Complexity and ambiguity is a hard thing to depict in overviews of history. People have an uncomfortable desire to get "the real story" with the implication that there's a single story. There's a desire to be able to interpret historic sources at face value, rather than struggling with the possibility that they may have been prescriptive rather than descriptive, or may have been deliberate fictions designed to obscure realities the author didn't want to acknowledge, or even that they simply reflected the incomplete and limited understanding of a contemporary of events that were incoherent at the time.
The one big take-away I hope readers get at this conclusion of my summary of Wahl's book is that the study of queer history can't take any historic sources at face value--not when the social structures that shaped and gate-kept those sources were not simply antagonistic toward non-normative sexuality, but were actively and persistently misogynistic. And yet, that doesn't mean that the student of these times can simply discard evidence that doesn't suit the history we want there to have been.
As we get historians looking more deeply at the complexities and shifts of understandings of gender and sexuality across time, a theme that comes up again and again is cyclicity. Any history book that tells you that a specfic understanding or expression of gender or sexuality first dates to year X should be looked askance. (I dedicate this observation to seeing yet another claim in an online queer history timeline that "Anne Lister had no language to express an understanding of lesbian identity -- the word hadn't even been invented yet." I paraphrase.)
Too often we're served one extreme or another of historic interpretation. "Homosexuality didn't exist before the 19th century." "Our modern queer identities have always existed throughout time." "If women't didn't write the equivalent of a diary entry saying, 'Today I fucked my female lover' then they were sexless prudes who don't earn the label of lesbian." "How dare you suggest that these beloved platonic friends sullied the purity of their love by feeling sexual desire?"
Although it isn't necessarily her intention, Wahl shows how all these things can be both true and false at the same time. That women may be depicted as experiencing only non-erotic love for other women because that's what they genuinely felt, or because the social mores of the day pressured them not to publicly express erotic desire at all, or because the writer was so freaked out about the thought of two women together that they needed to deny the possibility, or as a satirical wink-wink-nudge-nudge disclaimer because the writer wanted you to conclude the opposite, or many other reasons. And similarly, women may be depicted as engaging in sexual relations with each other becuase they genuinely were doing so, or because the writer didn't believe that such devotion was possible without being driven by eros, or because the writer wanted to destroy their reputation and could think of no worse accusation, or because the writer got off on imagining the act, or for many other reasons. And all of these things can be going on simultaneously.
In writing historical fiction, there is never only one history to choose from Indeed, all these overlapping and contradictory versions of history are a wealth of motifs to complexify your characters lives.
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