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I think the thing that is most galling about the "we cannot know and we shouldn't label historical people queer they wouldn't have used that language" argument is that we never debate the historical accuracy of identifying people as cis or heterosexual.
Heterosexual as a category has been around for less time than homosexual but of course no one is hedging their research with stuff like, "Joe Smith married three times and had eleven children but who knows what words he would have used?"
I need to refine my elevator speech for straight historians explaining the physical toll it takes on queer colleagues every time you seek our validation for not putting labels on lives of the past that would be understood in the present as queer.
One of the interesting themes emerging in response to this thread is that some folks are arguing that it's better not to use any ahistorical language / language they did not use to talk about people in the past.
It's a compelling argument, particularly since we (rightly, I believe) argue for respecting and using the language people use for themselves when speaking to and about them.
But there are a couple of reasons why this does not work for historical scholarship.
The first reason is that people in the past have a limited capacity to speak for themselves -- we often only have texts *about* them, or they may have not committed identity words to paper for fear of material consequences.
YES we should gather what evidence we can about their lives, but every historian makes inferences or contextual arguments to connect disparate traces in the historical record, to elaborate on silences.
All language is clumsy and partial. But we do the best we can, and I think maintaining silence when faced with evidence that could be interpreted in queer ways privileges a cisheterocentric reading of the past.
Which brings me to the second reason I think it's important not to avoid identity language around gender and sexuality when speaking about the past. And that is that the DEFAULT for most people is that everyone is presumed cis and heterosexual.
To argue that current labels don't apply is all well and good in a theoretical context -- yes! I believe all beings should have nothing presumed about their gender or sexuality beyond what they themselves convey directly and unambiguously.
But we don't live in a world where no labels, no identity words, means no assumptions are made. When there are no labels or identity words the assumption is that person was cis and straight (and probably white, abled, etc. etc. etc.).
So the project of making marginalized peoples visible in the historical record requires us to use SOME sort of language, not all of it the language of the time/place in which those people walked the earth.
It's imperfect, it's messy. But I would argue that it's better than silences and erasures.
