🏳️🌈🏺Newton is Asexual
🏳️🌈🏺2-Gay in History🏺🏳️🌈
Issac Newton is probably one of the best known names in science and in his own time he was famous and powerful as the head of the Royal Society (of Science) but he was cold and never had a single romantic relationship, however in 1693 as the only man he ever said he loved, Nicholas Fatio De Duillier, was set to join a monastic community, seemingly because of his own internalized homophobia, Newton at his most distraught wrote: “I love you more than anyone else… I could withdraw from all business and live a private life with you”
Newton never self identified as Asexual or homo-romantic, as the terms were unknown at the time. Most well known for his theory of gravity, laws of motion, and invention of calculus, he also studied light(inventing a telescope) and was made Master of the Mint for his anti-counterfeiting techniques. Fatio was a Swiss born mathematician first involved in geodesy(measuring the earth), who became an admirer of Newton, moving to London, and even translated and edited Principia Mathematica, Newton’s masterwork. Fatio was also deeply religious and oscillated between periods of scientific and theological fervor, ultimately leaving Newton and science altogether for a religious life.
Newton’s only other notable connection was his bitter rivalry with German polymath Gottfried Leibniz who published independently the system of calculus before Newton, and although both men seem to have been ACE(asexual), Leibniz although also aromatic, was gregarious, collaborative, and cosmopolitan, while Newton was secretive, ambitious, and solitary. They spilled a great deal of ink disagreeing with each other, as Newton, possibly influenced by Fatio, argued for an interventionist God, while Leibniz thought we lived in “the best of all possible worlds” a relational universe only started by a distant “clockmaker god”
Newton was buried as a state hero in Westminster Abby, Fatio continued as a Camisard monastic largely forgotten by the scientific world, and Leibniz funeral was only attended by his secretary after Newton destroyed his reputation.
The image is a modern reinterpretation of Fatio and Newton.
