Lesbian Sex is Holding Hands: Why Depictions of Lesbian Desire Matter in UK Historical Dramas

As a historian who identifies as lesbian, I often feel excluded from even the most well-meaning of historical dramas. Even chaste straight couples have on-screen kisses, visible points of flustered arousal, subtle side-glances about the size or excellence of their partner’s secondary or primary sex characteristics, or hasty but gentle exit-from-bedroom scenes. But lesbians? Lesbians get to touch fingertips or almost get caught holding eye contact for too long. An immediate response to my critique may be that queerness had to be hidden then so it has to be hidden now in dramatized depictions of the era. However, I feel this hugely confuses the broader public: just because the historical population didn’t ‘see’ lesbian desire as we would now class it, this doesn’t mean women weren’t flirting outrageously, kissing passionately, or joyously discovering inventive and pleasurable ways of being intimate together. In this article I narrowly define lesbian desire as the sexual interest and activities of at least two persons who identify as women (in the broadest and most inclusive sense). My writing aims to make a single point – from the public’s perspective, in the UK, lesbian desire is just holding hands.

For three seasons, in the historic complexities of lesbian relationships in London was explored through the characters of Patience (Patsy) Mount and Delia Busby. Patsy properly appears first in season three – an aloof and distant midwife, and definitely victim to the trope of queer baiting. Her sexuality was hinted at but not confirmed until writers perhaps felt her character viable for another season. We meet Delia at the end of the season, when the reserved patsy sneaks into her nurses’ home to find comfort – but the romance is not confirmed at all until season four. Queerbaiting is common on both TV and film as a way of drawing in a queer audience while also perhaps retaining a slightly more conservative demographic of viewer. Delia almost convinces Patsy to move into a flat-share with her, but in season four she fell victim to the ‘bury your gays’ phenomenon, having been the victim of a traffic accident and rendered amnesic – entirely forgetting her years’ long relationship with Patsy. ‘Bury your gays’ is a noted narrative pattern in which many, many shows kill off or incapacitate their queer characters in often sudden and violent ways. In season five, some moments of intimacy are suggested when Delia moves into the ensemble cast’s main residence; but most episodes show them fully clothed on a single bed holding each other like relations rather than lovers. In their final series, Patsy is sent for most of the action to Hong Kong and Delia is left with no intimacy even by letter until the final moments of the series in which they share one, brief, desperate kiss in an alley. Even a scene at London’s famous lesbian club, Gateways, the crowd of women dancing with each other do not hint at any desire greater than that of dancing like partner-less maidens at a debutante (season five, episode 7 in the last three minutes for the interested reader). Even with four whole seasons of airtime, this prime-time drama made the passion of two women less visible than a priest and his fiancée, and less satisfying than a nun with a slice of Battenburg cake.

In the UK perhaps the aesthetic is informed by the works of elite queers of history such as Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness (1928) or Virginia Woolf’s novel-come-love-letter to Vita Sackville-West, Orlando: A Biography (1928). But the aesthetic is stilted, narrow and now over-used to the point of ridicule even by lesbian commentators. If the public is not presented with sexual desire on par with what the straight white couple get, then it is only logical that it should seem that lesbian desire is fairly recent, fairly radical, fairly politically motivated ideal. If historical drama – through lack of diversity in actors, writers, directors and casting agents – continue to elide lesbian desire or women’s positive pleasure and sexual experiences then drama will continue to be taken for historical reality. At best this leads to far too many people asking the average lesbian minding their own business: ‘But, how do you even have sex?’ At worst, it snowballs into misconceptions of the longevity of queer, gender, and even racial and disability emancipation movements throughout history. Various issues arise in lesbian narratives set in historical UK locations. The women are almost always white, usually one or both has an affluent background, they identify with the sex assigned them at birth, and are rarely bisexual, pansexual or asexual. If they’re disabled, like Delia in Call the Midwife, their ‘affliction’ is transitory – more plot than identity. If lesbian desire is present and acknowledged (not queer baited), and the character manages to survive beyond the itching axe of ‘bury your gays’ then the final blow to many lesbian characters is the lack of a stable or happy romantic ending. Historically these could and did exist; the National Archives even have instructions on how to find them. An exception to the tragic end or the restrained love scene on the UK or about the UK may be Tipping the Velvet (2002), in which the main character encounters many and various women all quite keen on physical intimacy. But otherwise, the pool is quite shallow for lesbian desire on British screens, which itself is surprising for the self-proclaimed liberalism of anglophone regions. To look for realistic representations of desire, one must often look beyond the UK canon.