Can you believe it’s been almost three years since the last episode of Gentleman Jack aired on television? Yep, we haven’t had a new episode since June, 2019. I bring you good news, patient people: Gentleman Jack is coming back this Spring.
It’s a sign of an iconic lesbian show when we keep its memory alive so well that it never felt absent. It doesn’t take us much to get excited, either. We’re so used to crumbs of good representation that we didn’t want to jinx a show like Gentleman Jack by complaining about the wait. We simply spent the years spreading the word, making sure all our pals caught up before the elusive second season.
BBC’s Gentleman Jack, written by Sally Wainright, is an historical drama series set in and around Halifax, 1832. It follows Anne Lister (Suranne Jones), a lesbian landowner and industrialist who existed IRL. The show is based on her diaries, which contained over four million words and were mostly written in a secret code. The code was deciphered and cracked in the 1980s by Halifax-born historian Helena Whitbread.
Lesbians love watching ourselves reflected in history because it feels unpermitted. Take Carol (2015), a lesbian love story set in 1950s America, for example. It’s an even bigger adrenaline rush when we discover that, like Gentleman Jack, the story we’re watching or reading is based on a true story. Historians have a habit of maintaining that romance and sexuality between women must be an expression of friendship, never a fully fledged relationship. It’s lesbophobia.
What do we know about the second season of GJ?
Well we know it’s going to take off where it left us: Ann Walker chooses love over safety, she chooses to live a more dangerous life–as an out lesbian in a public relationship with another woman in the 1800s–when she accepts Anne Lister’s marriage proposal. The pair go to church, take the sacrament, and Ann agrees to move into Shibden Hall.
Suranne Jones will return to play Anne Lister. Sophie Lundle will return as her wife, Ann Walker. Much, or all, of the old cast will return, as well as some new characters! Marian Lister, played by Gemma Whelan, and Lydia Leonard, playing by Mariana Lawton, will join Anne Lister’s ex, Isabella ‘Tib’ Norcliffe (Joanna Scanlan) as newbies.
Seems like some dyke drama will be in the cards!
If Anne Lister’s diaries are anything to go by, we know she was super sexually active and not particularly monogamous in her life. While I don’t want the ever-innocent Ann Walker to be betrayed by Anne’s wandering eye, portraying Anne Lister as a one-woman devotee doesn’t truthfully depict her real character. Perhaps that’s why her ex-GF ‘Tib’ will rock up this season: to tempt Anne.
As a boring, old prude of a lesbian, who shudders at threesomes, let alone polyamory, I have hope that Anne can keep it in her pants. After all, in real life, she did settle down at 41-years-old. The show does allude to her womanizing ways of the past and the fact that she isn’t used to the mutual surrender, dedication and intimacy evident in her connection with Ann Walker. They don’t need to hurt Ann Walker.
Anne would be silly to betray Ann Walker. Anne Lister doesn’t want to hide her sexual orientation. She wants all the privileges, like marriage, that heterosexuals have. She knows her lesbianism isn’t a gross abnormality or a deviation from “the default.”
She’s so used to being fetishised and kept secret by women who want to use her for sex, only to not speak to her on the street. Will she risk the marriage with the arrival of her ex? Then again, internalized homophobia means lesbians self-sabotage and think all we’re worth is a bang in the shadows. Sometimes being treated well is triggering.
Ann Walker is the first woman to accept an ostracized life with Anne Lister so that they can be authentic in their love and relationship. It would be absolutely heartbreaking if the addition of Anne’s ex to the cast was to put a wedge between Anne and the first woman who is proud to be seen with her!
