"Tillie was a queer, addle-pated thing, as flighty as a girl at thirty-five, and overweeningly fond of gay clothes--which taste, as Mrs. Kronborg philosophically said, did nobody any harm."
-The Song of the Lark, Part 1, ch. 3
That is quite a combination of words, and yet I am fairly sure that Cather didn't mean to imply that Tillie is queer in any modern sense of the word?
And yet the publication of this (1915) was not that long before those words were well on their way to acquiring their current connotations at least among the gay community of NYC. According to the first chapter, this story begins "twenty-five years ago."
So I'm fairly comfortable in saying that, in 1890's Colorado, the words would not widely have been understood as having that connotation?
Still, it is quite a combination of words from an author who we'd now readily recognize as queer.
"In terms of the present study, however, what really matters is that 'queer' is a name Willa Cather called herself, and she did so in the only documents we have that speak directly to her sexual self-identification, the letters of the 1890s that are either to or about her college crush, Louise Pound. Beyond these private, terrified acts of self-naming and -unnaming, the word 'queer' resonates throughout Cather's fiction with the snap, crackle, and pop of acute anxiety and ideological work. It becomes, like the indolent, receptive Thea in Panther Canyon, "a continuous repetition of sound, like the cicadas."
-Marilee Lindemann, Willa Cather: Queering America
...Oh!
