For me, the undertones of Red, White and Royal Blue communicate that the representation of the pinnacle of gay love and acceptance is when two individuals from the top of the social establishment fall in love. Saying this, I enjoyed the series Young Royals, though the story is slightly different.

Living in the UK, where many gays are obsessed with Royalty, makes it difficult to buy into this story. A favourite pastime of many gays in the UK is visiting Stately homes/houses. I believe that here in the UK, there is an established fantasy that the aristocracy and royal households were in the past full of gays, and this is something that all gays should feel proud of and look up to.

Films and series like Brideshead, Maurice, and Benediction play to this idea of homosexuality being the preserve of the upper class. Some idealise this idea of homosexuality being the preserve of the social elite. There is a historical precedence for this; in the 19th century, many ‘gays’ saw the Ancient Greek culture as validating homosexuality as being at the pinnacle of high culture. Historians and philosophers see Western Civilisation as originating from the Ancient Greeks.

Many gays glorify and long for the return of the exclusive closeted club of Upper-Class gays. Well, one might say it still exists. One only has to look through the gay dating apps to see this obsession with social status. Films like Red, White and Royal Blue reinforce the idea that social status is the most important aspect of gay love.

The idea of LGBTQ as an elite closeted group is epitomized by The Church of England. In the 1990s, I visited a Church of England College in Cambridge. It was probably one of the gayest places I have ever been. The majority of the students at the college were LGBTQ+.

There are plenty of true historical LGBTQ+ romances that film companies can turn into films. I recently came back from a trip to Vienna, where I found out about the story of Eduard van der Nüll (1812-1868), who, with his partner, designed the Vienna Opera House. It is a tragic story, and one must ask why filmmakers have not made this into a film.

There are examples of many films where the LGBTQ aspect of the characters has been erased, for example, the story of the killing of Rasputin, where two of the protagonists, Prince Felix Yusupov and Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, were rumoured to be bisexual and homosexual and were engaged in a relationship.

Some may say that the above sentence contradicts my argument and that these characters represented the aristocracy. Yes and no, the difference is that this is a ‘true’ story, and secondly, there was no reference to the sexual orientations of the characters. Another recent example of the erasure of the sexuality of a significant historical figure is the Amazon Prime series Leonardo.

Yes, I know the argument that homosexuality as a concept did not exist during the lives of many of these historical characters. However, they still were involved or had same-sex attractions.