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

“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