(Published in Slate: November 28 2014)

What is a self-respecting lesbian to do when one of her idols turns out to have feet of clay? I had managed to forget that Baroness Phyllis Dorothy James of Holland Park, Life Peer in the United Kingdom House of Lords, had consistently opposed LGBTI equality measures – she also signed a now notorious letter from cultural and other figures urging a ‘No’ vote in the recent Scottish Referendum on Independence, but that’s a whole other problem I was working through – more specifically she voted against Marriage Equality and the repeal of the infamous, Thatcher-era ‘Section 28’ that tried to ban the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality. And it’s not as if her books avoided queer characters; everyone’s there in the early books  from the mincing arty queen to the brooding closeted lesbian to the tortured closet-case.

And yet…

Any scholar of the mystery/crime novel knows that there are significant issues with the world-view of many of the great writers. Dorothy L Sayers was notoriously anti-semitic; Raymond Chandler didn’t exactly create great role models for women; black characters were noticeable more for their absence and it is telling that, early in the life of the Detection Club, a British gathering of the great and good in the genre, they had to introduce a rule banning the introduction of ‘Chinamen’ as the villains because it was such a cliché, even by the 1930s. Many writers of the ‘Golden Age’ (around 1920 – 1957) started out with such regressive views and ghastly characters but mellowed, changed their opinions and reflected changes in society, the latter being something at which crime writers excel generally. Even Dorothy L Sayers moved from one of the worst lesbian villains in (not much of a spoiler alert!) ‘Unnatural Death’ to creating sympathetic and realistic lesbians in her later books.

PD James was born in 1920 and her first book was published in 1962 so she cld, fairly, be considered part of that tradition. She subsequently lived a fairly traditional upper middle-class life, becoming a hospital administrator, then Civil Servant and, throughout, adhering strongly to the precepts of a particular strand of Anglican Christianity known in shorthand, as ‘High Church’. Having been brought up in that particular sect of the Church of England, I can tell you that it is the closest thing you can get to being a Roman Catholic without actually acknowledging the Pope. You get incense, confession, stations of the cross, some celibate priests, choral evensong and richly-decorated churches. It also has what is known as the ‘Gin and Doily’ wing; often congregating around the Anglican Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, in Norfolk – a place James knew well – it has a reputation for being a bit, well, camp and swishy. So her well-known devotion to that type of religious observance – she campaigned for the retention of the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer – can’t have been an excuse.

Like her forebears in the genre, James’ gay characters developed. By the time of her later, much more sophisticated books – beginning with the highly-praised ‘A Taste for Death’ in 1986 - she provides a much more rounded view of society. Most notably in ‘The Private Patient’ in 2008 , sympathetic lesbians and gay men become central to the novel, even getting the last, significant word.

In person, James was charm itself; she supported Silver Moon Women’s bookshop in London by choosing to hold launch events and signings there when she could command a much larger audience easily; in an interview she gave me in the early 1990s, she expressed great admiration for the many emerging talents in feminist and lesbian crime writers, including Val McDermid, Sara Paretsky and Lisa Cody. James’ great friend and colleague Ruth Rendell, whose approach to LGBTI characters and politics in general is utterly different and would in itself make a fascinating study, is only ten years younger; one wonders whether, if she had been born even a few years later, would she have had a different view?

We can’t tell; so it seems that, like many other compromises we have to make, for those of us who love her work (and can forget the ghastly ‘Children of Men’ and ‘Death Comes to Pemberley’) we’ll have to continue to forgive her hertrespasses against us.

https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/11/p-d-james-opposed-lgbtq-equality-can-queers-still-love-her-work.html