ewh
For goodness sake, being ".gay is an insult??" Is being black, or having blue eyes also consider an insult??
Yes, in certain times and circles, being accused of being gay is not just an insult but a deadly, mortal insult. I'm sure Dr. McCrae would have seen it that way. He was evidently quite forward-thinking and tolerant for his time - when he was in medical school he paid his tuition partly by tutoring other students, including two of the first women to become doctors in Ontario. He did this even though much of the senior medical 'establishment' firmly believed that women had no business becoming doctors. However, being tolerant is one thing; letting other people threaten your career and your life is something else entirely.
When World War 1 began, Dr. McCrae was a member of the Scottish Presbyterian church, a respected doctor with an established private practice, an internationally famous pathologist and university professor, and a veteran artillery officer from the Boer War.
He reluctantly re-joined the army at the start of WW1 because he believed it was his duty. He served first as a brigade-level field surgeon before being appointed to command a major field hospital. When he died, he had just been named Consulting Physician to the entire First British Army, the first non-Brit to achieve such a position. He was also, thanks to 'In Flanders Fields', a world-famous poet.
If, at any time during his life, Dr. McCrae had ever been accused of being a homosexual (and I use the word 'accused' deliberately), the allegation would have tarnished - and could have destroyed - his honour, his reputation, his career, and very probably his life. In that era, being known to be gay would earn you an instant dishonourable discharge from the army, possibly with stockade time thrown in, regardless of your rank. It would get you dismissed from any medical faculty, would cost you your position as an official government pathologist (coroner), and would probably lose you your license to practice medicine. It also wouldn't do wonderful things for your position as a member of a Presbyterian congregation.
I suppose as a known gay, ex-Dr. McCrae might still have had a career as a poet, but that would be about all he would have had left, and his poetry was never more than a stress-relieving hobby for him -- he never considered himself a professional poet like Siegfried Sassoon and some other WW1 war poets.
So yes, I do think Dr. McCrae would have considered being labelled 'gay' an insult, regardless of whether it was a libel or the truth.
Considering the consequences he would have faced if he were 'outed', I also think that if Dr. McCrae really were gay, any evidence of that orientation would be buried so deep in the back of the closet that it would never ever see the light of day. In other words, I would be amazed if the Bytown Museum's curator can produce a single tiny shred of contemporary evidence to support the allegation that Dr. McCrae was homosexual. Again, I use the word 'allegation' rather than 'claim', because that is what a professional man or officer of Dr. McCrae's era would have considered it.
On the subject of Lt. Helmer, Dr. McCrae's alleged 'boyfriend', I find Dr. McCrae's description of Lt. Helmer's funeral quite telling. Dr. McCrae mentioned that Lt. Helmer had carried a photograph of his girlfriend, that they recovered the photograph with a hole pierced through it by a fragment of the shell that had killed Lt. Helmer and that they then buried the photograph in the sandbag with the surviving shreds of the lieutenant's body. To me, that sounds more like a man writing about the death of a friend than a lover, especially considering that the entry is in a private diary.