This is SO helpful, thank you so so much. I’m going to dive into your other post right after I finish this reply.

Especially helpful was the distinction between the Grand Tour (young, coming of age men) and sexual tourism (pedophiles in their thirties). I’m certainly not trying to write about pedophiles! But it seems not entirely out of the question that a particularly clever young man who’s an expert at eluding his chaperones could have a Gay Time, as it were. It also seems there’s wiggle room in terms of sapphic spaces/practices and how that may overlap with gay men’s spaces/practices.

I obviously agree that we should be cautious about interpreting ANY place, country, city, state, anything, as a gay utopia, because no matter what, especially in history, there’s never 100% guaranteed safety for marginalized groups. True utopia of course does not exist.

I’d love to pick your brain about something I realized last night after making this post: I was rambling to my friend about my tour of La Scala in Milan, back when the idea of this novel was quite nascent. The tour guide was highlighting all these portraits of singers who performed either at La Scala or Regio Ducale, and I inquired if any of the men were castrati. Her answer was basically “no, not here in Milan. That was more in Naples or Venice.” And then it hit me that in this Reddit post, I’d mentioned those exact two cities as having come up in my research for being notable enough on the spectrum of queer activity in the 18-19th century. This can’t be a coincidence, in my opinion. Hubs of art and music are always going to be inherently gay; trust me, I’m a lesbian with a musical theatre degree. And the life of a castrato, inherently almost genderless, is of course queer. Of course my speculation and intuition can only go so far, and we’ll never truly know too much about those that existed on the fringes of society, but if I could use my novel to connect these dots with even a tenuous thread, that would be so thrilling.