[ID: a lavender book cover with two white women in Victorian gowns giving each other side glances and holding hands. The title reads "Don't Want You Like a Best Friend" and the author is "Emma R. Alban." end ID]
A swoon-worthy debut queer Victorian romance in which two debutantes distract themselves from having to seek husbands by setting up their widowed parents, and instead find their perfect match in each other—the lesbian Bridgerton/Parent Trap you never knew you needed!
I'm so proud of Emma!! If you like queer historical romance like The Queer Principles of Kit Webb, you should pick up this book.
Once you start looking, you see queer presentism everywhere. It pops up when politicians espouse our “unprecedented” ability to love who we love, and when recent book bans are said to “roll back the clock” on LGBTQ+ rights, implying that clocks tick continually toward progress. It manifests in Oscar Wilde hagiography, which elevates him to the status of singular queer martyr and extrapolates an epochal paradigm from his 1895 trials. It seeps into our everyday speech, in our references to “forbidden love” and our use of the term “Victorian” to imply prudish homophobia. It both stems from and structures the editorial projects that publishers pursue, giving rise to catalogues like the NYRB Classics, where the oldest work tagged LGBTQ+ is Colette’s The Pure and the Impure (1932) — as if nothing queer was written before.
The truth is that there’s a world of queer writing that predates Colette, volumes of manuscript and books that aren’t so much products of historical suppression as they are suppressed by today’s “it’s gotten better” mindset. This is convenient for a culture industry in search of the sui generis and always eager to pat itself on the back for its own enlightenment. But the almost total neglect, outside the academy, of the queer literary archive is a shame, and not only because it propagates factual errors. In limiting our horizons for understanding how our predecessors lived, loved, and wrote, we end up narrowing our own vistas. When we apply the repressive hypothesis, we’re actually repressing ourselves.
Colton Valentine, “Against Queer Presentism | How the Book World Neglects the Archive,” The Drift, October 25, 2022.
All of these are at around the same power level. None of them look fully human, though some look more human than others. Sorted from eldest to youngest.
Your au takes place in the 1920’s. I know your au has rarijack, are there any issues because of them being lesbians or is that not really a problem (the general existence of cadence may have caused people to be more accepting sooner idk)
Not really a problem. This AU's supposed to be fun, it wouldn't be fun having to write 90% of characters and settings as vehemently and violently anti-gay. At the very least, bigotry still exists, but social progress is more similar to the 2010s, where queerness is more normalized.
"The faggots and their friends live the best while empires are falling. Since the men are always building as many empires as they can, there are always one or two falling and so one or two places for the faggots and their friends to go. When an empire is falling, the men become so busy opposing the rebellions elsewhere and searching for the reasons why this is happening, that they have no time to watch the faggots and their friends at home. The populace, tired of hearing only of foreign defeats, allows the faggots room to play. This entertains them. Once the empire is gone, the cause of the present evil must be found. And the faggots and their friends along with others often get chosen. Then times get bad and the faggots and their friends fade."
The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions, Larry Mitchell (1977)