Was Sir Isaac Newton gay?

But of course, if ever a man were, Sir Isaac Newton was gay. No gay man reading any of the many fine biographies of Newton has the least doubt that he was.  Straight ("normally heterosexual") people are not so sure. Why is that?  Well, in the first place, straight people--and, until very recently, most gay people (including Newton)--have not understood, and mostly still do not understand, that sexual preference/orientation is not a choice that anyone, gay or straight, deliberately makes; so straight people don't understand that being gay, typically, has driven gay men like Newton, who are scrupulous examiners of their own minds and consciences, mad, to think that they must somehow, have chosen to be gay (although they do not, and never can, remember just how or when that choice was made)--in the very way that we know Sir Isaac to have been demented, at various times throughout his life: with  depression, fulminating rages, hysteria, and "mental break-downs." Because--intelligent man that he was--still, as much as any man, Newton shared the Popular Wisdom, or Received Unwisdom, of his day, and could not bring himself to doubt (or let it be known that he doubted; which comes to the same thing) such preposterous absurdities as the Protestant Christianity, Faculty Psychology, or the half-instinctual, unexamined, moralistic Natural Philosophy which then prevailed as unquestioned, self-evident, sempiternal Truth. And still, of course, does.

Funny Thing, I'm only a Misogynist towards American and English, and some Scandinavian and German Women;

not usually towards Canadian or Australian women, and never towards women of the rest of the world's nationalities--least of all towards Japanese, French or Italian women.

Nec possum dicere quare--

But I think it has something to do with my strong aversion to ideologues, like the conscious or unconscious discipulae of Gramsci, Althusser and Kant-the-Moralist (whose Moralism before all things in this world I detest)--and, with them, to my strong distaste for believers in a "Patriarchy," "male privilege" and "Intersectionalism."

Hooray! the Fat and Nasty, Vile, Stupid and Cruel Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is Dead!

dead, dead, dead.

I hate to contradict Noam Chomsky--

But it's not that people expect Bernie Sanders will set things right and put things in order; although he will if anybody can or will.  What's important is that he is the only one, among the Zoo of both Democratic and (shudder) Republican presidential candidates in 2016, with enough Character to realize that that's what has to be done, and with sufficient Intelligence and Courage to try to do it.

The Things I Wouldn't Have Known If I hadn't Googled Them

That's a picture from, or from about the same time as, the original production (1865) of Tristan und Isolde, with husband and wife Ludwig and Malwine (correctly, Malvina--She was of Portuguese descent) Schnorr von Carolsfeld in the title rôles.  Six weeks after  the première, Herr Schnorr von Carolsfeld (Ludwig) up and died--poisoned, I believe, by Frau Schnorr von Carolsfeld (Malvina) "who therewith sank into a deep depression," and never afterward sang a note, of Tristan or of anything else; although she did, I conjecture, give Wagner (with whom she was passionately, secretly in love--although I don't think she liked his music, because singing it made her hoarse) to understand that she'd be back in full voice the instant he ditched Cosima (of whom she was madly and outspokenly jealous).  I am not making this up, except for the part about Frau Schnorr von Carolsfeld poisoning Herr Schnorr von Carolsfeld.  While he lived, Wagner never heard another performance of this, arguably, his single greatest work, though he soon died in Venice where he wrote it. Or, I should say probably, where he finished writing the second act.  He wrote the third act in Lucerne.

"Malvina Garrigues Schnorr von Carolsfeld died in Karlsruhe in 1904, aged 78, was cremated in Heidelberg, and her ashes are located in Dresden."  Along with a lot of other ashes.