famous asexuals?

[gambit_boi]

know of any? i've been reading a book called 'reclaiming our queer past'- is it possible to reclaim an asexual past as well? or is it not appropriate to 'label' historical people with names they didn't use themselves?

:|

[Guest]

It's difficult to tell. I mean, a lot of it is based on interpretation, and how can we tell if someone chose to be celibate, or simply couldn't get any, to be blunt?

[dabishop]

Fame can take care of a lot of, er...natural handicaps in that department, so it's an interesting question to ask. I figure the people who qualify best were so distracted with other things that their behavior looks an awful lot like asexuality to us. Is it wrong to stick that label on after the fact ? Doesn't bother me any (although Karl Marx would be kind of puzzled to be called a Marxist). I nominate (surprise!) Canadian pianist Glenn Gould. Hell, I want to be Glenn Gould. Except for the dead part.

[Bestatued Head]

Oo. Glenn Gould is swell; he plays Bach in a rich simplicity. I dig stuff like that. Anyway, hey my favorite human was asexual, Nickolai Tesla, what a creative soul. He should have gotten more credit for his inventions (for those who don't know, Edison took Tesla's ideas and called them his own. Those were in the days when Tesla worked for Edison. Go figure.)

[DarkCatalyst]

Isaac Newton died a virgin, though that doesn't necessarily mean he was asexual.

DC

[gambit_boi]

*nod* i know of several celibate famous people, though it's harder to know who was asexual, or if you could even rightly call them such...though i've heard alot of talk of Andy Warhol being asexual.

[dabishop]

Thanks for the Newtonian facts, DC. Will we be honored with a proper introduction, too ? :D

Or is it just Phase II of the UConn Asexual Invasion ?? :shock:

[Cate Perfect]

I know. I think there's something in the water up there in Conn. Can you export some o' that asex-H2O to California? They need it badly.

Cate

[whirlygirl]

cliff richard seems very asexual me, quite obsessive his appearance!

[donimo]

Morrissey has often referred to himself as asexual, so I suppose we can be pretty sure about him. :)

[Jayann]

Bishop and Cate: Seriously. I dunno why CT is a "breeding" ground for asexuality. Maybe someday, when the asexual movement is full under swing, CT will be a sort of asexual mecca.

Connecticut, the Not Fucking State!

We'll need a museum and monuments. To us. The founders of the Movement. *ego trip*

[JKReagan99]

Bishop and Cate: Seriously. I dunno why CT is a "breeding" ground for asexuality. Maybe someday, when the asexual movement is full under swing, CT will be a sort of asexual mecca.

I have no clue why either...maybe our water does have something in it...

Connecticut, the Not Fucking State!

*lmao* :lol:

[bard of aven]

Whatever it is, I WAS THERE FIRST!

boa

[Cate Perfect]

It's Bard's fault! He did something to the water in Connecticut!

Thanks Bard! :D

Cate

[bard of aven]

Yeah, and if it were the floride, there'd be a lot more of us.

boa

[JKReagan99]

It's Bard's fault! He did something to the water in Connecticut!

Thanks Bard! :D

Can Bard go around and put more of whatever it was in the water systems around the country/world then? *hopeful look* :)

[davelwhite]

It's difficult to tell. I mean, a lot of it is based on interpretation, and how can we tell if someone chose to be celibate, or simply couldn't get any, to be blunt?

The people who Reclaim the Queer Past have this exact problem with homosexuality. Some of the historical figures they say were gay really were, but a lot of them were simply practicing the customs of their particular eras, which mostly allowed greater affection between same-sex [nonsexual] friends than we do. Like, it was rumored that Abe Lincoln was gay, but it was perfectly allowed for single guys to sleep with their friends back then, and not considered sexual (heck, beds were hard to make back then, and houses were smaller, so you had to share!). John Boswell wrote a whole book claiming that the Catholic Church allowed gay weddings at one point in the early middle ages, and it became very controversial but the long and the short of it is that the evidence seems to indicate they were actually consecrating friendships (ceremonies to consecrate friendships were actually quite common in pre-modern times).

So you have to be careful about who you say "chose to be celibate," BUT, the flipside is that we can claim a past in the form of SEXUAL people (or whole countries!) who chose to put a very great emphasis on nonsexual relationships. My favorite is John Stuart Mill, the famous philosopher, and his beloved, Harriet Taylor. They were nonsexual friends for 20 years or more before they got married (partly for economic reasons I think), and Harriet spoke out openly against the notion that sexual relationships were more important. (They also were feminists and played a big part in making it possible for married women to own their own property an' stuff.)

My favorite entire tribe from this standpoint is the Nzema of Ghana, where homosexuality is taboo but it's still okay for men to marry each other. [As of 1970, when the anthropologist studied them.] Huh? Well, men can marry each other for love (or economic reasons, I suppose) and then they just don't have sex, because the Nzema don't think a marriage has to involve sex. They still sleep together though.

Dave

[davelwhite]

I realized I should mention a famous asexual or celibate: Jesus of Nazareth! IF the Gospels are historically accurate (which I realize could be a whole 'nother discussion all by itself, depending on one's religious background), then Jesus never married and did not appear to have sex with anyone, plus his whole relational life was focused around hanging out with his friends the Apostles. He seems to have been a cuddly sort of fellow-- John (the "Beloved Disciple") would recline in his bosom, and Mary Magdalene was allowed to give him footrubs with scented oils. But he wasn't so much into the sex.

Here is an actual Jesus quote confirming his general asexual qualities:

For when they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven. [Look at Mark 12:18-27; a similar passage is in Matthew 21 and somewhere in Luke.]

So Jesus seems to think that marriage is no longer needed in heaven. Everybody just hangs with their friends up there. Which is cool, as long as they aren't all playing harps continuously until the end of time.

dave

[whirlygirl]

A-C-eT-ality!! 8) :lol:

[bard of aven]

John Boswell wrote a whole book claiming that the Catholic Church allowed gay weddings at one point in the early middle ages, and it became very controversial but the long and the short of it is that the evidence seems to indicate they were actually consecrating friendships (ceremonies to consecrate friendships were actually quite common in pre-modern times).

Coincidentally, I just finished re-reading that the other day. Please forgive me for adding some of that nuance to your summary.

Boswell is somewhat more nuanced than that. He refers to them as same-sex unions, and shows that they served many of the same purposes as marriage which, in the middle ages and late Roman empire, had little to do with love or romance, though these occasionally occurred in marriages. Same-sex unions, as far as can be determined, were more likely to involve a romantic connection than marriage at the time, as they were mostly not arranged by families but by the individuals involved. And like marriage, some of the same-sex unions also involved the joining of estates with full ownership going to the surviving partner. Whether or not the guys (there are very few known instances of the joining of women in same-sex unions) were doing each other is as difficult to tell from historical records as it is with hetero marriages, but in some cases Boswell deals with, it seems fairly obvious. The empire and much of the middle ages did not have the taboo against this that we do today. (Unlike marriage in that time, one person did not become the property of the other; they were seen as equals in all respects.)

The ceremony was more practiced in the eastern than the Roman churches, and most copies of it that survive are in Greek, not Latin. And it was a long "point", over a thousand years.

One thing to remember here is that the concepts of marriage, acceptable sexual activity in and out of marriage, friendship, slavery, family, and property rights in vogue in the late empire and middle ages do not map easily to the concepts of these things we have today. Boswell spends quite a few pages discussing this.

The book is Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe. I have heard it is out of print, but you can probably find used copies (or new ones if it is not) at Amazon or some such. It's a bit of a slog, very scholarlay, almost as much footnotes as text in some chapters. It contains translations and the original Greek for a number of the ceremonies.