'Mary & George' Lets Us Reimagine All History As Queer History

The show doesn't just normalize the notion of sexually fluid queer community — it historicizes it.

“Mary & George” — a new drama streaming on Starz that charts the fantastic rags-to-riches rise of George and Mary Villiers, the first Duke and Countess of Buckingham, in King James I’s 17th century England — is a bodice-ripper with a twist: Everyone is queer.

OK, not every single person in the cast — but there are enough twinks and soft-butch eye candy to constitute a televisual queer community whose members are living their sexiest, most flamboyant gay lives in the Jacobean court scene. It’s like a gay, far-throwback “Gossip Girl” with more etiquette and orgy scenes.

What makes this kinky, corseted brand of representation different from, say, “Gentleman Jack” or any number of contemporary-set queer or queerish shows? It’s the community. It’s not just that “Mary & George” normalizes the notion of sexually fluid queer community — it historicizes it. And that does a specific kind of psychological work for both queer individuals and for queerness as a concept.

“Mary & George” obviously isn’t alone in excavating queer history from the bowels of the cis-het archives and seeking to show a world in which queerness is yassified. But if “Schitt’s Creek” invited us to imagine a world without homophobia, then “Mary & George” ups the ante by begging us to wonder, “What if everyone was kind of gay?” You know, like the way the world actually is — or the way that many queers experience the world as a queer bubble that floats in the sea of the status quo.

I, for example, am aware that white cis-heteronormativity is the norm, but most of the people I interact with on the daily are other queerdos. Still, I assumed that the idea of living in a queer bubble was new, or at least modern. Of course I know that queer people have always existed, but I thought that they were forever lurking in the shadows of secrecy. It never occurred to me that queers throughout the whole of history created close social networks that supported them, nurtured them and constituted the fabric of their everyday lives.