Lord Alfred, Gay Erasure and Victoria Series 3 - spoilers live below you have been warned
Finally the hell that was series 3 is over & I can write my complete thoughts. I waited until the end to see if there was any redemption but no
At the end of last season I ranted extensively at the treatment of Lord Alfred & in particular the dismissal of his grief as a gay man “men like lord Alfred only lend their hearts” and the idea that wils was “far kinder than I deserve” as if being gay and in love was such a terrible sin, he should be grateful anyone was nice to him at all. The sub text was very much that he as a Gay Man should be grateful a Nice Straight Woman was deigning to be his friend and get over himself already. I mean what’s a 4 year relationship with a man at a time where gay men risked death eh? anyone would think he had a stupid contrived fight with his lover who then got shot before they could make up and he’d have to spend the rest of his life not knowing that actually Drummond had forgiven him. I mean honestly the self indulgence of some people eh? It’s not as if that would in anyway crush your soul is it. The ham fisted proposal literally 30 seconds after being given the locket with the urgh god I have to say it “different kinds of love” just capped off what was all round fuckery of the highest order. I said at the time Lord Alfred should be written out because he’d never get a decent storyline again and we’d probably forced to watch him go full het.
Well I was half right
We were spared Alfred going full het because he barely got any lines or screen time and certainly no storyline, and wils simply vanished. After breaking our hearts with the Christmas special, so little fucks did Daisy give she simply wrote Wils out. Oh yes in the podcast she was “yeah she’s in the country cos she’s had a baby” and apparently there was a single line in the script that got cut saying that but basically wils is gone literally never to be mentioned again.
and gaaaahhhhh the erasure of LGBT characters once they’ve done the Tragically Gay storyline has got to bloody stop!!!
Although I hated Alf & wils being made A Couple primarily cos of the way it was done i.e. by implying Alfred’s grief wasn’t all that & all he needed was the love a good woman to Erase That Gay, having made them A Couple a good storyline did exist. The exploration of a lavender marriage, with Wils coming to understand that “different kinds of love” meant Alfred loves her as a friend not romantically and that despite what her aunt said, it wasn’t enough for her because she does love Alfred romantically, while Alfred struggles to be the husband he knows she wants but can’t be because he can’t love her the way he did Drummond, would have been a good storyline & a far more original one than what’s gone on in series 3
Daisy however like most writers decided that Alfred has no purpose other than being Tragically Gay. If he isn’t Being Gay then he ceases to matter. In tv show after tv show, so many lgbt characters exist to do a Gay Storyline rather than being a character who happens to be gay but it’s actually just a part of who they are rather that their whole defining characteristic. How many straight characters entire storylines and characters are defined solely by the fact they’re straight?? They’re just not but Alfred having done his Gay Duty spends series 3 standing at the back looking pretty (of course he does that very well because seriously, show me a more beautiful man) but FFS!
It sucks doubly because Jordan came out as gay himself last month (yeah ok we all knew that but still) and knows all about the stereotypes and tropes better than anyone. I can’t imagine how much it must hurt as a gay actor to be forced to re enact all the tropes and then it be made clear that you’re pretty much superfluous to requirements now you’ve done the Gay Storyline. Complete and utter waste of his time which he very much knows from his comment in an interview about feeling very disempowered as an actor
I’m almost in awe at how badly daisy has fucked up series 3. I mean it takes a special talent to make it THAT bad
This! It’s kind of incredible just how badly she messed up s3. But, as it is with this type of TV, and especially that it aired in the US (probably tailor made for US audiences), it will basically be all about children and marriage.
Once again, I ask: what was the point?
Long rant coming up.
Let’s get back to storytelling 101, shall we?
If you’re a novelist, you can spend pages and pages on side stories, on building scenery, on telling us something about characters that won’t really matter all that much at crucial moments of the main plot. Hermione’s SPEW? Cool, but, yeah, it will be the first thing to get cut from a movie adaptation.
However, if you write for film and TV, everything, every line, every scene, has to move the plot ahead. You can have little excursions if your show allows for an episode that focuses on only 1-2 characters but even then you’ll want to have made an effect on The Big Plot.
Everything has to have A POINT.
Therefore, if you can remove entire storylines and entire characters with their entailed conflicts from your story without it having made a difference, your writing is crap. Characters that are supposedly so superfluous that you can just get rid of them and never mention them again should have been cut before they even made it into the final draft, let alone to the screen.
Alas, if that had happened on Victoria, we would literally only be watching two characters: Albert and Victoria. And they aren’t even accurately portrayed, as raged about by the historical advisor in the past as well.
Let’s talk about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern a little. They die. Did anyone give a fuck when they did? Only Tom Stoppard who wrote the play about the nonsensical deaths of these minor characters in Hamlet - did they or didn’t they die? Who gives a fuck, really, as it makes no difference? Compare that to the death of Hamlet’s father - now that’s the catalyst for the whole bloody story! There’s a tragic death. It mattered.
If you can kill a character and it doesn’t matter, the character probably shouldn’t have existed in the first place.
And that goes for literally killing a character or just dropping them from your story mysteriously and hoping that no one will notice.
Maybe the casual viewers who watch this show while being more invested in their dinners and falling asleep by the third commercial break won’t. But do you really want to please those viewers or do you want to have put something good on the table as an artist?
I thought I’d be simply mad that they’d probably pull the Gay Erasure on Alfred this season and if not they’d milk and glamourize Gay Suffering (lbr I call it Torture Porn) to teach everyone, i.e. straight characters and viewers something about love.
But no, there was just nothing.
In fact, I’m so pissed at writers thinking they can amend their stories in interviews for brownie points by now, that I will completely disregard that Daisy Goodwin said in the podcast that Alfred did indeed marry Wils. If he had, it would have been only right for her to show up at balls or the exhibition. She didn’t need to have lines. There was enough space for her to just sort of be there. But she wasn’t. I’m going to then take this as her having married someone else after all, maybe she is living a quiet life too far from London to make it to dances and whatnot anymore. Especially if there’s awkwardness between her and her once fiancé she never ended up marrying because they remembered he’s gay.
It doesn’t matter what line had been in the final draft, if it’s not on screen in the final episode, it doesn’t exist. That’s just my view on canonical material, not a fact, just my approach, you can have a different one of course.
Now, about not the white but the pink elephant in the room:
I’ve seen some pretty shitty queer representation. I would like to say that I had never seen anything like Alfred and Drummond on prime time TV before and I’m grateful for the lovely scenes and all, it was more than nothing, which is the bar now apparently. Thank you.
But this was the worst case of erasure I’ve ever had the misfortune to witness as it was happening.
Studios and therefore directors and writers that they put their trust in will always be a little bit more conservative or wary when it comes to minority especially LGBTQ representation than their viewers, even in the case of these historical upstairs/downstairs kind of dramas.
However.
If you have an audience that you know you will have to appease or even please by killing an LGBTQ character to make it okay if they had a love story (the only story they could have - didn’t you know you’re not a person unless you’re being gay? yup, and you’re only gay as long as you have a dick in your mouth, otherwise you revert back to the default straight state as soon as you’ve wiped your chin) then perhaps your audience needs a lesson indeed. But not one that requires killing gay characters but one that keeps them relentlessly, shockingly, daringly, alive.
I’m so tired of being told the story that you die five minutes after you so much as kiss someone. Despite decriminalization and despite archaic obscenity laws having lost their standing more than half a century ago, the real transgression for queer characters (and real people too really) remains happiness. Just being fine. And surviving. Just… being okay. How dare we?
And I would say Alfred’s character is an example of fucked up gay representation but somehow it manages to be more than that: it is simultaneously bad gay and bad bi representation. I’m almost amazed.
First of all, and I strongly recommend DMing me if you want studies on this, the development of queer idenity is being misconstrued in these historical dramas. Upstairs Downstairs, Downton Abbey, Victoria, they’re just copies of one another on this front. Let me clear up something simple here, which is misunderstood by the posh straight writers of these ITV shows:
“They didn’t have words for it” yep they did just different ones. Molly houses anyone? Tribadism? Uranians? Just because you don’t know about something it doesn’t mean it didn’t exist.
The issue here is not with one’s grasp on their own preferences. You know what, in 200 years human bodies and minds have not gone through an incredible evolution. If you are queer today, you know it. It’s ludicrous to suggest that peope before the internet or before tv or before Oscar Wilde didn’t have an idea about themselves.
The only difference was that homosexuality was largely regarded as something to do not something to be before like the turn of the century. Even the Marquess of Queensberry was quite modern for his age (weirdly) when he wrote that Wilde was “posing as a somdomite[sic]” (misspelled without the excuse of autocorrect) in that open note that was the cause of his being sued for libel. Wilde WAS a sodomite? Not DID the act? And that sense of gay identity that was only developing trickled down fully to the working class by only the 1950s. Exceptions exist but basically, while it would be anachronistic to suggest that a character like Lord Alfred Paget woud have picked a label, he would have known about himself. Add to that that in this particular story he also gets well mad at Drummond’s engagement? It was as if he was hating the idea of marriage itself, being understandably resentful about the whole thing. He might have thought he’d never stumble upon a guy like Drummond ever again in his lifetime - and he was taken away by marriage??? And then worse, he died??? You’d think his mind wouldn’t be on marriage.
But no, he proposes to Wilhelmina.
No single people are allowed in series finales or Christmas Specials, eh? They’d bring down the mood, ugh.
Like, it’s tone deaf that he’s still literally holding his dead love’s hair in his hand and is secretly wearing the black armband. But really, I’m just still not sure whether that’s a gay man doing something stupid in the fog of grief or just really shitty bi representation?
“There’s more than one kind of love” oh fuck no. If he had been what we would today call bisexual, he wouldn’t have understood Drummond’s LACK of love for Florence. And he certainly wouldn’t have told Wilhelmina he can love her with a different kind of love. Other bi people out there correct me if you experience it otherwise but for me the whole point is that I can have the same burning joyous torturous love for someone regardless of their gender or sex. The love is the same. It’s only the object of that love and desire that can take different shapes.
Thus, as far as I’m concerned, Alfred’s gay. And if he did marry, that’s not a happy ending.
I can maybe see it as a good thing if she really did understand that this was a marriage of friendship. For companionship. After all, she was afraid of being an old maid, he was never going to find anyone else that could be his confidant about Drummond. She knew Drummond with him. She also understood that they loved each other. Alfred will never meet anyone else who has that kind of sympathy. Doesn’t mean he has to marry her but let’s say she gets that this is a good deal for her too, if only to escape her bullying aunt.
But do we trust Wilhelmina to understand this, when she’s the most dewy eyed romantic to have walked in the halls of the Palace?
Because if she expected a real marriage, with, like, some sort of love and also children and all, then what we saw in the CS was a gay man marrying lovelessly and without desire, maybe to combat loneliness or sacrificing his personal needs and comfort for the sake of having children. This is something that exists today and it is a largely silent part of a queer life experience, and it’s not good TV apaprently. Whether it’s your highschool beard or your actual spouse that you married for children at a time when adoption or IVF wasn’t possible. It’s painful and unfomfortable, if not completely disheartening and humiliating.
As @templehill also brought up beforehand, imagine if it was the other way round and Wilhelmina was a lesbian and yet agreed to marry some random guy who was kind to her? And to learn she’s got a real marriage with him, she has children… It would feel almost abusive, wouldn’t it?
Why are we assuming that people who lived a couple of centuries ago had an easier time with this?
“Oh they just got on with it, that was just the way things were done”
Okay, there are many things that are just the way things are done today, it doesn’t make it easier to do them.
And Jordan Waller put it excellently: the idea that gay history didn’t exist is ludicrous.
But ironically, the show ended up doing just that, exactly what he was speaking against there. I can’t imagine how frustrated he was to read the scripts as an actor here and as a much more talented writer himself.
Because… Why are we erasing not only the fact that queer people existed in the past but also the difficulties and pain they went through that was just as real to them as they are to us today? In fact, they kind of had it worse, didn’t they? No support networks, no sex ed leaflets, less anonimity whether in London or in the country, and the not forgettable threat of illegality, scandal, and ruin.
If you think Alfred marrying is a happy ending and therefore there’s no more point of him having storylines because he’s just fine and dandy, I invite you to sit down for a 10 minute chat with anyone who has ever been in the closet.
But to not even follow up on all this?
It’s not just not good enough. It’s not good. Imagine this being your first exposure of queer rep, on a show you can actually watch with your family. Like, this is just one stupid tv show, it’s not the end of the world but… Congratulations, Daisy. You’ve just contributed to the million little harmful things in the world.
I want to cry & clap at the same time!!!! 😭😭😭😭
Every single word of this
Your point about Wils is so well made! She is a romantic, she believes in love, in fact the reason she supports Alfred and Drummond is because (we are led to believe) she recognises real love when she sees it….
And we’re supposed to be happy for her that instead of being swept off her feet with a romantic happy ending, she gets to marry Lord Alfred who is sweet & kind & beautiful to look at but isn’t going to romantically love her in a million years
I’ve never understood why we’re supposed to be so pleased for her 🤷🏻♀️
As always, excellent points by both @templehill and @animateglee, and so well put. This confirms how grateful I am that I didn't bother with this season. As far as I'm concerned, the whole show died with Drummond. They could have explored an interesting story with characters we cared about and who shared such chemistry (and were so gorgeous, separately and together), but instead they made the most bizarre choices and just doubled down on destroying most (if not all) of the emotional connections the audience had made. Daisy just really sucks at this, and I'm glad I kept my blood pressure low by giving S3 a hard pass.
