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 Is 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. Its 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? Its the community. Its 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 isnt 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 Schitts 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 existed, but I thought that they were forever lurking in the shadows of secrecy. It never occurred to me that queers throughout the whole of history created close social networks that supported them, nurtured them and constituted the fabric of their everyday lives.

If Im being honest, I thought of queer history as half communitywide struggle and half discrete, individual joy. Mary & George turned that idea around for me. Somehow, my communitys joys and struggles feel more real by watching these satin-bedecked queers help each other make their way in the royal world. Queer community is not a response to the contemporary world; its a long-standing queer tradition. So, was my flawed assumption a product of internalized homophobia? Perhaps in part, but it could be more complex than that.