John Keats is a gay icon.

So that was the subject of an...erm...interesting journal I read the other day; Keats: Manliness, Sexuality, and Desire. James Najarian begs the question Will we understand Keats and his poetry better if we "prove"/"know" him to have been a latent homosexual instead of (or, titillatingly, in addition to) a frustrated heterosexual? Not necessarily. Najarian astutely points out that late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century attempts to categorize would be unwise for practical and theoretical reasons; we would do well to remain vigilant regarding the dependability of our knowledge of the sexual proclivities and practices of human beings in a culture and a time within which the discourse of sexuality was so very different from our own. So in other words, Najarian doesn't want to outright say that Keats is queer, he just wants to imply it. All in the name of literary fun.
I really have no strong feelings on Keats' sexual orientation, but I find it hard to agree with these implications when Keats so clearly LOVES FANNY.