Thom Dunn is a Boston-based writer, musician, and utterly terrible dancer. He is the singer/guitarist for the indie rock/power-pop the Roland High Life, as well as a staff writer for the New York Times’ Wirecutter and a regular contributor at BoingBoing.net. Thom enjoys Oxford commas, metaphysics, and romantic clichés (especially when they involve whiskey), and he firmly believes that Journey's "Don't Stop Believing" is the single greatest atrocity committed against mankind. He is a graduate of Clarion Writer's Workshop at UCSD ('13) & Emerson College ('08).
Officially, there were no homosexual men in Victorian England.
But that's just because the word "homosexual" didn't enter the language until the mid-to-late 1890s. ("Transsexual" and "transgender" would catch on even later.)
There were, however, men who engaged in sexual and/or romantic relationships with each other.
Read MoreI understand that passing thinly-veiled anti-LGBTQ legislation couched as "religious liberty" protection is all the rage these days — lookin' at you, North Carolina and Mississippi and South Dakota and Georgia and Indiana and so on ad nauseum infinitum.
I also understand that it's hard to find a cool new way to spin your discriminatory language and actions, after so many others did the same before you — and, oh yeah, reaped some pretty awful economic consequences in the process.
But you, Tennessee. "The Volunteer State." You just willingly volunteered the awful, heartless truth at the core of this entire struggle: