Altight, this is the crux of the issue. And a few things have to be pointed out.
First of all, Marx. I respect Marx as a thinker perhaps more than anyone else (barring maybe Freud and Hegel), but many of his conceptions contradicted one another. For example, he genuinely did believe that he discovered "laws of motion" in capitalist development by observing the past. This means that he believed that there was some sort of teleology at work. This was later called "dialectical materialism", but it was definetely present in Marx and implies that, even if he was viewing history through the "lens of the present" (whatever that actually means - I'd recommend reading Sartre's chapters on temporality in "Being and Nothingness" to question what exactly this highly metaphorical procedure might actually imply when cast in less vague terms...), even if he were viewing history through this metaphorical "lens" he still conceived his viewpoint as being able to uncover "laws".
This also led him to generate notions of "ideology" as a sort of false-consciousness. Both of these conceptions (linked at numerous points in Marx's work) seem to imply that there is some "true" consciousness and that this "true" consciousness will give the Communist some sort of "categorical imperative" as well as a "key to history". I think that while Marx's method may be useful in certain regards, its also over-exaggerated, overly arrogant and at the end of the day, dangerous. Not to say anything bad about Marxist historiography, but EP Thomson's essays against Althusser are the key argument in this regard.
Secondly, you claim that you have to read history "backwards" and I disagree, because to read it backwards means that you have some sort of "truth" or "key" with which to unlock its secrets. This is deeply arrogant. It essentially means that you won't learn anything from history; history will have to learn from you! Any facts you pick up in history books aren't allowed to generate any meaning except if they fit into the tidy little framework you've set up for yourself. You may disagree, but this is the end result... I've seen it a million times before. Rhetorical history, I'd call it. Its revolting.
Thirdly, you talk about history as if it were a collection of missed opportunities. Whatever the emotional basis for this it has to be said that this is precisely how to "cook" history. A great author in this regard to look into is anti-Communist and liar extraordinaire Richard Pipes ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Pipes). But you can also find this conception of history in the work of the main neo-conservative theorist Leo Strauss (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Strauss); by all accounts a brilliant philosopher, but an extremely dangerous theorist who directly influenced our friends in Washington - many of them ex-Trotskyists, hmmm - who've been the main force behind some of America's less pleasant sojourns over the past three decades. Why? Because they read their own ideology into history. History for them is a series of failed democracies... and only they can save us.
Finally, although I agree that certain conceptions of effeminacy didn't "have to" lead to certain consequences, the very notion of reading causality into history is completely pre-dialectical. That's why I invoked the notion of "overdetermination". I think you're missing the essential point here. By attempting to understand history, by reading it forward, one can become more aware of oneself and one's surroundings and is thus in a better position to critique. The central notion here is not "I read history" - whether backwards or forwards - but "I am history"...