Michael G. Cronin’s seminar, Hopeful and Homoerotic Spaces in Irish Writing, dealt with how “homoerotic desire can be a vector for utopian longing”. As he went on, I could not help but let my mind wander around; think about those pieces I’ve read or watched that captured homoerotic yearning, and which ones stood out to me the most.
During my studies, my lecturers taught plenty of authors with (sometimes glaring, sometimes subtle) homoerotic subtext or explicitly queer authors, such as the Spanish Lorca or Wilde, and novels (Carmila, Mrs. Dalloway, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit). It was interesting to see how, nevertheless, queerness and homoerotic themes were more discussed when they were not explicitly stated, rather than when they were. I remember having long lectures on whether or not Jane Eyre was in love with her friend Helen Burns; whether or not Anne and Diana had romantic feelings for each other and were literal kindred spirits.
It was even more interesting to speculate whether or not Emily Dickinson was in love with a woman in real life, for whatever reason. When it comes to Dickinson, her works are full of desire, but there is not a clear cut sexual label that goes with it. “In numerous poems, it is impossible to determine the genders and sexual identities of Dickinson’s speakers and addressees.” (Henneberg 1), which makes the guessing and the researching that much more enticing.
That guessing, attempting to know if the poet was really in love with a woman during her time alive, lead to the creation of the (modernised, to put it somehow) period drama show Dickinson, which gives the real-life poet a female love interest. Cronin mentioned in his seminar two types of gay narratives: coming out stories and historical stories. The latter, I feel like, has been much more explored in other types of media, such as TV shows or films, particularly sapphic stories (which I truly believe have been intentionally forgotten in the past in favour of achillean-focused stories). Dickinson is simply one of many examples, but there are plenty of visual media pieces that focus on historical sapphic figures: The Handmaiden, A Portrait of a Lady On Fire, Carol, The Favourite. Many people argue that Jo March, in the latest adaptation of Little Women, is lesbian coded—even though they gave her a male love interest, that is.
Historical queer narratives seem to be on the rise in general. The aesthetic is appealing, the time period is attractive, the longing portrayed captures one’s attention almost immediately, and the plot does not necessarily have to revolve around one’s coming out journey, allowing the characters to move around their lives and experiencing queer joy (or sadness) in different ways.
When Michael G. Cronin made that distinction, I thought about what type of queer stories I was more drawn to. It wasn’t, for whatever reason, coming out stories. Historical stories, much like during my lectures, appear to be what I’m attracted to when consuming queer works.
References
Henneberg, Sylvia. “Neither Lesbian nor Straight: Multiple Eroticisms in Emily Dickinson’s Love Poetry.” The Emily Dickinson Journal 4.2 (1995): 1-19.