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Later Sanderson got a job at a camera shop managed by a gay man, which received regular visitors from various pillars of the community who were living secret lives: “I came to realize that the twilight world actually existed unseen, but in parallel, with everyone else’s world,” he writes. Sanderson describes being measured for his first suit by a man who “lingered over my inside leg and when he realized I wasn’t going to object, gave me a comprehensive fondling,” which brings to mind Thomas’ unslapped hands on Jimmy’s shoulders and legs. It’s a story of an active but hidden world. I could find no chronicles of gay life in Yorkshire in the 1920s, but in the 1980s, Terry Sanderson, a working-class gay man from Rotherham, South Yorkshire, described his coming out in the 1970s in an essay in the British collection Radical Records: Thirty Years of Lesbian and Gay History. Men have been sleeping with other men for millennia they’ve been talking about it for considerably less.
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Carson, “When you’re like me … you have to read the signs as best you can, because no one will speak out.” Those commenters saying that Thomas should’ve gained Jimmy’s consent before kissing him are asking more than history will allow. But the fact that Jimmy had never complained about Thomas’ touches would have served, to a desperate man in 1920, as that other evidence.
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Would he have believed O’Brien’s stories of Jimmy “talking soppy” about him to Alfred? Not absent any other evidence. Should Thomas have kissed Jimmy while he was sleeping? No. O’Brien effectively manipulated Jimmy into stifling his natural responses to Thomas’ caresses, then she got Thomas to believe that his most deeply held desire-for an reciprocated romantic relationship with a class-appropriate guy who also happens to be drop-dead gorgeous-was on hand. But Thomas, who has resented Bates ever since his arrival denied him the job of Lord Grantham’s valet, has been forced to watch his rival enjoy a happy love life. As Robert’s former soldier-servant from the Boer War, Bates’ situation is far from typical. The Crawleys, of course, have made an exception for Anna and Bates, finding a cottage for them on the estate. Since there was no room for married couples below stairs, and given the masters’ round-the-clock demands, nonresident maids and valets would provide less than adequate service. If servants in great houses did wed, there was an expectation that they would leave service.
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Patmore allowed the outing only on the condition that they not go alone. In recent weeks, when Alfred invited Ivy to accompany him to the movies, Mrs. Hughes keeps guarded on a heavy metal key ring. As we saw in Season 1, below stairs the men’s quarters are separated from the women’s rooms by a locked door, whose key Mrs. Servants in great houses were generally expected to live celibate lives. The most unlikely part of this story line is that Thomas would sneak into Jimmy’s room and kiss him while the latter appeared to sleep. Dozens of readers are arguing about the credibility of the plot line that saw Thomas’ misunderstanding with Jimmy the junior footman result in his receiving a promotion rather than a jail term or a horsewhipping. Last night’s episode of Downton Abbey has turned Slate commenters into historians.