#and more than anything i want to escape the rigid categories/structures some people insist on (or themselves feel trapped in)

[my-deer-friend]

Words fail us almost immediately when we try to discuss any kind of human behaviour, especially when those words are trying to create artificial categories or oppositions. Still, we need terminology, however imperfect, to create a common basis for explaining what we're talking about. This is an especially tricky problem in "queer history", because both what has historically been considered sexually and romantically non-normative and how those things were named and understood has varied so much – even, as you say, within the last fifty years.

'Queer' is one of those modern words that is both useful and hazardous to apply to the past – useful because it's a good shorthand umbrella term for a range of non-normative sexual and romantic acts or desires, hazardous because it's vague and anachronistic and requires us to have a good understanding of the historical context before we can begin to apply it. It's not a word I think I would use in formal academic writing, but it serves me here as a contrast to "normative", and allows me to sidestep the problem we have both mentioned of rigidly structured social categories.

In the same breath, we can end up getting so tangled in nuances and definitons and ahistoricity that we devote all our time to trying to define exactly what we mean (trying, also, not to offend anyone - impossible) and leave less space and time to focus on the actual human behaviours we came here to examine.

At some point, we just have to choose a word so that we can move to the next step, and 'queer' is the imperfect word I've chosen (at least, for the purposes of this Tumblr post).

I really should have defined this earlier, though. I'm using "queer" to mean "same-sex romantic or sexual desire that fell outside the normative bounds of social acceptability in the 18th century". That's not the only kind of queerness that existed (obviously), but that's my specific focus. The most common other words for this are "gay" (which comes with its own package of contemporary characteristics that I find unhelpful to understanding, and masks bisexuality) or homosexual (which privileges the "sex" part and thus doesn't help my core argument).

Now, as for what I meant about inherent queerness versus homosexuality above...

Two soldiers sharing a bunk and engaging in mutual masturbation, or sailors taking part in consensual sodomy aboard ship, are performing a homosexual act without necessarily feeling any particular same-sex attraction or desire (just like your closeted gay man having sex with his wife is not evidence of his heterosexual desire). The act itself might be transgressive, or illegal, and thus one might say it's "queer" on that basis – but equally we could argue that some degree of homosexual activity in these contexts was tolerated, so long as it stayed within acceptable and understood bounds. There are many great analyses out there on, e.g., sodomy among sailors that could make this point much better than I can.

On the other end of the spectrum we have people like Thomas Gray, Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim and Johannes von Müller, who cultivated wide homosocial networks, and formed male-male friendships that they expounded on effusively, in deeply romantic language. There's no evidence of them engaging in homosexual acts, but their written works and behaviours signal their yearning for same-sex relationships (sexual or otherwise) that bordered on the socially transgressive – even if they themselves never transgressed those bounds. Contrast, also, the letters between George Washington and the Marquis de Lafayette on one hand, and Alexander Hamilton and John Laurens on the other. Both sets contain expressions of romantic affection, but the former is generally understood to take the style of a typical, normative romantic friendship, while the latter is increasingly accepted to be indicative of more transgressive – queer – same-sex desire.

And of course, all of these examples contain a degree of speculation and invite exceptions. There were certainly many homosexual men who joined the navy because it provided an outlet for their sexual desires, and homoromantic people who hid one-sided or mutual romantic love within the conventions of "regular" friendship.

Since we can't ever know exactly what any of these people really meant or felt, this is the point at which historians must shift to interpretation and analysis. Interpretations are not all equally valid, can and should evolve over time, and are always a function of our own biases, knowledge and access to evidence.

I don't think it's perpetuating harmful or oppressive structures to study queerness in historical context, inelegant though our language sometimes is. What does seem harmful and dated to me is requiring at least a suggestion of sexual desire (homoerotic) if not proof of sexual consummation (homosexual) before a relationship is considered "genuinely queer".

I have now rambled at length, and I'm not even sure I've properly addressed your question! But thanks nevertheless for the impetus to frame my thinking in more detail.

Homosocial – homoromantic – homoerotic – homosexual

A lot of people who talk about 18th century queerness treat these concepts as existing on a linear scale of "straight" to "gay", or as a progression of increasing queerness.

But that kind of framing isn't accurate. There's no line that we can draw here beyond which things become definitively queer. There were homosexual acts that had very little queerness to them, and homoromantic relationships that were fundamentally queer without ever (to our knowledge) straying beyond the emotional.