“‘I realised that I had thousands of these pages knocking about in a big wooden box in a shed at the bottom of the garden, and I ought to sort them out, see if they were any good,” says Gordon. “I was quite exercised to find out if they were any good. If I was going to do anything vis-a-vis my wife to show my love, my regret that she’d died, I wanted it to be good, so I was going through them with a fine-tooth comb. I felt that some of them might be considered reasonably good. That was what kept me going.’” My heart! “For this list, I’ve focused on books set in the 19th century or earlier because we’re trying to find books a la Tipping the Velvet, but know that there are also some great queer historical novels set in the 20th century up until, well, whenever you think it’s reasonable to draw the line for what counts as historical fiction. A few of these books below have a deliciously fantastical twist to the historical setting.” I’ve been meaning to read Tipping the Velvet for years and now I want to read all these! “The kids who need queer books still need them. They probably need them actually more than they did before. And so that I think gave me a little bit of permission to be like, “Okay, this is still important.” I think in any revolution, I suppose everyone has a particular role. And I think there’s often a lot of guilt about not being more on the front lines, or being safe or all these different things. But I think as storytellers, one of the things that I try to keep in mind is, I can just find my pocket, and I can fight from that pocket, and do my job that I’m here to do.” A fantastic conversation on the importune of queer lit.
