Time Well Bent: Queer Alternative Histories by Connie Wilkins

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I always want to love alternative history, and yet I'm picky about it. When events happen in fiction that could have made a better future than the reality we got, I feel both delighted and conflicted: is this cheapening the horrors of what really happened? By contrast, perhaps they highlight it. These stories don't generally shy away from that - I'm still gnawing on the tale of a gay Thomas Jefferson as a marriage-equality campaigner while still being an unapologetic slave owner (Samuel Hemmings in this story). There are two stories of Indigenous lesbian resistance to colonialism, a gay Indian (from India) survivor of a brutal Caribbean voyage, a transgender T.E. Lawrence, a tale in which everything you think you know about Shakespeare and Marlowe was wrong (except Marlowe being gay, that part was true) a painfully sad but hopeful story that considers what the influence might have been if E.M. Forster's Maurice had been published at the time it was written instead of decades later after his death...There is a LOT to chew on here, and while not all the stories worked for me, the ones that did really haunt me.



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