Historians of the Closet: Queering the Past in Contemporary Gay, Lesbian, and Trans Fiction

This chapter traces how history is queerly put to use in contemporary gay, lesbian, and trans fiction. The chapter explores three Anglophone gay, lesbian, and trans novels of the last decade which have engaged in questions of queer historiography: namely, Bernardine Evaristo’s Mr Loverman (2013); Katherine O’Donnell’s Slant (2023); and Jordy Rosenberg’s Confessions of The Fox (2018). These novels each track very different gay, lesbian, and trans characters in history; however, they are all united in making queer experience itself historical whilst also unsettling some of the ontological assumptions that undergird a historicism that might discount such experience. In foregrounding historiographic modes as a concern, I argue that recent gay, lesbian, and trans fictions have absorbed, and importantly recast, one of the strongest debates in queer historiography of the last twenty years or so: namely, ‘historicism versus unhistoricism.’ In taking up queer historiographic concerns, Anglophone gay, lesbian, and trans fictions over the past decade have positioned characters as both chroniclers of the closet and as historians of the unrecorded, each prompting decisive consequences for how we might, in our present, reparatively curate a queer past beyond fiction that finds queers in history as much as it queers history tout court.