Welcome to the first post in my “In Conclusion” series, looking at the final passages of queer love stories. If you haven’t read the introductory post yet, I would encourage you to do so, and then dive into the first reading: Something Spectacular by Alexis Hall. I’m glad this book comes first chronologically, because of the four I’ll be looking at, it’s the one that most directly engages with – quite literally fucks with – the “marriage and children” epilogue that scaffolds so many historical romance epilogues. Here’s the blurb: 

Cover image, blurb, and content guidance available on the author’s website.

The final passage of this book takes the form of a letter from Orfeo to Peggy. One of the primary sources of conflict between them, prior to this letter, is their differing visions for the future. Peggy wants to buy a home, get married and have children, though she worries this would mean becoming a wife and a mother, neither of which fit her understanding of her own gender. Orfeo, for their part, wants to continue their career as a performer, traveling across Europe. While the locational elements of this conflict are solved by agreeing that love can survive periods of separation and long-distance, the question of having a child is logistically and legally more complicated. Any child Peggy would give birth to would not be biologically related to Orfeo, who is a castrato, and both know that “the world would not be kind to a child born out of wedlock.” The solution? For Peggy and Orfeo to marry, relying on society’s mis-apprehension of them as a man and woman, while conceiving said child – to be born, legally, in wedlock – with the help of a friend (and his partner). The scene before the letter describes the two couples procreating together in joyful detail. It is not just an act of pleasure, but an affirmation that family can be made through queer love and community, rather than legal and religious sanction of heterosexuality. 

Peggy talks about the creation of her and Orfeo’s child not just as an act of building a family, but as an act of building a different kind of future: theirs will be “a child who might, perhaps, have a child of their own who lived in a world where who you loved was not cause for speculation and who you were required no explanation.” One theoretical frame of reference against which we might look at how Something Spectacular is fucking with narratives about posterity is No Future by Lee Edelman. He talks about the idea of “reproductive futurism” : broadly, the way society uses The Child as the sacred image of the future, the center of all politics. In order to preserve “the privilege of heteronomativity,” society rejects any means of being and having sex – particularly queer ones – that don’t participate in child-making. Edelman suggests that rather than fighting against or working around the idea of queerness as antithetical to reproductive futurism, we might consider “accepting and even embracing” that negativity (10). As with any piece of theory, there have been all kinds of responses and rejoinders since No Future was published in 2004, including those that ask how reproductive technologies might shift this landscape. Something Spectacular’s detailed rendering of group sex as a “reproductive technology” made only of queer bodies in pleasure offers an interesting read that prods a bit at Edelman’s theory.

But what I found myself returning to while reading Something Spectacular is a more recent work of queer and trans theory: Grace E. Lavery’s Pleasure and Efficacy. She starts off by talking about the “romance of intractability” (xviii): how easy and seductive it is to believe that certain things – like “creating anew our own bodies, communities, and politics” (xxi)  – just aren’t possible. Against the romance of the intractable, Lavery celebrates technique, which she defines as “skills acquired through practice… with which feminists, queers, and trans people have made our lives not merely possible, but pleasurable” (xxiii). Technique can take a lot of forms, and Lavery’s work mostly focuses on techniques as they relate to gender transition. But more broadly the term refers to clever, crafty, and subversive ways that queer people have made pleasurable lives possible, even when they have seemed impossible. 

I really liked the idea of a romance novel giving its protagonists specific techniques to fight against the romance of the intractable. Something Spectacular offers a unique combination of techniques that are historically accurate (legal marriage, the social misapprehension of Orfeo and Peggy as man and wife), anachronistically futuristic (the language and understanding around queer identities) and sometimes both at once (group sex as metaphor for reproductive technology). But more broadly, I was struck by how this combination of techniques repositions the very nature of the HEA, making the ending of Orfeo and Peggy’s story something they build with technique rather than a structure to which they assimilate. 

If we look at the concluding letter that Orfeo writes to Peggy we can see two disparate HEA structures being evoked at the same time. One the one hand, there is the classic “we have a home in England and are married and have a child” structure : in short, the traditional historical epilogue. Orfeo evokes it in images throughout their letter, telling Peggy how they dream of “you and of home. Of grey English skies and green English fields,” of their child – “our stellina” who Orfeo humorously insists looked like a “disgruntled hedgehog” last time they beheld her. While we get little twinges of unconventional prose, what Orfeo dreams of is largely, prosaically, the material of a traditional HEA. A return to a genre norm. 

On the other hand, this novel’s epilogue also reminds readers of a more recent history of non-traditional HEAs, in which lovers might be living “distantly” from each other, or from the normative structures of marriage and family. That comes through best in the very final lines: 

Strange, I think I used to dream of stars, too, their distance and their pure light. I felt I belonged among them, like some cold, unreachable thing towards whom others could turn their covetous eyes. How fine it is, instead, to have a star of one’s own. Even a star who looks like a hedgehog. And a prince to cherish her with. 

All my love, always,
Orfeo 

This reads, at first, like a rejection of a non-traditional ending : the “stars” and “distance” and “light” which are the opposite of England’s grey skies and green fields get left behind with terms of refusal like “strange and “used to” and “instead of.” But what’s clever about this ending, I think, is that it isn’t really about a choice between two structures. Rather, this letter is full of technique. The first and most important, of course, is the adoption of a letter as form. It allows Orfeo to take control of their voice, an act which is particularly meaningful given how their patron economically controlled their livelihood by physically controlling their voice through the process of castration. Ending the novel on a letter’s signature reminds the reader of the central power of this voice-reclaiming. The letter allows Orfeo, as well, the technique of naming their child in their language (renaming being a powerful form of technique) in a way that preserves any positive associations with light and stardom: stellina. And finally, of course, the letter indicates to us that Orfeo has not, ultimately, had to choose between a “traditional” and “nontraditional” ending. Orfeo is still a star, they are still distant : not emotionally, nor in terms of community or place to belong, but quite literally and prosaically because they haven’t had to give up their career and are writing from across a physical distance. One that they control.

Ultimately, what works about this ending as a “queer marriage and babies HEA” is that the ending is not a structure into which the characters assimilate. It’s a series of active, productive techniques, whether that’s exploiting legal misgendering for the protection of marriage, the taking of physical pleasure in procreation with multiple queer bodies, the expansion of the configuration of family as they raise the child together, or the refusal to relinquish the tropes of distance, stardom, and light if they are chosen rather than imposed. It’s a nice doubling gesture that Orfeo gets the final word in fashioning this ending in their own voice, just as Something Spectacular writes its ending: using tradition not as a fixed point into which to assimilate, but a tool – a technique – for queering the future.

Thanks for reading. I’ll be back later this week with another post in this same series, this time a close reading of the ending of C. L. Polk’s Even Though I Knew The End. See you soon!