Well, I hate to say it, but even that delightful scenario might fail to convince those who are committed to not seeing and not knowing. One could always describe such an image as fake or “out of context.”

If only all it came down to was “lazy writing.” Still, you’re a hero (not to mention unique) for knowing what you’re talking about.

“Alexander von Humboldt never married, and throughout his life — he died at age 90 — he had a series of very close relationships with other men. One of the first, formed while he was still a young man, was with a fellow student named Wilhelm Wegener. Some of von Humboldt’s correspondence with Wegener survives:

“When I measure the longing with which I wait for news of you, I am certain that no friends could love one another more than I love you,” von Humboldt wrote. “When I recall all the signs of your friendship, I feel tormented in the thought that I don’t love you as much as your sweet impressionable soul, your attachment for me, deserve.”

Years later, he wrote a similar letter to another companion, Reinhard von Haeften, saying that he had decided against making a trip across Germany:

“It would have meant seeing you six days later, and such a loss cannot be made up by anything in the whole world. Other people may have no understanding of this. I know that I live only through you, my good precious Reinhard, and that I can only be happy in your presence.”

Of course there are those who dismiss this sort of thing as “typical” of men at the time, just as there are those who view being gay as a negative, and will want photographic proof of Humboldt with a cock in his mouth before admitting the obvious.

All of this, however, misses the point of the above post, which is that my problem with Measuring the World is that that Kehlmann made the character gay and then did nothing to explore what this might have meant, which is a sign of weak writing, regardless of the historical truth of the situtation. Plus he conforms to a tiresome gay stereotype — the sexless old queen — that again is the sign of lazy writing.