On 3/1/06, Peter Mackay peter.mackay@bigpond.com wrote:
I was looking up some recent historical figure yesterday - can't remember who - and the second para of the article was devoted to speculation about his homosexuality. I thought that was really weird. I'm not uncomfortable with famous people being homosexual, but I'm just not sure that we need to give such prominence and weight. It's almost as if such people are being used as posthumous pin-up boys for modern day homosexual folk, when the reality is that we are writing biographical articles about the careers and achievements of these people, not about who poked whom. This information should go at the bottom, maybe in a trivia section.
Yes, it's an interesting phenomenon that I've noticed at [[Freddie Mercury]] (I always thought he was openly gay, but apparently there are those who swear he was, and those who swear he wasn't), and at [[Paris]]. There was at one stage the following sentence: the current mayor of Paris is [[Bertrand Delanoë]] (sp), who is openly homosexual. Intriguingly, the entire article on him didn't mention the fact. Even more undue weight...
But then, you get similar stories with membership of religions, ethnic descent and so on. The Freddie Mercury article had a long section on his pride in his "Iranian" descent, the recent featured article on [[Edward Teller]] proudly proclaimed his Jewish origins in the opening sentence. The trouble when trying to put these things in perspective is you get accused of either trying to deny something (if you remove it altogether) or cover it up (if you simply reduce its prominence).
Shrug.
Steve