What a great question! Though it is one traditionally outside of my wheelhouse in food history, I just finished up some writing on issues of ancient gender roles and sexuality, so I’m going to do my best to answer this by looking at the limited context of how scholars have discussed this in the context of ancient Greece and Rome.

Some added context to my answer: I am a lesbian. I do not study LGBT history, but I certainly understand what’s at stake in the ways people represent and discuss sex and sexuality in the past and the ancient world. The thing is, there’s no one “right” way to address there, and there is certainly no scholarly consensus on when you can or cannot apply an anachronistic label like “gay” onto a historic actor. Historians use anachronistic terms all the time: there are several works, for example, on colonialism and imperialism in Ancient Rome, but neither of those words existed in Ancient Rome. I’d argue (and this is an argument, and there are scholars out there who disagree) that this is perfectly permissible. It is fine to define and explain the use of anachronistic terms for descriptive reasons. For this reason, I follow the lead of scholars who think it’s okay to use words like “gay” to describe actions and acts, as “homosexual” has the unintended impact of medicalizing your subject, which I think it worse than using an anachronistic term (and, for that matter, homosexual is an anachronistic term).

To really score the sense of debate on the topic, I’m going to quickly address the work of two scholars who have written on the idea of whether or not a history of sexuality exists, and how scholars should treat that. David Halperin, a well regarded classicist who studies ancient sexuality, argued in his “Is There a History of Sexuality?” that there is not, because sexuality as we understand it (as an essential characteristic of the self) is a relatively recent invention. Non-normative sexual relationships did form in the ancient world especially, where men had sex with other men. There was a whole complicated typology of terminology. An classicist (whose name I don’t bring up because he is in federal prison on child porn charges) wrote a relevant article “The Teratogenic grid,” that explains the different roman terms attached to different active and passive sexual positions with respect to different orifices. Was a Cinadeus, a man who was the passive participant in anal sex, gay, because he had gay sex? Halperin views such a scholarly imposition as anachronistic in part because of the lack of any organized self-concept attached to it. I think it’s relevant here to mention that Halperin himself is a gay man, and has been openly gay for his career. Some contemporary audiences might view this as a form of erasure, but I think it’s clearly more complicated than that.

Obviously, there are many scholars who disagree with Halperin, and the contemporary consensus is far more nuanced, thought many scholar especially of ancient sex and sexuality I have found are still touchy about calling any ancient figure “gay” “Lesbian” or “bisexual,” because the sources we have simply don’t illuminate much about their own self concept. John Boswell disagrees with the essential idea that something (ie, being gay) only exists when society gives a name or explanation to that identity, and identifies places in ancient texts where preference, and not simply action, are expressed. And on a more basic and theoretical level, many gay people (myself included) would tell you that we would be able to comprehend our experience and our difference even in the absence of the descriptive language of today’s LGBT movement.

This seems to be where most scholars today settle, and who tend to avoid the erasure trap you bring up. Though it is still easier to speak in abstracts here, about ideas of sex and sexuality, versus about individual people. I tend to think biography is a different beast entirely, thought many people tend to synonymize it with all types of history. Even scholars who embrace these expansive conceptual ideas might hesitate to apply them when writing about the life of an ancient figure whose life is only recorded through rumor and hearsay. By all means, describe their actions, describe what we do know, but historians writing scholarship has an obligation to their sources and to the truth. Do not use euphemisms like friendship where your subject used words like “love,” but seek to understand that in context. Write about affairs, romances, sexual relationships, etc, with honesty and the best description you have, but scholarly arguments are rarely about whether someone was gay or not. That detail should not be the focus, or the only part, or a biography.

An interesting a case study that I think is illuminating here: was Sappho a lesbian? Can we call Sappho a lesbian? I find that when I see people discussing this and historian erasure, Sappho’s name appears fairly often, supposedly as one of few examples of women who loved other women in the ancient world. Also, both our terms “lesbian” and “sapphic” come from her. Certainly, scholars must be engaging in erasure to deny her homosexuality? Obviously it is far more complicated than this, and scholars react in different ways inside and outside of the academy. We have almost no information about Sappho. We have a handful of fragments, some of which express love and affection for other women. But the Brothers poem, some of the longest fragments we have, discusses nothing of the sort. Sappho’s “husband” whose name basically translates to Dick Allcock of man island, doesn’t poke any meaningful holes in this theory but. Again. We know so little about her that it’s difficult to say anything about her with certainty.

But that lack of certainty does not mean we should look away from the question of get on people’s case when they call her a lesbian or when queer women say they ID with her poetry. This eidolon article Re-queering Sappho suggests that academic rigor can live alongside a more easy going identification. Seeing yourself reflected in the past can be a good thing— and while its important to understand those limitations falter, I don’t think its historic to allow scholars to loosen these restrictions in public writing, as many scholars seem to.

So to answer the question, I think the best way I can think to solve this problem is simply distinguish between academic scholarship, where language must be more precise, and yes, constrained, and public scholarly work or other artistic engagements with a figure. I think there is room for both, and I think it’s important to distinguish between scholarly engagement with ancient sexuality and erasure because we don’t use the terminology people want. These issues are fraught, and lots of well meaning scholars have taken different perspectives, some of which I find more limiting. These questions are more difficult, especially in the ancient world, than people realize, given the proliferation of memes about how gay the greeks were etc, . There’s a lot more to say about this, but hopefully some people with more expertise than I can help fill in the holes here.

Sure! When I teach it, I usually start with the basic observation that everything - people, places, ideas, events, objects, languages, whatever - has a history. That includes concepts like “gender” and “sexuality”. But, just like many things from only a few decades ago seem different to us when we look at them in the past, so too do those subjects.

I then use as an example Foucault’s observation that the idea of “homosexuality” is recent and, in some contexts, therefore doesn’t do justice to prior eras. I use as examples of this: Ancient Greek pederasty, Florentine sodomy courts, the (gender-bending) fashion of the 17th century, etc. The point of those examples isn’t so much to do a deep-dive as it is to just give students a sense of what queerness might be in the past and how it may not be described well within our modern conceptual schema for things.

After that, I like to point out that sometimes our modern categories could work - say in the case of Angelo Poliziano and Pico della Mirandola - but that we need to be very intentional about what we mean, which is often not so much about a sexual practice as it is a complex relationship or identity. I point out that, in their case, it may even be more important to notice the question - “did they have a queer relationship?” - than find the answer, since the question marks where we ourselves (or others) are perceiving something queer. Sometimes we find a love whose name we dare not, or cannot, speak.

I then point out that, in some sense, history itself is a really queer enterprise. It’s an art that depends on our ability to form relationships with people of all sexual and gender preferences across gaps of time that often enough radically separate us. Whether we take this literally (I actually connect) or metaphorically (I feel connected but know that’s silly), it’s an experience we ALL have - not only in history, but in literature. It’s the feeling of “wow, this is old!” That happens, eg, when you visit a historical site.

Noting, then, that there’s A LOT more queer about history than people normally think, I conclude by suggesting that part of our role - if we take the job ethically - is to actually do justice for everything in the past that we consider. This means connecting with it, respecting it for what it is/does, and carrying those resonances forward in what we write. We have to do a good job of registering the queerness of the past in its own queer terms. That may mean being willing to see connections where there appear to be gaps (could they have been LGBTQ+?) OR being willing to let go of our own perspectives and vocabulary to better understand theirs. That process is important for treating the people of the past with the dignity they merit; not being willing to engage in it (whether out of a refusal to see the queerness OR an insistence that we find a genealogy for queers today) is the real act of erasure, since it opts to overwrite the individuals’ own voices, perspectives, and contexts rather than illuminate them.

To add to the incredibly good answers of the others:

As a historian of early modernity and a focus on media and communication, it often seems like it really does not matter that much if someone really was gay etc. While it may be fun to think about as a modern queer person that I am, the question often is irrelevant to most topics I look at. So it may be read as erasure and heteronormative, but in most of my cases it makes no difference, so it will be left out. And the private life of figures it is hard (almost impossible) to prove, as you stated in your post. It also is tied to a focus on humans and individuals in the past, which I personally seldom look at.

I would also argue that sexuality as a major part of one’s identity is a fairly new phenomenon (at least I don’t really see a lot of it between 1500 and 1800, but I may be wrong), and homo- (or trans-)phobia seem to be hard to find in early modernity as well, especially in the circles of nobles, kings and powerful people. As an example, the German and French 18th century:

While today many would see Frederick II. of Prussia as a gay man, I would argue that this was not the case at the time. Yes, it was quite well known, that Frederick did not really like spending time with his wife and kept no mistresses. He also ‘joked’ about not being inclined towards women and spent a lot of time with his officers, even trying to flee the country with his ‘best-friend’ (or companion, or lover… you get the picture) in his youth. But does this prove his homosexuality? Maybe, or he was asexual and someone who did not want to be beaten up by his dad all the time… But does it matter? What mattered to the people of his time was that he had no heir (his brother took care of that, as F II.s nephew followed him onto the throne) and that he focused on ruling instead of women. But the question of his childlessness, used as an argument that every Prussian is his child because of it, was not about his sexuality, it was about having an heir. While it was important to refute the idea that he was infertile or impotent, the childlessness blamed on a failed operation in his youth, nobody not even his enemies worried about the issue of the king maybe sleeping with men. So its not that the king is gay, he just sleeps with men and can't produce an heir, but those are seperate issues.

In France this is even more the case. There we have people openly joking about the gayness of the Kings brother or other nobles. That does not seem like a big problem for anybody, these men weren’t treated worse than other courtiers. Even the king’s sexuality only is important in that he ‘can’ (potence and fertility being important), as long as you do your duty and produce an heir with one’s wife it seems nobody really cared who else you sleep with (mostly in the cases of men, but also with women, one just can’t get pregnant by ones lover). Love, sex, and marriage did not have to fall together in this time, and often seen as part of the job at court. I would argue that changes in the 19th century and with the middle class.

Looking at male gendered German romantic poets of the time and their letters, one can see the language they use. Writing their male gendered friends, they use a excess of words that we would read as very much in the realm of intimacy, e.g. writing about crying onto the others portrait and wanting to cry into/ in the others arms, the dying of soldiers in the arms of their comrades with both being covered in the dying mans blood… (bodily fluids seem to be very important: A. Kosschorke for more (sadly only in German) https://kops.uni-konstanz.de/handle/123456789/16723 ).

Now we could extrapolate that this means those guys were all gay (and that may be true), but as they write this to EVERYBODY (there are literally hundreds of examples), it does not seem likely that this is the case for all of them. That is just may also be how one would express everything from friendship to platonic love to romantic love, so in the end we often don’t know and never will.

And I think it, historically, doesn’t matter if they really were gay, but more how people talked about it, how they dealt with such instances and what this says about/ does to society. The latter issues are relevant to history and histical change, the first isn’t. I think “how it really was” should never be at the center of historical inquiry, because that’s a losing battle.