wild for to hold

inspired by this post, here are some headcanons and meta about Steve & Bucky and queerness pre-war.

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Sarah Rogers:

This idea of Sarah's awareness/acceptance of queerness, doesn't necessarily have to be a function of her living in NYC.

If we go with the idea that Steve's parents were Irish immigrants, and Steve was born in 1918... Well that gives Sarah time to have been living in Ireland during the Easter Uprising.

Steve Rogers's mother is obviously going to be involved with that, probably a member of the Irish womens' paramilitary group Cumann na mBan. (Would've also brought her into contact with Suffragists, Socialists, and Trade Unionists to pass that onto Steve, if she wasn't into all that already.)

And y'know who else were involved? A fucktonne of lesbians, that's who (including more than one female doctor and even one butch sniper!)

(My personal headcanon is that she was a nurse on the front lines in 1916, and actually left Ireland because she was in danger of getting arrested if she stayed. She met post-WWI-injury naturalised-American Joseph, either in 1916 while he was visiting Ireland (his home country) and they fought together, or in NYC, after he had been invalided home in 1917, then they married and had Steve in 1918.)

So if Sarah was a part of the Easter Uprising, she could've come into contact with/been accepting of lesbians, at least, long before she set foot in NYC.

You could so easily have her attitude as being like 'ah so there are men like that too, are there??'

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Gay-Community Steve:

It is hard for me to reconcile 'bloody-mindedly honest, terrible liar' Steve with being gay and knowing he's gay, and not being open about it, in a self-destructive-for-the-period way.

So either he was so deeply in the closet that he himself didn't know yet, and so hadn't been a part of a gay community with gay friends because he literally didn't know to look for one.

(Like, he and Bucky are a couple and sleeping together for years, but Steve is so naive or in denial he thinks it's just a thing all bachelors do in the absence of a girl they're going to marry.)

CATFA's view is the propagandised version of events, and Steve actually did know he was gay, and was out to his friends, and the real reason Captain America kept getting rejected for active service is not because of his disabilities but because... he kept admitting to being gay?

And it was only after he got serum (and got in the news), that his public records were expunged to cover up the fact that their darling supersoldier (good and pure and Therefore straight! or perhaps asexual!) ...had broken the law; both by being gay and by falsifying his enlistment forms multiple times.

(Kind of like how how celebrities get a suspect 4F or dodge the draft, and their PR team makes up a more-palatable lie to feed to the public. Like how Frank Sinatra got rejected for active service on psychiatric grounds, but pretended it was because of an inner-ear problem.)

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So, if Steve did have rainbow connections, where are they?

Possible reasons (beyond hate crimes, imprisonment or institutionalisation), why it looks like Steve only has the one friend:

• Steve could also have had friends in the disabled community and lost them to illness?
• Lost friends to the Depression/poverty, or had to move away from NYC for economic reasons?
• Lost friends to internment (it wasn't just Japanese-Americans!), deportation, or lavender marriages (felt their new concentration on children and straight-passing made them strangers?)
• had friends who were not enlisted, but we didn't see them because when we first meet Steve it's the middle of the day and they were all busy working?
• had queer friends but: they were all enlisted by the time CATFA rolls around, and/or already died in the Spanish Civil War?
• had queer friends but: they were all in the Navy and kept getting in fights with Steve about the Army being superior.
• had queer friends but: they were introduced to Steve by Bucky, and 9/10 were actually friendzoned guys harbouring secret hopes and weren't exactly ecstatic to find out that Bucky was taken -- or, even worse, didn't see Steve as competition at all! -- and therefore never formed a good relationship with Steve.
  ('Jeez Steve why can't you n' these guys ever seem to get along? He was always so nice to me!' 'I know Buck, it's a mystery.' 😏)
• had queer friends but: every time he went to a gay bar the men he could've befriended avoided him to hit on Bucky, or avoided him because he was hitting on Bucky, or avoided him because Bucky was hitting on him (and giving them the stink eye), or both of them were avoided because they were too... distracted to pay attention to anyone else.
• (And/or the lesbians that talked to Steve all sidled up thinking he was a beautiful butch woman, then panicked once he opened his mouth, or were only there to ask if that friend of his was 'the double-date guy.')
• imagine cops running Steve down outside a gay bar to arrest him for being a woman wearing pants… (Bucky would not let him hear the end of it.) And then being like 'oh! uhh sorry sir…' (two second pause before they suddenly clock that Steve and Bucky are a gay couple) 'Wait a second-' (Steve and Bucky already running.)
• Maybe Steve would even become reluctant to go to the clubs, out of a fear of losing Bucky to someone else? Or Bucky reluctant to go for the same reason, and because Steve just attracts bad luck? (See: mob-related stuff below.) Both of them just sick of having run-ins with the cops?
• had queer friends but: his views were so ahead of his time that even they found him too much.
• (IE. barred from the gay bath house for protesting ableist body standards, the lack of POC, fighting the police too hard during a raid, and/or criticising the mob owners... Maybe Steve eventually couldn't go to any gay club, because he was in shit with the mob? Maybe the police actually thought he was straight, because they'd seen his photo up behind the bar as a persona non grata in gay clubs?! Future idiots will say this is 'proof' he stands for 'Traditional American Values.')
• Banned from politics club for criticising Stalin's regime; barred from the jazz club for fighting a white dude there; banned from the radical womens group for bringing a trans friend; banned from the trade union for attacking the mob / wanting to fix union and police corruption. (Has he been excommunicated yet? It's probably only a matter of time.)
• Picture hapless social-secretary Bucky helping Steve limp home from yet another Club that Bucky got him into, and having to listen to Steve rant about why 'they're all a bunch of hypocrites, Buck!' Perhaps homebody introvert Steve, secretly wanting to stay in, while extrovert Bucky keeps trying to help him get out more, and every time Bucky thinks he's found Steve the perfect place this time, Steve's all like 'we'll see.'
• had queer friends but: he was so open about it that he was alienated by potential friends who wanted to remain on the DL and considered him dangerous.
  (Perhaps especially so, if they were / or about to be enlisted and didn't want to risk a blue discharge, and couldn't sanction the way Stevee blatantly proclaimed his orientation at recruitment stations? 🤔 Whereas Bucky was so invested, and had cultivated such a lady killer rep, that he can not-worry about being seen with Steve.)
• Or: he was on the DL and was alienated by potential friends who weren't, and looked down on him for passing?
• Or: he was estranged from gay friends who did the same thing he did (ie. declared their orientation during recruitment) but because they actually wanted to dodge the draft, etc.
• Also consider: gay Steve and gay Bucky, both aware of their sexuality but not out to each other yet... independently going to any of the numerous gay hot spots in Brooklyn, seeing each other there, and fleeing in horror before they can make any friends, thinking 'omg why was he there? did he follow me?? does he know?!' And not figuring it out... because they are just genuinely that dumb.
• Likewise, both of them in the pre-out phase, thinking 'well I can't risk having gay friends because they'd have to be a part of my life and then Bucky/Steve will find out!!' ...because they are just genuinely that dumb.

There are actually loads of options!

You could definitely do a have-your-cake-and-eat-it version of events where Steve has been part of a wider queer community, made friends, and yet still wound up having only one who stood by him. (There has to be reason why 'even when I had nothing, I had Bucky' would be true).

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Other Possibilities:

• Steve and Bucky double-dating beards / playing mirkin to lesbian couples? = Hell yes.
• (Sidenote: I also headcanon Bucky as having a gay sister, so maybe she could've been Steve's plus one, or they'd take out all Bucky's sisters to act as chaperones?)
• Shit, why not turn it into a business? Bucky the Escort who gives his lesbian client a cover date, a great night of dancing, and a second cover-escort guaranteed to not steal her girl!
• (Service comes complete with beautiful handwritten love letters (dictated by Bucky, penned by artist!Steve), a personalised sweetheart-style photo of Bucky, and a messy Public Break Up Scene on her stoop.😉)
• RE: them moving in together: everyone talks about how queer Brooklyn was, but what if the boys went above and beyond for their own safety -- February House style -- and lived in a building exclusively populated by queer people? Maybe by queer members of the forces, or people who occupied humble positions in creative industries?
• If Steve has lesbian friends from BK, and lesbian friends in the chorus line... why not both at the same time? Why not have some of those lesbian friends be Brooklyn girls who signed up to be chorus girls because- y'know -chorus girls, and were then like 'Steve?! Wtf are you doing here?!'
• (Why not kill three birds with one stone: one of those chorus girls is Bucky's sister? Cue Spidermenpointing_meme and mutual assured blackmail -- she promises not to tell Bucky what Steve did if Steve promises not to tell Bucky that one of his sisters has run away from home to become a showgirl.)
• Bucky as the social butterfly of the two, more likely to be out and about, especially in risky places (ie. he worked on the docks; he could actually get and keep jobs in those places), and/or the safer one, and given their later pattern of Bucky's friends becoming Steve's (ie. the Howlies)... I think Bucky would be more likely to be the one making eye-opening introductions to Steve rather than the other way around. Which could have interesting knock on effects... (see above).
• Maybe he got Steve a lucrative job illustrating queer 8-pagers (maybe there's an underground queer magazine out of BK, a la The Circle, and he illustrates for that, using Bucky as a model?
  Cue hilarious 'what were you doing at the Devil's Sabbath?' moments when random men come up to Bucky in the street like 'where do I know your face from??' 😱)

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Re: Extended Family

I also headcanon that Bucky had a gay Uncle Jim (maybe a tailor?) who was institutionalized for being gay, and received harrowing medical treatments like electroshock therapy that eventually resulted in his death.

So by the time Bucky -- named after his dead uncle -- started showing signs of being bi, Bucky's parents had already had their eyes opened. Or maybe, like Sarah, they had already emigrated from a specific open-minded situation, so queer Brooklyn wasn't such a revelation.

Alternatively: In Stucky fic, people often seem to think as far as 'Brooklyn was queer!' but no farther.

But why not? Why does their queer education have to have started in queer Brooklyn?

Why not have Bucky's or Steve's (or both!) parents be engaged in Lavender Marriages, and open about it? One gay parent, or both?

(This might be another reason why Steve appears to not have friends outside Bucky; he might have got all the queer community he needed from his own family unit. Imagine it! Not just connected to Brooklyn queers but Edwardian queers, darling! The Herstory!!)

What if Steve's mother wasn't single but simply... 'never married?' 👀 Or maybe she was straight, but in love with her late lavender husband?

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And during/after the war:

Re: the Howlies.

(Have brought this ficbunny up elsewhere)

The Howlies knew and were fine about it, because... maybe there was an official investigation during the war to establish whether or not any of the Howlies were gay and/or in a relationship with Steve.

So, being a bunch of professional mischief-makers, and acting completely independently, the Howlies all pulled an 'I am Spartacus!' and claimed to be gay and in a relationship with Steve, under interrogation.

Steve also admitted to being gay, because he is terrible at lying and had to stand by them when he was told all his men admitted they were gay.

(Except for Bucky. He kept his head during interrogation -- sadly, not his first rodeo.)

So Bucky went down in hastily-redacted Army Record as somehow the only straight Howling Commando??

(The interrogators couldn't tell if they were being made fun of or not, and in any case the scandal was considered absolutely monstrous and a terrible blow for morale, so it was immediately covered up and no further steps were taken.)

Ironically enough, Steve & Bucky weren't even the only queer Howlies!

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The Future:

Seeing gay marriage legalised, the Stonewall riots, openly queer films and celebrities and tv shows, queer pride parades etc. etc. would be heart-breaking for Steve... because of course by this point he has become Captain America, deluded women he barely knows have spent decades claiming to have been his true love, and the people that did know him have been loyally covering up for him claiming he's straight. He'd feel like a hypocrite for not being what they said; or like he's letting them down by unmasking all their hard work.

And of course his real beloved isn't here any more, when he's finding all this out he's totally alone, no one to share it with, (doesn't know if any of his other friends are still alive, yet). And he doesn't want to have to relive that pain over Bucky by being interrogated on his love life...

Plus, after a century of being mythologised, he associates coming out with even wider public furore and a violation of the privacy that Steve Rogers never gets to have.

So all he has is the private escape of the 20th century's queer cinema, literature, tv shows, and porn (which all feel like an embarrassment of riches) ...but without being out to anyone - he feels he has to keep it a secret.

Until Bucky comes back, and isn't in a prudent enough mental state to realise all this. So for him, finding all this out about queer rights etc. is an untrammelled joy, and that's what finally gets Steve out of his negative headspace and into the light.

(And then, yeah, out and married. Try to stop Bucky getting his citizenship back when he's literally married to Captain America, assholes! Nowadays, the only women that hit on Steve are lunatics who think they can turn him, and Steve's only other problem is all the gay men who either want in on that threesome or think they can steal him away from Bucky!)