California considers teaching gay history

But I don't know if you were being mean there.

eg, 'shakespeare who was gay wrote othello in 1604' or whatever.

it won't cause any great shake-up.

“Most histories are written by straight people who wouldn’t know, see the signs that a gay person does when they look at a person’s life,” Kramer said. “I mean, how could you write the life of Mark Twain without realising that he was hugely, hugely gay? The way he lived, who his friends were, and how his relationships began. And what he wrote about! I don’t know how you could avoid the assumption that he’s gay.” (Kramer is not the first to raise this possibility, but it is not a view accepted by most Twain scholars.)

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/apr/21/larry-kramer-i-decided-i-was-going-to-write-a-history-of-my-american-people

see the signs that a gay person does when they look at a person’s life

It is usually a mistake to view history simply through the lens of our own social conventions. The social context in which Twain operated was quite different from our own. I would mistrust speculative 'insights' derived from viewing his life through the lens of our current social context.

I'd speculate that any man as wealthy and powerful as Twain became would have been able to construct a life that gratified all his sexual needs while maintaining a veneer of respectability. It wouldn't have been necessary to bury it, so much as to throw a sheet over it and be somewhat discreet. Having a lot of money would do the rest of the work for you. High society tended to be polite about such peccadilloes, if you had the necessary wit not to rub their face in it.