warmonger1981 wrote:Dukasaur wrote:karel wrote:no matter what you all think transgenders and gays do not belong in the armed forces period
You ever heard of Alexander the Great? Richard the Lionheart? Lawrence of Arabia?
Proof or it was a lie.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hephaestion#RelationshipsAs Robin Lane Fox says, "... descendants of the Dorians were considered and even expected to be openly homosexual, especially among their ruling class, and the Macedonian kings had long insisted on their pure Dorian ancestry."[60] This was no fashionable affectation; this was something that belonged at the heart of what it was to be Dorian, and therefore Macedonian, and had more in common with the Theban Sacred Band than with Athens.[61] In light of this, it is not surprising that there are many indications that their sexual relationship was indeed lifelong. Lucian, writing in his book On Slips of the Tongue[62] describes an occasion when Hephaestion's conversation one morning implied that he had been in Alexander's tent all night, and Plutarch[63] describes the intimacy between them when he tells how Hephaestion was in the habit of reading Alexander's letters with him, and of a time when he showed that the contents of a letter were to be kept secret by touching his ring to Hephaestion's lips. Diogenes of Sinope, in a letter written to Alexander when he was a grown man, accuses Alexander of being "... ruled by Hephaestion's thighs."[64]
No other circumstance shows better the nature and length of their relationship than Alexander's overwhelming grief at Hephaestion's death. As Andrew Chugg says, "... it is surely incredible that Alexander's reaction to Hephaestion's death could indicate anything other than the closest relationship imaginable."[65] The many and varied ways, both spontaneous and planned, by which Alexander poured out his grief are detailed below. In the context of the nature of their relationship however, one stands out as remarkable. Arrian says that Alexander "... flung himself on the body of his friend and lay there nearly all day long in tears, and refused to be parted from him until he was dragged away by force by his Companions."[66]
http://www.dominicselwood.com/richard-lionheart-saladin/His record as a husband was likewise not spectacular. And here we tread on controversial territory, so let’s let the chronicles do the talking. This is how Roger of Howden (a close confidant of Henry II and Richard) describes Richard’s friendship with King Philip Augustus of France in 1187:
Every day they ate from one table and one bowl, and by night the bed did not separate them. The king of France loved him as his own soul, and they loved each other so much that the king of England (i.e., Henry II, Richard’s father) was absolutely astonished at the passionate love between them.
A minority of historians believe this passage records no more than a ritual symbolic show of political harmony between the two great royal lords. The majority of historians has never heard of the princely “bed-and-bowl rite”, and assumes Roger meant exactly what he wrote.
In any case, four years later, a political union was struck between Richard and Berengaria of Navarre, and the couple married in Cyprus en route to the Crusades. However, for whatever reason, Berengaria did not hang around for more than a few months, and soon headed back to France.
But that is not the end of it. In 1195, Roger of Howden tells us that a hermit cautioned Richard to desist from certain same-sex acts, which he identifies clearly, and I do not need to. Despite the warning, Roger says Richard did not heed the words until a serious illness caused him to take his wife back again, although the marriage remained distant and childless to the end.
http://rictornorton.co.uk/lawrence.htm In this famous study of the Arab revolt against the Turks he acknowledged that the soldiers, rather than use the "sordid commerce" of public prostitutes "began indifferently to slake one another's few needs in their own clean bodies – a cold convenience that, by comparison, seemed sexless and even pure. Later, some began to justify this sterile process, and swore that friends quivering together in the yielding sand with intimate hot limbs in supreme embrace, found there hidden in the darkness a sensual co-efficient of the mental passion which was welding our souls and spirits in one flaming effort." Rumours about his private life have supplied a dozen biographies. In August 1992 the London Daily Telegraph uncovered new evidence to suggest that Lawrence of Arabia was indeed actively gay, but a reader contradicted this with a statement from a man who shared barracks with Lawrence who claimed that Lawrence was not a homosexual, merely a masochist. In Seven Pillars Lawrence went on to say that "Several, thirsting to punish appetites they could not wholly prevent, took a savage pride in degrading the body, and offered themselves fiercely in any habit which promised physical pain or filth." The story is well known that in 1917 Lawrence was captured as a spy at Der'a, south of Damascus; Hajim Bey, the governor, tried to make love to him but Lawrence resisted, upon which he was turned over to a gang of soldiers to be tortured and raped. Pain, humiliation and ecstacy released the beast within, which "journeyed with me since, fascination and terror and morbid desire, lascivious and vicious perhaps, but like the striving of a moth towards its flame." After the war he joined the Royal Air Force as a lowly private in order to escape from himself as well as from the fame he felt was unearned. But in order to recapture the experience of the beating he received at Der'a, Lawrence invented an uncle, "R", who gave instructions for the discipline of "Ted", i.e. Lawrence personifying himself as a naughty nephew. Engaged for these purposes was John Bruce, a young Scots friend who had enlisted in the Tank Corps at the same time as Lawrence in 1923. Another service companion sometimes attended as a witness of these floggings, which took place over a period of twelve years: he confirmed that Lawrence was beaten with a metal whip upon the bare buttocks until he ejaculated. Lawrence in his diary occasionally noted, for example, "30 from Jock", his nickname for Bruce; the numbers, from 30 to 75, presumably indicate the number of lashes administered. Bruce sold his story to the Sunday Times in 1969, which was serialised as "The Secret Life of Lawrence of Arabia".
Richard is debatable. The other two are overwhelmingly obvious.
