Did they deserve to die?

In literature, especially in times of great sexual repression, it was quite popular to end the lives of characters who were considered to be sexual deviants. Also, to express homosexual love, to be one of the Other, requires, even now, a generous amount of indirection. After reading Goldberg's depiction of the death of Christopher Marlowe, it struck me that, while I had heard how he died, several times, the fault always seemed to reside with Marlowe, his temper or something like it. Now it seems that he was killed for believing and being something other than what the popular society had dictated was appropriate. And I am sure that there were a great many people (including those who were relieved to get away with similar activity) who believed Marlowe deserved to die.

Sedgwick also mentions societal mores condemning homosexuals to being as denigrated as women, if not moreso: "the suppression of the homosexual component of human sexuality, is a product of the same system whose rules and relations oppress women...Our own society is brutally homophobic" (1686). It was this latter sentence that really caught my attention. It made me think of Matthew Shepard and Tina Brandon.

I was surprised (sort of) to read about homosexuality during World War I in the Barry. I actually read a book called Regeneration that was about Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. It was the primary read for the last theory class I took, in fact. I dropped the class before we got to Queer Theory, but I read some of their poems, and they were beautiful, and they were also about the brutality of government and war (two things that always seem to want to squelch beauty). Something in us is bred to fear and hate things that we are told are different. Sad. Keeps us from evolving. And it'll kill us in the end.