Throbbing platonic love.

Why on earth are you looking for definitive proof of specific claims when it comes to history? That just seems like a fool's errand.

Too, there's the "anything's better than a well-born straight white man" bias in most of modern academia, and The Guardian's audience. Saying "Henry James was straight" would sell about as well as "2 + 2 = 4".

The Guardian's final 2 paragraphs acknowledge that the case is weak:

> But the book that made all the difference was published in 1990. Epistemology of the Closet by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick became the bible for gay studies and queer theory in universities. It proposed an entire new way of reading James as a gay writer whose efforts to remain in the closet gave him his style and may, in fact, have been his real subject, all the more present for being secret and submerged.

> Kosofsky Segdwick’s argument is dense and brilliant, and, at times, far-fetched and unconvincing. But it removed James from the realm of dead white males who wrote about posh people. He became our contemporary. Thus James’s artistry, his skill at creating scenes and drama, his sly sexuality, his wonderful prose style, his genius with form and tone and structure, make him a subject of fascination not only for ordinary readers but also for students and teachers of literature, and indeed for many, if not all, of the novelists who have come after him. James’s dying words – “Tell them to follow, to be faithful, to take me seriously” – continue to resonate a hundred years after his death.