What’s now in place, in contrast, in most scholarship and most curricula is an even briefer response to question like these: Don’t ask. Or, less laconically: You shouldn’t know. The vast preponderance of scholarship and teaching, accordingly, even among liberal academics, does simply neither ask no know. At the most expansive, there is a series of dismissals of such questions on the grounds that:

1. Passionate language of same-sex attraction was extremely common during whatever period is under discussion–and therefore must have been completely meaningless. Or

2. Same-sex genital relations may have been perfectly common during the period under discussion–but since there was no language about them, they must have been completely meaningless. Or

3. Attitudes about homosexuality were intolerant back then, unlike now–so people probably didn’t do anything. Or

4. Prohibitions against homosexuality didn’t exist back then, unlike now–so if people did anything, it was completely meaningless. Or

5. The word “homosexuality” wasn’t coined until 1869–so everyone before then was heterosexual. (Of course, heterosexuality has always existed.) Or

6. The author under discussion is certified or rumored to have had an attachment to someone of the other sex–so their feelings about people of their own sex must have been completely meaningless. Of (under a perhaps somewhat different rule of admissible evidence)

7. There is not actual proof of homosexuality, such as sperm taken from the body of another man or a nude photograph with another woman–so the author may be assumed to have been ardently and exclusively heterosexual. Or (as a last resort)

8. The author or the author’s important attachments may very well have been homosexual–but it would be provincial to let to insignificant a fact make any difference at all to our understanding of any serious project of life, writing, or thought.