Thomas is gay

Thomas does not exhibit the "gay list" speech pattern that a log of gay men exhibit. A lot, not all. Believe me I'd known one guy for years and never got a hint he was gay till a mutual friend told me he had finally "come out". Thomas had big trouble with his father, who knew. Robert James-Collier is known internationally for his role as Thomas Barrow, the devious gay underbutler who brought intrigue to the halls of Downton Abbey.

In the period drama, Barrow hid. While the Downton Abbey TV series has had Thomas go through a whole lot of trouble when trying to accept his sexuality, the current version of Thomas was the type of gay man who didn’t want to hide his true self. Thomas is gay and has to hide his sexuality due to homosexuality being a crime.

He tries to do hormonal therapy to change his sexuality, but it doesn’t work and just leaves him ill. The new Downton Abbey movie explores Tom's sexuality, but what was life really like for gay men in s Britain? Here's whether or not the movie portrayed it accurately. As half the family hares off to the French Riviera to unravel a mysterious inheritance, Lady Mary Michelle Dockery stays behind to shepherd the production of a silent film at Downton.

Thomas Barrow Rob James-Collier —former footman, would-be blackmailer, and early modern homosexual everyman—is now head butler on staff, giving him ample opportunity to interact with the visiting stars, and in particular, with the debonair Guy Dexter Dominic West. While Lady Mary unexpectedly takes on a role in the film, Thomas finds himself offered a new role all his own, when Guy pursues him to leave Downton and become his manservant.

If the opening and closing

But is there more to his offer? As everyone else becomes, Barrow merely is. Dating back at least into the 19 th century, queer performers were integral to the spread of sexual information in several ways. And regardless of their own true identities, nearly every celebrity was the occasion for a bustling gossip and newspaper industry, whose intimations of sexual deviance were equal parts titillating and informative to readers who might otherwise never had access to the bedrooms of Hollywood and London.

Although the queer storyline in A New Era is small, it is one of the most historically illuminating that the franchise has produced to date. Fifty-seven minutes in to the first episode of Downton Abbey , the fastidious, sharp-featured footman Thomas Barrow makes his move, confronting his erstwhile summer lover—the impoverished but entitled Duke of Crowborough—with epistolary evidence of their affair. The Duke, on the other hand, is louche and unctuous, the human personification of privilege lounging in a fabulous dressing gown.

With one short scene, creator Julian Fellowes made a declaration: the love that dare not speak its name would be given voice here. Hello to the future of the gay past. In the film, audiences will see Barrow in the context of a wider gay world for the first time: visiting a secret gay bar, dodging police harassment, and possibly even finding love.

The post-Edwardian moment— Downton Abbey opens in , with news of the sinking of the Titanic; the movie takes the story all the way up to —was an era of tremendous upheaval in Western culture. The tricky work of navigating those changes is the dramatic engine that powers Downton Abbey. We are watching modern life emerge in all its messy glory, like a little alien head punching through a corseted chest. Ideas about sex and sexuality are as much a part of this violent flowering as are atonal music or flapper dresses.

All of them, that is, except for Thomas Barrow. Barrow is instantly recognizable as a modern gay man, even if he never quite uses those words. From isolation to conversion therapy, his struggles are our struggles, just in period drag. On the other hand, it seems to remove sexuality from the domain of history entirely, suggesting that the experience of being gay has always been the same, no matter the place or period.

While everyone else in the show becomes , Barrow already is. The question for queer Downton Abbey fans, then, is this: Is Thomas an accurate unveiling of historical homosexuality, hidden but fully formed, just waiting for us to notice his existence? Or is he a backward projection of our current idea of what it means to be gay, an anachronism disguised as a revelation? Maurice , his most autobiographical book, was written in Like Thomas Barrow, Alec Scudder seems preternaturally gay , fully aware of his sexual desires, that they are exclusively for men, and that they mark him, irrevocably, as a different sort of person.

Yet the book is often used as period research. In particular, literary research can substitute the experiences of the upper class for those of all people. In the post-Edwardian period, upper class men were more likely to already understand the world in terms of heterosexuals and homosexuals, with a bright and absolute line dividing the two.

When Forster himself did, finally, embark upon a sexual relationship, it was with an Egyptian man named Mohammed el-Adl. But whereas Scudder and Barrow seemed to think of themselves as gay, el-Adl experienced his desire for men differently.

Forster was keen to get al-Adl to understand sexuality, and sexual orientation, in the same way that he did: An unconscious extension of the broader colonial project of reshaping the world in the image of aristocratic England. It was a forerunner to the kinds of police repression that Barrow encounters in the new Downton movie.