I feel very strongly that if historical romance can give women a happy ending, it can give queer people a happy ending. M/f historical romance doesn’t tie itself in knots over the likelihood of the rake having syphilis, the terrible dentistry, the lice, the prolapsed uterus after multiple pregnancies, the prospect of death in childbed, or the horrifying legal discrimination against married women. We don’t close the book on the wedding scene reflecting that the heroine can now be legally raped, has just lost all her property to her husband…and would be vanishingly unlikely to obtain a divorce. Historical romance readers aren’t stupid; we know this stuff, but we choose to believe our heroine will be one of the lucky ones. And I don’t see why we can’t extend that happy glow to other stories, too. If women’s lives don’t have to be blighted by social oppression in romance, neither do those of people of color or queer people.
Moreover, human nature doesn’t change. A lot of what we read about LGBT people in history is appalling because the rec­ords we have are the legal documents, the newspaper reports, the accounts of people who were victimized. We don’t generally have the hidden stories of the people who lived under the radar…. But we know…people we’d now call gay, bi, trans have always existed and [that] as a matter of statistics plenty of them must have lived and died without ever coming to the law’s attention. Which is not to hand-wave the horrors of the past but only to say that horror isn’t the only story, and it’s not an acceptable reason to deny marginalized people their happy-ever-after.