(1) Madame Blavatsky, one of the founders of the Theosophical Society, MIGHT have been a lesbian.

(2) Blavatsky’s friendship with Mrs Annie Besant, who became the leader of the Theosophical movement after Blavatsky’s death, MIGHT have been of a lesbian nature.

(3) Charles Webster Leadbeater, a renegade Church of England curate who abandoned his ministry, joined the TS, was later irregularly consecrated a bishop by another schismatic bishop and formed his own “Liberal Catholic Church”, was almost certainly a pederast. (He’s right on this one.)

Needless to say, Lively ignores any facts that might cast doubt on (1) and (2), which rest on an extremely flimsy foundation to start with, and suppresses the fact that Leadbeater was pressured into resigning from the Society as soon as his hanky-panky was discovered and was allowed to resume his place in the Society later only after Mrs Besant (no doubt gullibly) had been persuaded that he had mended his ways.

I see from Warren’s web-site that Lively, in his book “The Poisoned Stream”, claims also to have discovered “gay fingerprints” on “the Spanish Inquisition, the French ‘Reign of Terror’, the era of South African apartheid, and the two centuries of American slavery”. (I wonder what else. The Mafia? The Camorra? The Bermuda Triangle?)

It’s all rather reminiscent of Dan Brown’s “Da Vinci Code”, which at least wasn’t presented as more than a novel, even if its author did make spurious claims about the alleged historical facts on which it was based. As a journalist remarked at the time, “Everyone except the Abominable Snowman seems to be in on this.”

Lively’s method is basically a simple one, and we can all do it if we have the necessary time, energy and degree of fanaticism. You start by taking any organization or movement that your readers are likely to disapprove of. Then you look for people associated with it who were homosexual; since a proportion of the world’s population have always been homosexual, you’re almost certain to find some – even if only closeted ones, and even in homophobic movements. If you find yourself short of definites, settle for possibles. Add an immense amount of fanciful conjecture and ignore or distort any facts that conflict with your thesis. Stir it all together and Bob’s your uncle.

Frankly, I suspect that Scott Lively is a monomaniac.