Talk:Bosom Friends affair

A fact from Bosom Friends affair appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 18 July 2012 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that the Bosom Friends affair, like the Tinky-Winky controversy, concerned the alleged homosexuality of a children's character?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2012/July. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Bosom Friends affair.

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The premise of this article is incorrect[edit]

Robinson did not speculate "that Anne Shirley of the popular Anne of Green Gables series was a lesbian". In the first source used for this article ("Making Avonlea"), it quotes Robinson as saying "I never said that Anne was a lesbian; I did not even imply she was a repressed lesbian. Instead, if one reads the novels from a queer perspective, one can see that Anne could not be a lesbian". Delicious carbuncle (talk) 00:19, 15 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

But that's what sparked the whole controversy: she didn't say Anne was a lesbian, but Spears reported that based on his reading of her paper, and that's the reading that ran eventually nationwide. Quite frankly, few if any of the people who actually made this controversy exist either read the original paper or heard the talk. We can certainly add that quote from Robinson to make this clearer, but the premise for the article isn't incorrect, only that for its topic (just as an article about a hoax is not itself a "hoax" by our terms). Nikkimaria (talk) 04:36, 15 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

You wrote "professor Laura Robinson speculated that Anne Shirley of the popular Anne of Green Gables series was a lesbian". You did that, not Spears. I'm not going to argue about whether or not subsequent coverage of Robinson's presentation amounts to a "controversy", but let's try and get the facts right at least. Delicious carbuncle (talk) 11:16, 15 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Okay. That's been clarified, so I assume your concern has been resolved? Your edit summary was rather strange. Nikkimaria (talk) 20:00, 15 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

==See also== Relevance[edit]

Reporter Tom Spears of the Ottawa Citizen published a report based on Robinson's paper suggesting that Anne of Green Gables was "full of homo-erotic, sado-masochistic references", and that children had been exposed to said references without the knowledge of their parents in the guise of a wholesome children's story.

That sounds like homophobia and an invocation of the idea of the "gay agenda" to me.

There isn't anywhere in the prose where such wikilinks would fit, ergo I added the ==See also== section. - Toast for Teddy (talk) 04:40, 23 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I think the "gay agenda" piece in particular requires some original interpretation - I haven't seen any sources applying that label to the incident. Are there any? Nikkimaria (talk) 02:33, 24 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]