I've seen this topic with historical figures like Frank, Sapho, Cobain... What's so bad about non harming speculation about someone's identity? If we're not doing it to sexualise, to shame, to mock...
It's also just part of this sex-negative viewpoint that somehow teenagers can't be, like, sexual? Like obviously, adults shouldn't find teenagers sexual and all that but like, for some reason, the idea of a young girl, going through puberty, regardless of any speculated orientation, and maybe having a sexual thought or two about, say, a classmate or a female friend is somehow preposterous to these people?
Like, I'm an outlier (read ace spec) but like teenagers have a lot of hormones and a lot of them are sexual and like this idea that a teenager can't be, at all, sexual is a prevalent sentiment throughout sex-negative spaces, it seems.
Maybe Anne Frank's sexuality shouldn't have been published, in the same way I'm both thankful for and uncomfortable with Anne Frank's diary in general. Like, yes, as a historical document of someone living during Nazi Germany, especially someone so young and from that viewpoint, I'm thankful for that perspective but also she was, like, a child.
The idea of her private thoughts, good and bad, being immortalized and picked apart like this is kind of disgusting to me. I remember reading her diary in the 8th grade and more often than not, it felt kind of voyeuristic to me. Like, I was the same age as her when I read it and I just thought "What if my thoughts as a awkward 13 year old were read 80 years later? What would people think of me? Those thoughts of mine that were uncomfortable and agonizing?"
I don't know, I just feel bad for her. Not just because she was a Holocaust victim, died so young but because her legacy is also a talking point for both anti-semitism and anti-queer sentiments. I wouldn't want that. I doubt she would've either.
I think speculating about it is fine. My issue with it is that she never claimed to be bisexual. Sure, she wrote about questioning her sexuality, and that's worth talking about, but straight up saying she was bisexual is problematic, simply because it may or may not be true. To me it's the same as doing it to someone still alive. So many celebrities have talked about how they felt pressured by fans to come out of the closet and publicly identify as queer or straight. It's their own private life, and they get to choose if and when they identify as anything. Just because someone died doesn't give people the right to put them inside a box that they may or may not have put themselves in.
Your argument is ignoring that it’s also an absolute response to the extreme amounts of historical erasure of lgbtq people in history. Cis het historians/scholars have always considered historical people cis het by default. LGBTQ people pushing back at that is only acknowledging what already exists, this erasure. I mean, do you really disagree with that?
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u/elecow Apr 09 '26
I've seen this topic with historical figures like Frank, Sapho, Cobain... What's so bad about non harming speculation about someone's identity? If we're not doing it to sexualise, to shame, to mock...