Two years ago to the month, I was giddy over Marvel’s Agent Carter. I’d loved Peggy Carter almost as soon as I’d first seen her in Captain America: The First Avenger, and of course I was ecstatic that Marvel put its faith in another female-led show (I say another because although it’s an ensemble show with an ensemble name, Daisy Johnson is very much the lead of Agents of SHIELD). What thrilled me most about the show, however, was Cartinelli. I’d jokingly shipped Peggy with Angie the adorable snarky waitress from their first conversation (which is actually how I start out shipping most of my favorite pairings, now that I think about it), but by the end of episode 3, it wasn’t a joke anymore. I was down that shipping rabbit hole faster than you could say schnapps. I wrote fic for this ship, which I almost never do. I had such high hopes at the end of season 1, when Peggy and Angie moved into Howard Stark’s mansion together. I’d been burned before by queer ships, namely Johnlock, but this time, this time it looked like a primetime network was sailing a queer ship into canon territory.

So you can probably imagine my disappointment when, after a hiatus that went from “encouraging” to “total radio silence,” Angie was almost completely erased in the second season. There was no explanation for her absence, not even when she made a tiny appearance in a dream sequence, the sole purpose of which was to help Peggy choose between two male love interests.

It might have been foolish of me to get my hopes up, but a canonical confirmation of Peggy’s bisexuality wouldn’t have been historically inaccurate at all. There are a whole host of ways in which Peggy’s backstory could have fit into established queer history. I wrote a whole paper on this my senior year of college, and I’ll relate my findings here. The second season of Agent Carter retconned a few key parts of Peggy’s backstory, but I did this research in 2015, so I had no second season to work with. Besides, Peggy’s backstory was far more interesting before it got retconned anyway, so I reserve the right to be petty and ignore the second season entirely.

Peggy’s extensive military service is one aspect of her backstory that fits in nicely with queer history. According to a deleted scene from The Avengers, Peggy joined the British military as a nurse at age 15, moved to the SAS at 17, and joined the Strategic Scientific Reserve (SSR) at age 21, in 1940. The SSR was based first at a training camp in New Jersey and then in New York City. Peggy would have been quite familiar with lesbians and lesbian culture during her military service, at least while she was in the U.S. The prospects of dressing with a little more freedom and socializing with other girls attracted many queer women to the military. In addition, no specific policies against lesbianism existed till 1944, by which time lesbians were so thoroughly entrenched in the WAC and other organizations that such policies were largely ineffective. One famous incident pitted then-Colonel Eisenhower against Johnnie Phelps. When Eisenhower told Phelps that he wanted to purge his division of lesbians, Phelps informed him he would have to sack her, as well as “all the file clerks, the section heads, most of the commanders, and the motor pool” and many others, as historian Lillian Faderman put it. Eisenhower dropped the subject.

Furthermore, just by virtue of her military service, the general public would have stereotyped Peggy herself as a lesbian. In The First Avenger, she inhabits all the roles that historian Allan Bérubé lists as having the greatest lesbian stigma--“the unmarried career officer, the tough sergeant, and the physical training officer.” Peggy is thus heavily coded as queer. MCU canon never elaborates on this coding, but it is still likely that Peggy would have at least known and accepted lesbian fellow officers while in the military. As Faderman states, “military life fostered some tolerance regarding lesbianism,” even among women who had never encountered queerness before.

Since Agent Carter begins a year after V-E Day, an examination of the queer history of postwar New York is also merited. In the aftermath of the war, larger cities such as New York offered queer veterans a chance at sustaining a queer social life, whereas the smaller towns from which many of them hailed would have had little to offer them but heterosexual marriages. Peggy’s postwar trajectory follows this geographic pattern. She was born in London, but she spent a portion of the war at Camp Lehigh in Wheaton, New Jersey. Captain America: The Winter Soldier establishes that the SSR had deep roots in Wheaton. But as Agent Carter shows, Peggy chose not to stay in Wheaton after the war, instead moving to the New York City branch of the SSR. This might seem insignificant but for a comment Peggy makes in season 1, episode 2--“I caught my heel on a cobblestone. You know how the West Village is.” The West Village overlapped to a degree with Greenwich Village, which housed a significant gay community even in the 1940s, well before the Stonewall riots.

Peggy’s stay in the Griffith Hotel, an all-female boarding house, is also worth further scrutiny. The measure of independence afforded to women during the war through the jobs men left behind diminished somewhat in the postwar period; unmarried women, for the most part, still went straight from their family homes to their eventual husbands’ homes, whether they had jobs or not. Unmarried working-class women form the entirety of the Griffith, so its mere existence is therefore strange. Given the aggressively prudish sensibilities of hotel owner Miriam Fry, the Griffith could easily be seen as a stopgap measure, founded in order to deal with the wartime and postwar surge in working, independent women. However, since a place like the Griffith allows women to maintain some distance between their families and their social lives, as many lesbians of that time had to do, the Griffith is exactly the kind of institution that would become a haven for queer women, despite Miriam Fry’s best efforts to the contrary. Once again, Peggy’s primary social outlet would in all likelihood involve a preponderance of lesbians.

Queer history didn’t begin with Stonewall, despite what your high school history classes might have implied. We’ve been here forever. Scholars like Allan Bérubé and Lillian Faderman have traced the extensive paper trails we’ve left, the diaries and letters and memories. Agent Carter irrevocably lost its chance at exploring this history when it didn’t get renewed for a season 3; though I am and always shall be angry at the show regarding Angie’s erasure, I still mourn for the series we could have had. A show that didn’t peddle a standardized, straightwashed narrative of 1940s America, that dared to explore more of our history, whether this exploration involved canon Cartinelli or not. Maybe someday we’ll get that show. Till then, though, I’ll just have to keep talking about this history, about Bérubé and Faderman and all the queer women the popular narrative of history has left behind, to anyone who will listen.

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To learn more:

Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II by Allan Bérubé

Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America by Lillian Faderman