This very website recently carried a piece about contemporary attempts to ruin Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson’s reputation by disingenuously smearing him as an avid supporter of the transatlantic slave-trade. The National Maritime Museum (NMM) in London has just tried the opposite line, attempting to “improve” the Admiral’s standing in the eyes of contemporary woke opinion instead … by implying he was gay.

This is how the story was reported in right-leaning British newspapers like The Daily Telegraph and The Sun, in any case; the NMM itself subsequently claimed such stories were “misleading”. Were they? Arguably not quite as misleading as the NMM’s denial and displays themselves.

Kiss me, Hardy

According to the evil homophobic British Press, in order to celebrate LGBTQ+ History Month this February, the NMM had decided to examine the great naval hero’s life “through a queer lens”, as part of what was termed on social media to be a #NELSONFEST. A talk was to be hosted on NMM premises by something called the “Queer History Club”, about Nelson and the “men who loved him”, even though the Admiral was famously heterosexual, at least to judge by his notorious adulterous dalliance with Lady Emma Hamilton who, as her title implies, was very much an actual female lady, with corresponding female lady-parts to boot.

Nonetheless, implied the Queer History Club, this infamous romance still sort of made Nelson “queer”, as in “non-normative“, leading all the Queer Historians involved to begin incontinently “crushing on the ghosts of the Nelson-Hamilton thruple”. That’s right: Nelson, Lady Emma and her cuckolded husband Sir William were actually an early polyamorous trio. Promotional material to this apparent effect was seen by journalists, but then mysteriously disappeared from the NMM’s website once reporters began making queries (or “making queeries”, as the NMM themselves would surely prefer).

Fortunately, one intrepid online archaeologist from the Telegraph managed to archive some of the NMM’s deleted web-material before it could be consigned to Davy Jones’ Locker forever – just have a look at this incredibly bizarre video about a series of drag queens and activist artists with names like Bird la Bird and The Mollusc Dimension queering the NMM’s famous “Armada Portrait” of Queen Elizabeth I at presumable taxpayer expense.

All the nice girls love a sailor

Once certain actual naval historians out there were alerted to this nonsense and began objecting that Nelson was not gay at all, the NMM jumped into action and denied point-blank they were really seeking to see Lord Nelson “be reimagined as a gay icon”. Instead, they were just handing over part of their premises temporarily to a wholly benign and independent outside organisation who sought not to begin “questioning Nelson’s sexuality, but [exploring] how men within a male environment establish friendship and devotion” towards one another – by giving Horatio fellatio, presumably.

“Nelson has been used as a starting point to engage new audiences,” they further explained, the words “new audiences” here really meaning “a gang of obsessive homosexuals”. Whilst the NMM itself “approaches its historical sources from an evidence-based position”, and thus was wholly unable to give any talks implying Nelson was gay themselves, as there was no evidence whatsoever to back up this false claim, when it came to outside visitors, the case was very different. In such circumstances, the institution “also gives space to more emotive and creative responses to people, events and objects, as a way of engaging audiences.”

The likely translation of this is as follows: “Being wholly captured by the Far-Left, we would love to suggest that Lord Nelson was gay, in order to publicly signal how right-on and woke we are. However, Nelson was clearly not gay, and we would receive huge amounts of criticism from the general, non-gay public, if we ever dared suggest otherwise. Therefore, we deliberately invited a load of random unqualified queers in to make the suggestion for us at arm’s-length, based upon “more emotive and creative” lines of reasoning [i.e., making things up], so we can then deny we did any such thing at all, should we ever get rumbled by the newspapers.” Just imagine if the National Holocaust Memorial Museum were to begin facilitating lectures by neo-Nazi Holocaust deniers about how Auschwitz didn’t really exist, in the name of “widening audience participation to all” likewise, and you can see how clearly faulty is the NMM’s logic here.

However, it seems also seems possible the Queer History Club were not necessarily acclaiming Nelson as literally being gay, just creatively exploring, as a group of enthusiastic homosexuals themselves, what it might have been like on-board HMS Victory if he had been gay – a non-stop orgy of rum, sodomy and the lash. Arguably, the Queer Historians were just pointlessly and self-indulgently exploring Nelson as an imaginary gay icon in their valuable public talks, rather than as a an actual, historically existing, heterosexual figure. Again, however, to see just how spurious this entire exercise would be, just imagine if the British Library had allowed a group of amateur enthusiasts from the Hetero History Club to hold a talk there exploring the life of Oscar Wilde as if he was a straight icon: after all, young Oscar was married to a woman, wasn’t he?

Unanchored from reality

Maybe the NMM aren’t entirely responsible for absolutely every last stupid little thing the outside speakers they invite in say on their premises. But surely they are responsible for every last stupid little thing they put on display inside their own actual exhibition rooms? If so, then it becomes immediately obvious that the NMM directors are currently engaged in an institutionally all-encompassing programme of steadily transforming what was once a place of politically neutral military-historical education into a place of Far-Left political, racial, sexual and moral pseudo-historical re-education instead.

This February half-term, for example, for all those parents disturbed enough to wish to celebrate LGBTQ+ History Month by dragging their offspring along to be groomed into gayness by curators, the NMM are putting on an entire suite of homo-tastic activities for kids, such as the following “Penguin Pride” activity:

Penguin pride   
Thursday 15 February | 11am-1pm | 2pm-4pm   
Learn about penguin pride and make your own pocket penguin to take home! During Captain Scott’s Terra Nova expedition to the Antarctic in 1910-13, scientists first discovered same-sex behaviour between penguins. They decided to cover up their findings by writing them in Greek alphabet code. The story was forgotten for decades until it was finally published in 2012. Today, penguins feature on the symbol for the organisation Pride in Polar Research – there’s even a book about a same-sex penguin couple who lived in Central Park Zoo! 

Alternatively, queerphilic parents and their children visiting the NMM could just as easily pretend polar exploration heroes of old were every bit as gay as the mincing sea-birds they so frequently encountered:

This is incredibly, insanely mad stuff, of a self-evident Far-Left political nature, and it is, unambiguously, not the Queer History Club putting on these activities as an “independent outside body” -- it is the NMM themselves, or people they have specifically hired to do so. And, elsewhere within their building, Lord Nelson himself specifically does not escape the gaze of their deranged woke lens.