by Jonathon Van Maren, The Bridgehead
For the past two decades, the LGBT movement has been busily engaged in the task of queering history. Not only have they managed to elevate the heroes of their own movement to sacrosanct status – from Harvey Milk to Alfred Kinsey – they have also been promiscuously claiming that great historical figures from William Shakespeare to Abraham Lincoln were, if you squint at the evidence just right, also definitely LGBT.
This campaign has had some very amusing moments. The Roman Emperor Elagabalus, the North Hertfordshire Museum announced several years ago, was obviously transgender, and promptly corrected their curated plaques to emphasize this fact.
This move was made on the strength of accusations leveled at the emperor by his political enemies, who would no doubt find it hilarious that over a thousand years later, their smears have finally stuck. As I noted in an essay in 2024, ambitious archaeologists are now digging up gay Vikings and bisexual Saxons with suspicious frequency.
Two recent examples highlight this trend. Last month, the LGBT news outlet Pink News announced that Anne Frank, the famous young diarist who died at the hands of the Nazis in Bergen Belsen at the age of 15, was bisexual. As evidence, Pink News cited passages from Frank’s diary in which, while she was going through puberty, she ruminated about being “terribly inquisitive” about the body of one of her friends, and that she had kissed her out of curiosity. To deny Frank’s bisexuality, Pink News claimed without irony, was “straightwashing … history.”
Of course, Frank famously had a crush on Peter, her fellow occupant of the Secret Annex (who also perished in the Holocaust). Addressing this, Pink News felt compelled to admit: “Anne never defined her sexuality, and it may not have been the most important fact about her. She was a teenage refugee, after all. But it is important to shed light on times historical figures have expressed same-sex attraction.” Why important? The question answers itself: in order to normalize the LGBT agenda by associating it with much-loved, world-famous figures.
But the thread of evidence upon which LGBT activists hang their assertion of Anne Frank’s bisexuality looks positively sturdy compared to another recent claim. As the Daily Mail dramatically put it: