yuletide reveals: clean linen (heyer, the unknown ajax)+book rec: homosexuality in the 19th century

[cimorene]

Well, for Yuletide I wrote Clean Linen for RosieR. This is 22,000 words of sequel to Georgette Heyer's The Unknown Ajax with a crossover cameo from April Lady's Felix Hethersett (Claud/Felix).

The Unknown Ajax is one of my favorite Heyer novels and I passionately ship Richmond/Vincent, but since I love everything about it I signed up for "any". My recipient had requested Claud slash without specifying whom she wanted him slashed with. I kind of thought she was just trying to be nice, and asked (through proper Yuletide channels) for a clarification of her preference, but it turned out that she really honestly didn't have one, except not slashing him with Richmond (I'm not sure why she felt that way, but it accorded with my shipper's soul, since I only want Richmond to be paired with Vincent); and she gave the okay to OMCs, which was how I decided to borrow a sidekick from another Heyer book. (Well, actually, I combed through about 20 different Heyers from my shelf before I settled on Felix, but the story there is lengthy.)

Besides the scandal, shenanigans, and madcap coincidence plot which I thought was necessary to make a good Heyer story (fervent thanks go to fairestcat for helping me to hammer that out!), the main thing I wanted to do was put homosexuality into Claud's life. Claud is one of Heyer's many secondary characters who read as coded-homosexual to me, and I wanted to add the homosexual lifestyle - subculture, that is - to the story. In the clueless stage I asked my spouse, and she provided the Period Equivalent of a Gay Club prompt. Also invaluable to me in writing this was this book I got for my birthday:

Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century by Graham Robb. The author is an award-winning biographer who carried out a great deal of research around Europe using primary sources, and the book has lots of fascinating information on how people lived, hooked up, found each other, and talked about what they were doing throughout the 19th century. There's also a section devoted to homosexual representation that addresses Evil or Dead Queers (not by that name), including EM Forster's comment that Maurice wouldn't be big because his protagonists survived it without punishment. (Ouch.) Also, did you know that Tchaikovsky and Hans Christian Andersen were gay? That Walt Whitman lived with a little laborer dude happily, but once denied the homosexual implications in Leaves of Grass in writing? That throughout the history of Christianity many have read the Bible as Jesus/John the Baptist (est rel), and that one of the books removed from the Bible in the middle ages by the Church intimated as much very much more directly? That Arthur Conan Doyle's life was changed when he met Oscar Wilde at a dinner party, that he still talked about it years later, and that he declared his intention of making a study of homosexuality, which he considered not a hanging offence but a medical matter? (Robb theorizes that Holmes is based on Wilde. That whole section is awesome and, ahem, pretty wild.) In short: BUY THIS BOOK.

To return to "Clean Linen" for the moment, nobody commented that I was too obvious with the Richmond/Vincent in the background, so perhaps my decision to remove the part where Richmond tells Vincent that he's not in the petticoat-line was effective after all. I still worried that I was being a bit too obvious with my actual shipping preferences, so feel free to tell me if you thought so. I'm currently weighing whether to write a Richmond/Vincent sequel to it, actually, for my own satisfaction if nothing else. I originally envisioned all of that being entirely off-screen, but nonetheless resolved in the course of the story; but when I reached the end I realized that I don't think they are ready to hook up yet, after all.

Comments

[torachan]

Ooh. I haven't read any Heyer since high school when I read a bunch of my mom's, so I wouldn't ordinarily read any for Yuletide, but I think I will have to check yours out. Also put that book on my wishlist.

[cimorene]

I should clarify that my story doesn't include any visits to period gay clubs! That's all off-screen and only referred to. I decided to go with a second-time story, with a couple of flashbacks to their first time, which took place at a sort of private gay club, but not a lot of detail about it. It's not an exploration of the subculture, really, because that would've made the story twice as long. I just wanted to make sure it was firmly established that both the gay guys were members of it, and self-identified that way (if only in the company of the like-minded) - that they weren't, like, Only Gay For You, or self-hating queers, anything of the kind.

I do like that there are a lot of Heyer characters that read (to me) as coded-gay, but at the same time, it bothers me that it's always, well, coded. Some of her books make abundantly clear that it really is on purpose, that she knows what she's doing with it. It makes me feel that even in the books, much like in the society it's set in, they have to be closeted from the (average) reader. Probably she wouldn't've had any choice given the time she was publishing, but still, I wanted to give them their sexuality back.

[torachan]

*nods* Still, I'd like to read it! I am still feeling beaten down from the number of WNG fics I slogged through for McShep Match, so anything that establishes characters as actually queer sounds like a breath of fresh air.

[cimorene]

Cool, I just didn't want to be guilty of inadvertent false advertising. :) I would love to go back and write the one about the underground gay nightlife of the fashionable sorts.

One of the best things about Heyer is that people aren't automatically gay if their hair sticks up (hair doesn't stick up without gel, and hair gel is gay! What the fuck) or even if they are fashion experts with fastidious taste and sissy, anti-athletic habits. (The latter is evidently one of her favorite types of het hero.)

[effex]

Even knowing you ship Richmond/Vincent, and keeping half an eye out for it while reading, it wasn't much in evidence. Well, not until the scene where Richmond is jealous about Angelique, anyway (although it was subtle even then). So, I mean. Not obvious at all!

[buys that book hard] Mmm, queer history.

[cimorene]

That's good! My plan was that Vincent was acting like a bear with a toothache all along because of his jealousy, hence the unaccustomed nastiness and pointed remarks at Richmond (when usually he addresses them only to other people). Of course these are also interspersed with moments of affection for Richmond, and his pet-name for him, which are both things he never addresses to anyone else. But I didn't want that to be apparent until the end, because it's not apparent to Claud or Felix. In fact, his outsider's perspective was the main reason I chose to do that bit in Felix's POV, because he was more likely to notice the subtleties of the emotions expressed by Richmond and Vincent during the confrontation.

Richmond meets hookups in the army, while Vincent, in spite of being fashionable enough, is the type who meets them at the period equivalent of the gym (races, mills, cock-fights, and hunting parties, I fancy, because the atmosphere is a little less private at Gentleman Jackson's), not the disco (the Regency equivalent of the latter is more Claud and Felix's speed).