What you describe is way more positive than I was expecting--maybe superior or at least as good to women as the non-queer works of the era that one gets forced to read in high school...
I don't know if I would go as far as superior just because I have read novels from the '30's and '60's whose female characters are vividly explored and key to their narratives, but it mattered to me that neither novel seemed to feel the need to prove its queer bona fides by showing off its lack of interest in women. Neither Francis nor Fay is sexually interested in women, which is taken as read and does not prevent Francis from bantering with Hattie or Fay from palling around with Marjorie. There's a moment in A Scarlet Pansy where Fay performs a pantomime of disgust with the overtures of an exotic dancer and there's another where she and Mason befriend the pair of kept women who live in the apartment beneath theirs; when she moves to Baltimore in the first step of her journey toward self-discovery, the landlady of the boarding house where it takes her three weeks to find a job is horrifically untidy and sincerely kind and Fay remembers her with gratitude and affection to the end of her life. It doesn't have to be glowing representation across the board, but it defuses a lot of the worry that a book means its woman-hating literally. (The phrase is not actually used in either novel. There's no reason for it to be. Fay doesn't seem to be of sexual interest to women of any orientation and Francis is regarded by Hattie as a nice young man but just a little too pretty, besides which if anything she views him familially, having been his uncle's secretary for the last thirty years. From her perspective, she inherited him.)
no subject
I don't know if I would go as far as superior just because I have read novels from the '30's and '60's whose female characters are vividly explored and key to their narratives, but it mattered to me that neither novel seemed to feel the need to prove its queer bona fides by showing off its lack of interest in women. Neither Francis nor Fay is sexually interested in women, which is taken as read and does not prevent Francis from bantering with Hattie or Fay from palling around with Marjorie. There's a moment in A Scarlet Pansy where Fay performs a pantomime of disgust with the overtures of an exotic dancer and there's another where she and Mason befriend the pair of kept women who live in the apartment beneath theirs; when she moves to Baltimore in the first step of her journey toward self-discovery, the landlady of the boarding house where it takes her three weeks to find a job is horrifically untidy and sincerely kind and Fay remembers her with gratitude and affection to the end of her life. It doesn't have to be glowing representation across the board, but it defuses a lot of the worry that a book means its woman-hating literally. (The phrase is not actually used in either novel. There's no reason for it to be. Fay doesn't seem to be of sexual interest to women of any orientation and Francis is regarded by Hattie as a nice young man but just a little too pretty, besides which if anything she views him familially, having been his uncle's secretary for the last thirty years. From her perspective, she inherited him.)