Hello friends! Once again, I am participating in the Queer Your Bookshelf event organized by author Hudson Lin. This year you can get my New York Times-reviewed historical mystery romance, A Bloomy Head, for $0.99 on all the platforms it is available on — Amazon, my website, B&N, Kobo, Apple Books, and more.

There are a ton of other cool self-pubbed queer books in the sale, so I heartily recommend you click through and check them out! One of my favorites (as in, one of my favorite romances I’ve ever read) is Felicia Davin’s The Anonymous Letters of C. Forestier, in which a shapechanging gender-bending thief and con artist goes on a quest for vengeance with an ageless woman filled with grief, rage, and huge amounts of grumpiness. However fun that sounds, it’s more satisfying than that.

There are also books by Skye Kilaen and Ladz which I am excited to check out, and I will also be digging through a lot of new-to-me-authors. Enjoy!

And now that you have filled your bookshelf with some modern queer books, let’s briefly chat about some historically queer little guys.

I started listening to an audiobook of Moby-Dick in January, during the depths of trudging back and forth to work on foot in the snow and ice. I’ve wanted to read the aforementioned doorstop of a tome for a while; many very good friends of mine love this book, in all its extravagant strangeness (including a chapter in which Melville lists every fact he knows about whales, many of them hilariously inaccurate. Whales, according to Melville, are fish.)

However, I have perhaps never gotten a review which piqued my interest so much as that from a fellow retail employee, in the first year of my current job: “It’s about atheism. [meditative pause] And it’s very gay.”

One suspects the audience of this newsletter is perhaps better-acquainted with the startling queerness of the 19th-century whaler than most, but let’s read a characteristic passage, when Ishmael, our narrator, and his new pal, Queequeg the Polynesian harpooner, are sharing a rented bed in a small hostelry together:

How it is I know not; but there is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they say, there open the very bottom of their souls to each other; and some old couples often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our hearts’ honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg—a cosy, loving pair. . . We had lain thus in bed, chatting and napping at short intervals, and Queequeg now and then affectionately throwing his brown tattooed legs over mine, and then drawing them back; so entirely sociable and free and easy were we . . .

It was a different time, as they say; but Herman Melville also spent a good five years at sea, and ships and their sailors were a locus of queerness in the 19th century. I have also been dipping in and out of Jonathan Ned Katz’s Love Stories: Sex Between Men Before Homosexuality, and he tells us of a firsthand account of a sailor’s life:

Writing in the early 1850s, Van Buskirk [the aforementioned sailor] reported that men and boys seeking unspecified erotic encounters found them under the boom cover that protected stored masts. This interaction was so common it had a name, the “boom cover trade.” . . . [in] 1855 . . . Van Buskirk also reported that “ninety per cent of the white boys in the Navy of this day . . . are . . . blasphemous and sodomites.”

Van Buskirk may, of course, have been exaggerating, but nonetheless, his journals are full of extremely specific details of the sorts of encounters he witnessed on ship.

Many of the relationships Katz details are more worrisome for a modern reader than is Melville’s depiction of Ishmael’s and Queequeg’s deep tenderness for each other. He shares a passage from the memoir of John McElroy, a Union soldier who spent over a year in Confederate prisons, describing the exquisite care another prisoner took of a fifteen-year-old boy who had lost his arm in battle. The words McElroy uses suggest the same kind of sexual relationship Van Buskirk’s fellow sailors partook in; but McElroy gives far more detail about the older sailor begging or stealing food for his young companion and sewing (and embroidering!) new clothes for him.

It’s hard for me to talk about queerness in the past in a way that doesn’t undermine me or them or the space between us. I am troubled and comforted by Katz’s book in turns, often by the same stories. I can’t help but judge the people with more power in these relationships, and I also question my impulse to judge.

I think it’s interesting that when Melville wrote his magnum opus about the destructive power of a monomaniacal white man in charge of an enterprise, he anchored it in a cross-cultural friendship between men which reads as straightforwardly, romantically gay to a modern audience. He walks right up to the line when describing their physical affection, holding the reader’s gaze and then drawing a curtain over the darkest parts of the night.

Not to spoil a book published a hundred and seventy years ago, but Ishmael is ultimately saved from the destruction wrought by the vengeful whale by the coffin Queequeg has carved for himself. The carved box bobs to the surface and floats Ishmael to a passing ship, whose crew takes him on board. He is literally and symbolically carried to salvation by the work of a man he loved, and in his fictional narrative, he (Melville!) has chosen to spend a good part of the text witnessing that love to us.

The great thing about a newsletter is that no one can make me come to conclusions. I get to just leave you with my grave uncertainty and no one can stop me.

Buy some queer books. Look up your local immigrants rights organizations and send them some money. Read your history and think worrying thoughts about it.

Best,

Sharon

P.S. What 19th century novel are you most interested in getting to grips with?