Talk:T. E. Lawrence/Archive 2

Dates
This article is lacking some significant dates. The language employed here is not consistent with the clear factual style of an encyclopedia. Please revise if possible. Thank you. VaniNY (talk) 23:09, 30 December 2009 (UTC)

Attitude to homosexuality
Factuarius is introducing language claiming that Lawrence was "opposed" to homosexuality, with a reference to "Khondakar Golam Mowla, 2008 p. 258". I have no idea who Mr. Mowla is aside from being an Islamist author from Dhaka Books by Mowla, but I have read all of the collected letters and all of the biographies, and have provided four specific well-attributed quotes in Attitude toward homosexuality. The overwhelming weight of verifiable evidence is that Lawrence was open-minded and appreciative towards male/male relationships. How much more specific can you get than “I’ve seen lots of man-and-man loves: very lovely and fortunate some of them were.” (Letter to Charlotte Shaw, Nov 6, 1928).

Unless someone can introduce some higher-quality evidence, or find something I've missed showing that Lawrence didn't actually say the things he's quoted saying, or said them but somehow didn't mean them, this claim has to come out.
 * The "he didn't find homosexuality morally wrong, but he did find it distasteful" sentence was present with ref in the text before you clean re-write the section, but you chose not to include it, and I can suspect the reason. To me is a very significant issue and must be included. That's why I put it back. With a ref. --Factuarius (talk) 18:54, 31 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Can you refine the ref a bit? I.e. when he wrote that, and to whom?  Given that, I can easily dig out the actual text so we can look at it together.  Given Lawrence's multiple well-attested precisely-sourced written remarks which are friendly-in-principle to homosexuality, it seems unacceptable that WP states as a fact that he opposed it.  It's obvious that TEL's attitudes toward sexuality in general were somewhat anguished and twisted, but the evidence does not support a claim that he was opposed to homosexuality. Tim Bray (talk) 19:11, 31 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Another point. Reading the description of Mr. Mowla's work (The Judgment Against Imperialism, Fascism and Racism Against Caliphate and Islam) it's clear that he's not in the slightest neutral about Middle Eastern history. Whatever we think of Mr. Mowla's viewpoints, it seems that his access to the raw TEL materials and records is not comparable to people like Brown and Wilson, who studied the subject at length on a professional basis. Thus I question the quality of this reference. Tim Bray (talk) 19:29, 31 December 2009 (UTC)
 * I don't know if Mowla is or isn't neutral about Middle Eastern history. I do know that in his 258 page says clearly that "In a letter to a homosexual man Lawrence wrote that "he didn't find homosexuality morally wrong, but he did find it distasteful" accompanied it with his (22) ref. which is not visible to me. That has little to do (if any) with the "Middle Eastern history". I don't have the time to find another ref now because I have to leave and I am not sure if it's necessary (in WP the secondary refs are preferable to the primary). The sentence must be in his Letters as this was the ref about it in the old text you overwrote, but had no page, which is another reason I prefered to mention Mowla's book. Have a happy new year. --Factuarius (talk) 21:07, 31 December 2009 (UTC)
 * OK, further research. Mowla's books are self-published by AuthorHouse, and in the Editorial Review to his first volume The Judgment Against Imperialism, Fascism and Racism Against Caliphate and Islam: Volume 1, there is content, for example "Ataturk, a secret Jew according to Joachim Prinz as he mentioned in his famous book, The Secret Jews", which makes its value as a credible reference very doubtful. I could go to AuthorHouse tomorrow and publish a book claiming that Lawrence was from Mars; would that be useful in Verifiability terms? There are multiple direct citations from Lawrence and his biographers establishing an accepting attitude toward homosexuality, you have a vague one from a self-publishing conspiracy-theorist propagandist. Per Verifiability I will remove this poorly-supported assertion. Please do not re-introduce it without providing credible evidence. Tim Bray (talk) 23:48, 31 December 2009 (UTC)


 * Suppose we have a discussion here, why don't you waited to have an answer about your new arguments before deleting the sentence with the ref? I could possibly find a second (or a third) ref as it happened, instead of choosing this back and forth in the text that is more of an edit war than a discussion. At least until tomorrow. You've did the same with all the chapter. We supposedly had to discuss the issue upon the refs you found, and I personally gave you warm congratulations for your work with the refs in your blog, asking you to paste the material in the talk page as to facilitate a wider -than in your blog- dialogue. Instead you deleted and rewrote all the chapter entirely by yourself explaining nothing about to anyone. And then, when I edited your test, you reverted almost every single edit I made using 9 rvs instead of a more honest single, essentially indicating that you, were who had clean wrote the chapter and you accepting no modifications. Or what? Anyway on second thought I found that the text had some serious problems and I tried to fix them. First the homosexual hypothesis was all around, in the start, in the end and in-between. The chapter started with Dahoum and ended with Dahoum. Secondly there was not any mention about his attitude against the women which since he was a man is a key starting point for his sexuality whatever this became. Third the asexuality hypothesis was from the start almost non existence (only a dubious phrase) although it was, according to his most closed friends, the most possible scenario about him. And finally I strongly believe that his personal position about the homosexuality is of some significance and we cannot omit it. Accordingly I tried to organize the text upon the following directions: To try to expand slightly the women's and asexuality's issues, to find a new, more acceptable to you ref about his (aesthetic) opposition against the homosexuality, and to try to re-organize the contents according to the four mine issues: his position about the opposite sex, the homosexuality, the masochism and the asexuality, putting all the relevant elements together. I did my best for the first day of the year and I honestly believe that the text is a little more neatly and balanced. Accordingly I am going to sleep because I am tired, hopping to find some words of mine when I'll wake up. --Factuarius (talk) 05:29, 1 January 2010 (UTC)

Shorter And More Verifiable
As of December 31st, this section was half the length that it is today or less and contained nothing that was not rigorously cited and verifiable. It has become overly long, is poorly organized, and contains certain statements that have verifiability issues.

I've got some ideas on how we can organize some discussions and make some progress towards improving this, but in the interim I'm pasting in the Dec. 31st version, just to preserve it. I'm not claiming it's perfectly organized, just that it's compact and 100% verifiable. Tim Bray (talk) 01:33, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

Oh, and I should mention Sex and T.E. Lawrence, where I'm trying to aggregate all the raw references, and the text found at each, that should support the construction of this section. I'm updating with references that turn up in the discussion, for example Factuarius' citation from Altounyan; am looking into the P.K. Bakshi reference.Tim Bray (talk) 06:06, 3 January 2010 (UTC) ---

Lawrence's biographers have discussed his sexuality at considerable length, and this discussion has spilled into the popular press.

There is no reliable evidence for consensual sexual intimacy between Lawrence and any person of either gender. Lawrence specifically denied, on multiple occasions in private correspondence, any personal experience of sex. It has been alleged that Lawrence had homosexual relationships with Selim Ahmed and fellow-soldier R.A.M. Guy. His biographers have disputed these allegations.

Lawrence lived during a time during which official homophobia was strong, but his writing on the subject is tolerant,  and, when discussing relationships between young male fighters in the war, he refers on one occasion to "the openness and honesty of perfect love" and on another to "friends quivering together in the yielding sand with intimate hot limbs in supreme embrace".

In both Seven Pillars and a 1919 letter to a military colleague, Lawrence describes an episode in November 1917 in which, while reconnoitring Dera'a in disguise, he was captured by the Turkish military, heavily beaten, and sexually abused by the local Bey and his guardsmen. The precise nature of the sexual contact is not specified. Some commentators have expressed doubt that the episode took place, and there is no independent evidence, but the multiple consistent reports, and the lack of evidence for outright invention in Lawrence’s works, make the account believable to his biographers. At least three of Lawrence's biographers (Malcolm Brown, John Mack, and Jeremy Wilson) have argued this episode had strong psychological effects on Lawrence which may help explain some of his unconventional behaviour in later life.

There is considerable evidence that Lawrence was a masochist. In the Seven Pillars description of the Dera’a beating, Lawrence writes “a delicious warmth, probably sexual, was swelling through me”. In later life, Lawrence arranged to pay a military colleague to administer regular beatings to him, and to be subjected to severe formal tests of fitness and stamina. . Lawrence's biographer Jeremy Wilson points out that John Bruce, who first brought forward this narrative, included some other claims which were not credible, but acknowledges that there is independent evidence for the beatings.

The dedication to Seven Pillars is a poem entitled "To S.A." which opens as follows:

and wrote my will across the sky in stars To earn you Freedom, the seven pillared worthy house that your eyes might be shining for me           When we came.
 * I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands

The identity of "S.A." has never been established. There are many theories, the most popular of which is that S.A. stands for Selim Ahmed.

References from previous
argument for MiszaBot. And you have to create the Archive index page. It should work now. I've taken the liberty of changing the archiveheader to something better then the default.--Oneiros (talk) 21:30, 21 February 2010 (UTC)


 * Thank you so much Oneiros! I was away from Wikipedia for a month and could only just now get back to this. I thought that the problem might have been with the, but was afraid that if I set it to  , the system would number the first archive as  . I am so glad that someone with more experience came along and fixed it. Thanks again! —  Spike  Toronto  20:24, 3 March 2010 (UTC)


 * I see that the current archiving is too effective. It leaves only a few threads on the talk page. About one thread in the month is created, that would mean you get about 12 latest threads for a value of 365 days. Take also in consideration users that irregular follow the development of the article. --Kslotte (talk) 13:15, 28 June 2010 (UTC)