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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 27, 2025

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Even in eras where it isn't shoehorned in to everything, there will be a trickle of LGBT characters.

Yes, but the trick in the eras where they aren't shoehorned into everything is that they tend not to be introduced for homosupremacist reasons (much like how women are shoehorned into works in certain ways for gynosupremacist reasons).

It's not the homo- or gyno- that causes the problem, it's the -supremacy; and absent an inquisition Hays Code-style paragovernmental organization that "knows it when it sees it" there's no particularly logical way to go about erasing it.

Yes, but the trick in the eras where they aren't shoehorned into everything is that they tend not to be introduced for homosupremacist reasons (much like how women are shoehorned into works in certain ways for gynosupremacist reasons).

"Tend to" is doing a lot of work here. Plato's Symposium says that the ultimate love is the love between two men, and it includes the idea that the "offspring" of such heavenly love is art, statecraft and philosophical ideas.

‘Now,’ she said, ‘those who are pregnant in their bodies are more inclined towards women and are affected by love in this way, believing that they will secure immortality, fame and happiness for themselves for all time by begetting children. While as far as soul 209A is concerned,’ said she, ‘those who are pregnant in their souls, even more than in their bodies, conceive and bring forth what belongs to the soul. So, what belongs to the soul? Understanding and excellence in general are indeed begotten by all the poets and by any artificers who are regarded as creative. Yet the most extensive and most beautiful understanding, by far, is the setting in order of our cities and our households, and its name is sound-mindedness and justice.

What is more, when someone is pregnant with these in soul from a young age, 209B being divine, and reaching an age where he develops a desire to bring forth and beget, he then I presume, goes around searching for the beauty in which he may beget, for he will never beget in ugliness. Since the person is pregnant, he welcomes beautiful bodies rather than ugly ones, and should he also encounter a beautiful, noble and well-developed soul, he welcomes the twofold combination all the more. And towards this person he is immediately well-resourced with words about excellence, and what a good man 209C should be like, and how he should behave, and he sets about educating him.

For being in contact with the beautiful one, and consorting therewith, what was conceived in times past is brought forth and begotten when the beautiful one is present, and when he is absent but remembered. And he joins with that person in the shared nurture of what they have begotten, so that such people maintain a much greater communion with one another, and a more constant friendship than children would afford, since their communion involves children who are more beautiful and more immortal. And everyone would prefer to have such children as these rather than the human 209D kind and looking at Homer and Hesiod and the other good poets, they envy the offspring of themselves that these poets leave behind, which furnish the poets with immortal glory and fame, since that is what the offspring itself is like.

Or if you prefer,’ said she, ‘look at the sort of children Lycurgus left behind him in Sparta, saviours of Sparta and, in a sense, of Greece. Solon too is revered among yourselves as the begetter of your laws,[50] as are other men in many other places, 209E among Greeks and barbarians, for their display of so many noble deeds, and for begetting excellence of every kind. Many shrines have already been established for them because they had such children as these, but this has never yet happened because of human children.

(Paragraph breaks mine, mostly because this ended up being a big block of text.)

Homosupremacist thinking has a long history in Western culture.