Talk:James Davidson (historian)

Notability and being gay
Davidson is automatically notable per WP:PROF from having professor status. The evidence for him being gay is by his book, "One Mykonos", which includes his stories of walking around the Island with his boyfriend. --Fæ (talk) 11:55, 14 April 2017 (UTC)
 * Could you please add an in-line citation with a page number and direct quotation?Zigzig20s (talk) 18:08, 15 April 2017 (UTC)


 * My copy of James' One Mykonos is somewhere in our personal library, but it's not turned up yet; if it does I'll add something here. However, checking "The Greeks & Greek Love", p.xiv under Acknowledgements says "the book is dedicated to my partner Alberto Perez Cedillo" then p.xvi is blank apart from the single dedication "For Alberto With Much Love". The ISBN etc. is already in the publication list. I think that's enough evidence of someone living an open gay life.
 * I really knew James when he was setting out on his academic career, it was at some gay event in Oxford, and I recall the discussion about "intercrural sex", a term which hardly anyone actually used until James put it into his book. Of course, knowing someone is gay just because of our personal networks, is not good enough for Wikipedia. However there's no risk of outing someone like James, he was never in.


 * Our copy popped up. James describes their apartment and travelling around Mykonos with his friend 'B.' I doubt he writes "I am gay" however this is clear enough, especially in the sections about seeing friends have sex on the beach and how B. is picking up men during the holiday.
 * P.94 [Heading to Super Paradise beach] "There are several other beaches, of course, but gay people don't go there much and we have disdained them."
 * P.121 "We go to the square where the gay bars are."
 * P.132 "Before we go back to the apartment we try to find Mykonos's only gay nightclub, but it's by now about three in the morning and we get lost."
 * P.147 "Most of these people who fill the gay bars on Mykonos will be back in the closet back home, giving homosexuality a massively inflated value, whenever and wherever it appears. We must be at least as common as Germans."
 * --Fæ (talk) 00:48, 16 April 2017 (UTC)

The last quote above can be found online with Davidson identifying himself as part of 'homosexuality':
 * ''"Most of the people who fill the gay bars on Mykonos will be back in the closet once they’re home, giving homosexuality a massively inflated value, whenever and wherever it appears. We must be at least as common as Germans.
 * https://www.lrb.co.uk/v21/n12/james-davidson/how-many-gay-men-does-it-take-to-change-an-island

--Fæ (talk) 15:01, 27 March 2019 (UTC)