Got a 2020 DA calendar. Thomas’s pic is for may (my birth month!) and I couldn’t be happier! Scanned the pic and am now sharing it. He looks so stern but as gorgeous as ever! ♥
i really think the line about never having spoken to someone like him wasn’t just about gay people but working class gay people. when you read about gay history you realise the gay scene in that epoque was (often, not always) pretty elitist and generally only geared towards upper class people so it would have been even more alienating to be gay for a working class man, which thomas is proudly. not only that, but he’s already a working class man largely living in a upper class world so he probably is all the more cut off from working class gay men like him, who were evidently capable of gathering and forming a subculture among themselves, but one that thomas didn’t have access to
and the gay bar he visited wasn’t just a gay bar, it was pretty clearly a bar for working class men, or at the very most middle class, where they were free to let loose and not be all proper and dressed up, etc. and i think that amazed thomas as well as anything
i mean we know that thomas had an aristocratic lover (who he seemed very comfortable speaking with tbh, and who literally said they didnt have the makings of a servant-master relationship hjghk) and honestly there’s no way the duke was the first and last gay guy he ever met but i honestly think it is possible all the gay men he met were upper class, considering gay relationships often transcended class barriers at the time and thomas had more access to upper class men than the average guy, and i don’t think he’s had a lover who was also in service before. in fact before and during the war he exclusively goes after upper class men (the duke, pamuk, edward) which shows that that was where the action was for him, but i think something changed with the war and also him getting older which made him grow more proud of his class as well as probably less attractive in the upper class scene due to, yknow, not being twenty anymore
anyway all this to say that line about wanting to speak to people like him was about class as well as sexuality, which is reenforced by the comments made after about “two normal guys” just walking together and all that
So I just saw the Downton Abbey movie and I cried so many times over Thomas Barrow, oh my God
Like, just seeing how happy he was to see so many other gay men just casually dancing and kissing each other, and later, when he said he didn’t know many other men “like him”, I felt that.
Thomas: Okay, I dare you to kiss the prettiest girl in the room on the lips. And notice I charitably said "girl" and not "person" because let's face it, I'd smoke all you bitches.
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