The Queering of History from Anne Frank to Pompeii

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:  

As Mount Vesuvius erupted 2,000 years ago, two doomed residents of Pompeii clutched each other in their final moments. Trapped in an eternal embrace, they have come to be known as “The Two Maidens.”

However, new DNA analysis on the bodies suggests that the iconic pair might need a new name. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute found that at least one, if not both of the people were men. David Reich, one of the authors of the new study, said: “A pair of individuals thought to be sisters, or mother and daughter, were found to include at least one genetic male. These findings challenge traditional gender and familial assumptions.”

While the true nature of their relationship remains unclear, experts say they may have been gay lovers. Massimo Osanna, superintendent of the Pompeii archaeological site, previously said: “The fact that they were lovers is a hypothesis that cannot be dismissed.”

What backs that assumption? Quite literally nothing, aside from the wishful thinking of activists and the desire of experts to win a few cheap headlines. In fact, no hypothesis can ever be proven, and archaeologists admit that the relationship between the two doomed Pompeians is impossible to determine. Or, as the Daily Mail put it:  

While the nature of their relationship remains unclear, previous studies have suggested that they may have been gay lovers. For example, experts point out their suggestive positioning, with one’s head resting on the other’s chest. However, experts have previously said that their relationship can “never be verified.”

“When this discovery was made, that they were not two young girls, some scholars suggested there could have been an emotional connection between the pair,” said Professor Stefano Vanacore, who led a research team examining the pair back in 2017. “But we are talking about hypotheses that can never be verified.”

Consider, for a moment, how obsessed with sexuality one must be to look at two people clutching each other in the moment of mutual death as a volcano wipes out their world and thinking: Hmmmm. Bet they were gay! I suppose we should be grateful that the “experts” did not previously conclude that the two “maidens” were obviously lesbian lovers, due to the supposedly “suggestive” positioning of… a person’s head resting on the other’s chest. 

Rose-colored glasses about the past are always inadvisable; rainbow-colored glasses, however, are currently all the rage.