I find it really frustrating sometimes that you can speculate about a long-dead person’s sexuality like, “Maybe they were gay” or “Maybe they were bi” and people will be like “Huh yeah I guess they could’ve been” but the second you say “Maybe they were ace” they’re like
hoW D A R EYOU
HE JUST!!!! HAD HIGH STANDARDS!!!!!!
This New Yorker article calls T.S. Eliot’s sex life “a sad and desolate place.” The author declares, “Eliot was…almost certainly a frustrated virgin” when he married his first wife (who he proceeded to sleep a room away from, by the way). The same article explains that Eliot was “in love with” his next partner…and never had sex with her. He was also never sexual with his THIRD partner. The article concludes that T.S. Elliot was SURELY not sex-averse (GOOD HEAVENS NO!) but rather wrote sex as bad because “For Eliot, bad sex was the symptom of a failure of civilization, and it is a fallacy to conclude that, because sex in his poems is disgusting, Eliot was disgusted by sex.”
That’s genuinely how people talk about T.S. Eliot. We all make fun of articles that say things like, “This female author divorced her husband and lived with her CLOSE FEMALE FRIEND for the rest of her life.” But for some reason when I say, “As a sex-repulsed asexual person I relate to a lot of T.S. Eliot’s poetry because so many of his works are caught between an almost hopeless desire for affection and a terrified disgust for sex,“ that’s considered UNINTELLECTUAL. Obviously I’m grossly misinterpreting the TRUE BRILLIANCE of T.S. Eliot’s poetry. When I look up T.S. Eliot’s love life and say, “Maybe T.S. Eliot was like me,” that’s shoved away with “NO! HE COULDN’T POSSIBLY BE LIKE YOU! HE WAS JUST P I C K Y!!!”
Just…would people PLEASE stop rushing to dead people’s “defense” just because I “accused” them of DARING to POSSIBLY be asexual????
(via sad--gittarius)