Quote Originally Posted by PanzerJaeger View Post
I don't know enough about the subject to have an opinion, but I do know that The Book of Matt puts forth some dubiously sourced claims.
He is always very clear about what's speculative. Recreating exactly what happened, and the histories of the people involved, is necessarily speculative. The author of the review is playing bait and switch with you. She is acting like he needs his own attempt at describing what really happened to be perfect in order to disprove the "story that’s become deeply embedded in accepted history", but he doesn't. The accepted history is based off of absurd sources that contradict each other, and takes very little work to disprove.

It's as if someone wrote a book about a ufo's and area 51, and tried to figure out exactly what the object people saw actually was (weather balloon? etc), and tell the story about how the various myths developed, and then a reviewer tried to pretend like the speculative nature of some of the research means that it was probably aliens after all. A deliberate smear job, she's counting on you not having read the book.

One of bad things about myths like this is the "you must passionately believe my version or else" attitude. As if what we believe about gay people should depend on a what we say about a murder that by chance became a huge story.