Amphibious Thing

Thomas Gray's social anxiety, unequivocally assumed to be the result of homophobic attack because... Delaney finds it relatable?

The Chuteheds (which "many historians" have ignored... Haggerty spinning in his grave)

That adult adoption, cohabitation and proximity to other queer figures are indicators of queerness (just ✋🛑🙅‍♀️ don't apply the same logic to von Steuben)

Antonio Cocchi's writing on bachelorhood (this was good)

John Chute's interior decorating (unclear what, if anything, this has to do with period queerness)

Topics Delaney does not cover in his chapter on Horace Walpole:

Literally anything about Horace Walpole, one of the most written-about queer figures of the period – not his noted effeminacy, or his bachelorhood, or his possible asexuality, or his love letters to Henry Seymour Conway, or his relationship with Thomas Gray, or–

Literally anything about the gothic queerness of Strawberry Hill House, despite Delaney being all about the domestic queer spaces

The "Quadruple Alliance", Walpole's circle of friends at Eton that's absolutely brimming with queerplatonic potential (or– oh, wait, is queer friendship not queer enough?)

I say "story" intentionally, because at times it feels like Delaney forgets that he's talking about real people – he tells us that "Like all the very best love stories, however, it also ends in heartbreak." Again, as with the executions, real people's suffering is framed as entertainment for us.

I'm not very familiar with Hervey-Fox, so I can't comment on the details presented, but what struck me most in these chapters was the flattening of nuance. You'd think that flipping from working-class Gabriel Lawrence to aristocratic John Hervey would be a chance to explore the different types and levels of risk that queerness carried across social strata... but no. The experiences are framed in the same stakes – "all would be lost" for Hervey – where in practice there was little chance of an aristocrat being tried and executed for same-sex encounters. After all, Hervey was publicly accused of sodomy and lost neither his job nor his social standing, never mind his life.

In a similar vein, there are things to critique about the interchangeable way he uses "sex" and "gender", but perhaps that will be a post of its own in future.

Still, Delaney makes the point his prologue to assure his readers that he's only including real and proper queers, and not any of those fuzzy edge cases. You can trust him, all right? He's been to all the archives (apparently) and he's not apologising for it.

But ☝️ he also needs to set the record straight (pun very much intended). Baron von Steuben is used as a case study for the contrary position where previous historians have overreached on the whole gay thing. It's a cautionary tale, a misunderstanding by folks who apparently don't have any conception of period sensibilities or behaviours. Men just wrote I love yous to each other and kissed in the streets and it was totally heteroplatonic.

Maybe it's a fundamental ontological difference, but I find this line of thinking painfully reductive; if anything, it feels like a ploy to cater to normative standard of "straight until proven guilty, beyond a reasonable doubt". But also, I feel like Delaney's conclusion falls short of his own standard of understanding the context, because 18th century queerness was fundamentally ambiguous, designed to hide between the lines of letters and social norms. The cult of friendship was both platonic and a space in which deeper affections could thrive. Letters expressing love could be innocuous or subversively meaningful. Queer folks could marry and yet remain queer (like, seriously, he pulls the "they had wives" line unironically). Et cetera. And once again, you don't need proof or suspicion of fucking to confirm queerness.

Steuben was lifelong friends with Prince Henry of Prussia, perhaps the most openly same-sex attracted man at the time. He was accused in a letter of sodomitical acts and fled Europe at least partly because of it. He became very emotionally close with William North and Benjamin Walker, corresponded intimately for decades, lived with them, and formally adopted them for inheritance purposes – a common way to create legal bonds between queer partners who had no other mechanisms to form families. Like... I don't know, man. None of these points are definitive, sure, but I think there's enough potential there to entertain a queer interpretation. I don't think previous scholars have been ignorantly misled by their supposedly ahistorical wishful thinking.

Delaney makes no mention of the adoption or the crossover with other queer figures, dismisses the letters as, y'know, just how they wrote back then (“in the context of the late eighteenth century, men openly declared their love for one another, as North did in his letter, without the slightest implication of same-sex desire”), and fixates at length and without good reason on the pantsless-flaming-shots party (yeah... we know the pantsless thing wasn't literal...). Delaney states that he hasn't found any definitive evidence of Steuben's queerness – but that seems to be because he doesn't consider whatever the loving triad of Steuben-North-Walker was to be in any way queer, platonically or otherwise.

CHEVALIER (2022)

THE GREEN KNIGHT (2021)

THE MUSKETEERS (2014 - 2016)

FRANKENSTEIN (2025)

BRIDGERTON (2020 - )

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING (1993)