Daily Inspiration Quote by George Weinberg

Weinberg’s line lands less like a biographical claim than a diagnostic of cultural denial. As a psychologist who helped coin and popularize the term "homophobia", he’s not primarily adjudicating Elizabethan bedroom politics; he’s pointing at the social machinery that decides what counts as "known" and what must be treated as unsayable. The phrasing "down through the ages" is doing sly work: it implies an open secret circulating in plain sight, passed along in whispers, footnotes, and coded readings, while official culture keeps demanding fresh "proof" as if queer possibility were a scandalous hypothesis.

The intent is provocation with a clinical edge. Weinberg reframes the Shakespeare debate away from evidence fetishism (sonnets, dedications, biographical gaps) and toward the psychology of reception. Why does the idea of a queer Shakespeare trigger courtroom standards of verification, when straight readings are granted as default, even when they’re equally inferential? "People have known" is a jab at the asymmetry: heterosexuality is assumed; homosexuality must be litigated.

Subtextually, Weinberg is also defending a lineage. If Shakespeare can be read as queer, then queerness isn’t a modern "lifestyle" add-on to history; it’s threaded through the canon. That matters in a 20th-century context where gay identity was pathologized and policed. The sentence isn’t neutral; it’s a corrective to erasure, and a reminder that ignorance is often a choice dressed up as skepticism.