Joanna Lowell lives among the fig trees in North Carolina, where she teaches in the English department at Wake Forest University. When she’s not writing historical romance, she writes collections and novels as Joanna Ruocco. Those books include Dan, Another Governess/The Least Blacksmith, The Week, and Field Glass, coauthored with Joanna Howard.

Queer, trans, and nonbinary people are not new. We’ve been around as long, as well… people. It feels particularly important to affirm that right now, as anti-trans executive orders and legislation attempt to erase trans existence. The haters aren’t going to win. But they can make the world harsher and more dangerous for so many, at least until our resistance carries the day and we start making something truly great together—a world without domination. My dear friend, the artist Corinne Teed, recently sent me and my partner a print they made that read “I love you more under fascism.” Loving each other more, creating stronger and deeper networks of care, is resistance—it’s how we’ll keep going.

Last June, I published a queer and trans historical romance, A Shore Thing, and this June, I’m publishing a queer and nonbinary historical romance, A Rare Find. Both books celebrate LGBTQ+ characters in the past. Anachronisms abound. History itself involves anachronism and always bears the stamp of the time in which it was written. The central premise, though—that LGBTQ+ folks kissed each other happily in the past and had lots of fun—is not anachronistic. The 19th century was much queerer than the textbooks let on. Queer people faced oppressive laws and social norms, and, depending on the ways in which their queerness intersected other positionalities, they had to grapple as well with racism, classism, misogyny, and ableism. But oppression didn’t completely define the queer experience. Then, as now, no one is ever only oppressed. Queer history helps us remember that people have always resisted, experienced joy, and found ways to love each other more.

In A Shore Thing, Kit and Muriel dance with a secret society of sapphists, and there really were secret queer societies, clubs, and bars, for men and women and those who might have considered themselves both or neither. In A Rare Find, Georgie aspires to a theatrical career and wears breeches on and off the stage. For centuries, the theater has been a place for gender play, and my research led me to learn about several real-life actresses in England and France who flouted conventions when it came to their lovers (male and female) and to their self-fashioning. For example, in the 18th century, the English actress Charlotte Charke took “male” jobs between acting gigs using the name “Mr. Charles Brown,” and she lived with a woman known as “Mrs. Brown.” Historians can’t pin down Charke’s gender or sexuality; her story is one of many that shows how fluid gender and sexuality could be, even in the 1700s. (That’s right, Heritage Foundation, no leftist social media required.) When I was crafting Georgie, a character who’d likely identify as nonbinary today, I had plenty of historical precedents to use as models.

In Regency England, sodomy was punishable by death (although this penalty was rarely applied), and by the late Victorian period, “gross indecency” between men became a crime, the deliberate vagueness of the term “gross indecency” meaning that any m/m intimacy in public or private could be prosecuted. Sex between women wasn’t illegal; lawmakers and most of society tried to pretend it didn’t happen, despite the fact that female couples cohabitated with romantic intensity and that some women married “female husbands.” Across the 20th and 21st centuries, UK legislation shifted, and LGBTQ+ people gained rights and protections. This past April, however, the UK Supreme Court handed down a horrible transphobic ruling that strips trans women and trans men of legal recognition as men and women. The UK and the US seem to be following the same playbook of cis-propaganda and hate. There, and here, the attacks are brutal and taking place in a larger context of increasing economic exploitation and racist anti-immigrant policies.

Reading or writing historical romance novels about LGBTQ+ characters won’t undo discriminatory policies or protect anyone from material harm. For me, queer historical romance provides a restorative escape (fun clothes plus happy ending), and it also reinforces my understanding of the longue durée of the fight for justice. LGBTQ+ people have never needed permission to feel joy and declare our personhoods. No matter the institutional forces arrayed against us, we can refuse to accept the top-down efforts to normalize binary gender, biological essentialism, exclusion, hierarchy, and hate. The laws and the courts can’t define us, and they won’t save us either. We need to take our demands and our vision to the streets. Stories about historical queers in the sheets give me fuel for the fight. For you, the fuel may be different! Whatever fuels you, gives you strength for the struggle—I hope you let yourself enjoy it and feel pleasure and delight, now more than ever. Because we have to love ourselves and our communities more under fascism, so we can ultimately take it down.

A Rare Find by Joanna Lowell

Elfreda is about to prove that a Viking army camped on her family’s estate, making her a force to be reckoned with as an upcoming archeologist. But when she crashes into her childhood enemy, Georgie, sparks fly, and the priceless amulet that solidified Elfreda’s discovery is gone. Now, the two must work together to find the Viking treasure that will help Elfreda be taken seriously in her field and provide enough funds for the attractive, popular, and charming party-girl Georgie to get out of dreary Derbyshire. As the hunt continues, the two begin to have feelings they can no longer ignore, but each knows that falling for the other could risk the entire expedition.

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