talk about these issues because modern typologies of gay/straight, homosexual/heterosexual, with exactly the connotations we give them (who we? people in Omaha? Jacksonville? New York? Tribeca? Bensonhurst? The New School? The Columbia Com Lit Dept?) give them.
Not only can we talk about whether Michelangelo (or any of these people) liked boys or girls, the themselves and their contemporaries talked about it -- as those quotes I gave about Michelangelo show. Obviously be have to make some effort to grasp that the way that people conceptualized sexual preference has changed over time, for example, to say that Alexander was gay could be misleading if you didn't know that male homosexuality was not despised but practically expected from a Mediterranean man of his time. But we have to understand that the way people think about it in Tribeca or Columbia U is a bit different from the way they think about it in Merrillville, Indiana or the Willow Creek Church in Chicago.
--- Miles Jackson <cqmv at pdx.edu> wrote:
> Chris Doss wrote:
> > --- andie nachgeborenen
> > <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > Michelangelo could not have imagined
> >> Robert Mapplethorpe, whatever their shared taste
> for
> >> pretty boys. So the question is pointless.
> >>
> >>
> >
> > Just out of curiousity, how do we know what
> > Michelangelo's sexual orientation was? Do we have
> > correspondence between him and a lover or
> somesuch?
>
> Asking about M's sexual orientation is as silly as
> asking whether he
> was a Democrat or a Republican. Our typology of
> sexual orientation
> did not exist in 16th century Europe, so it's a
> meaningless question.
>
> Miles
>
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