One of the many reasons why I love teaching and writing is that I get to meet a lot of wonderful creators and share their worlds with my students. I was fortunate enough to interview KJ Charles for my historical romance novel class. We are reading her book Band Sinister (2018). Do yourself a favor and read this lively romance that is often a class favorite. But before you do, check out what Charles has to say about writing queer historical romance. It’s a fantastic conversation!
1. Band Sinister is set in the Regency era. What made you decide to set your story in this time period? What drew you to this setting for the novel? Did you do any research for this novel, and, if so, what surprised you most while researching?
This is the story that gave me the tagline “Heyer but gayer” (for which I sadly cannot claim credit, it was a reader’s genius). I grew up reading Georgette Heyer’s Regency novels—marvellously constructed stories, ingeniously varied plots, properly witty dialogue, and relationships which, while mostly chaste, are bursting with sexual tension. Not to mention that in some of her work, there’s a queerness that’s no less present or deliberate for not being in any way spelled out. However, there’s also antisemitism, hideous classist snobbery, and an entire whitewashing of a period. Talk about a problematic favourite.
Band Sinister was me trying to write a Georgette Heyer novel that was on-page queer, didn’t exclude people of colour, and offered a happy ever after for more people than just one man, one woman. It’s a Regency because Heyer basically invented the Regency romance.
I very much set it in Romancelandia, unusually for me: I usually like to riff off real specific locations, but this one felt it wanted to be in a fictional village. I did, however, do a deep dive into the history of extracting sugar from beets. This sounds silly (beetroot is one of those perennially comical words), but it was highly political. The British controlled the trade routes from the sugar cane plantations worked by enslaved people; Napoleon funded a French sugar beet industry in order not to be dependent on British sugar; a European supply line for sugar helped in the push to boycott the products of slavery.
2. What historical constraints (class, gender, sexuality, religion, law, reputation, money) most shaped the protagonists’ choices—and which were you most excited to dramatize?
Ha. All of them in different ways, which was why it was fun to do a large cast!
In the end what shapes the plot most is probably gender inequality, in that the events of the plot are put in motion by social constraints on and systemic injustice towards women. Mrs Frisby can’t escape an unbearable marriage by divorce so she runs away with Philip’s brother, staining her daughter’s reputation, leaving her children in the hands of their inadequate father, and setting off the events that led to Philip’s brother’s death and Philip inheriting his title. (Not to mention that Philip’s mother would have divorced Sir George Rookwood long before Philip’s birth, given a choice.) If Guy and Philip’s mothers had been permitted to leave their unhappy marriages at will, everything would have been dramatically different.
Plus, Amanda is socially reviled for having a sexual appetite outside marriage, making her deeply vulnerable to any further hint of ‘immorality’ in staying under Philip’s roof, and Aunt Beatrice is an oppressive villain to the Frisbys largely because she’s afraid of Mrs Frisby and Amanda’s disgrace becoming contagious to her own daughters—who are also, of course, dependent on marriage for prosperity. And Amanda’s writing career, of course, reflects a relatively new and exciting way women could claw themselves some financial freedom despite the constraints of gender and class.
So the social and ecomonic constraints on all these women has a direct impact on the situations and choices available to Philip and Guy, because patriarchy harms everyone, and that’s even before we get into queerness in a patriarchal system.
(See also: Corvin’s terrible reputation as a rake comes about because he ‘ruins’ a female friend at her request to help her escape an unwanted marriage; the social and professional pressures that affect Sherry’s gender presentation.)
A large part of what I wanted to do in this book is show a safe space in action (I think this is why it’s usually referenced as my most comforting book), and members of the Murder operate under pretty much all the constraints you mention in the question—race, religion, class, sexuality, gender. It doesn’t escape my notice, however, that the Murder can only exist as it does because of Corvin and Philip’s inherited wealth and gender/class privilege.
3. Band Sinister is set in a period when queer desire existed but was not publicly legible in modern terms. How do you approach writing queer lives in a historical context without imposing contemporary identity labels?
Well, things exist even when we don’t have names for them, and modern conceptions are unlikely to represent a complete and sufficient truth about human nature, any more than past conceptions have ever managed to do so.
For example, I didn’t want to explicitly define Sherry as a trans man, or genderfluid, or agender, or indeed a cross-dressing cis woman, though readers are welcome to draw their own conclusions from the text. And the reason I didn’t want to do that is, we have plenty of examples in the historical record of people not living as their birth-assigned genders, where we simply don’t know how they felt about themselves or what modern label they might adopt if they had the opportunity. What’s important is to recognise people who defied social gender/sexuality norms were there, they existed, they carved out space to live in ways they wanted as far as they could, often with remarkable courage and ingenuity.
Of course, labels can be a huge help to people who want identity and community. But although Guy doesn’t have ‘I’m gay’ available, he does have an entire history of male-male relationships depicted in his classical studies, plus the practical examples of same-sex and/or non-conforming love within the Murder--and we know that a lot of queer people in the past were able to benefit from existing communities and established tradition.
And in the end, labels are super useful shorthand, but they aren’t the same thing as character work. In a modern book I might call Corvin a pansexual open polyromantic (for example), but I would still have to work through what it means in practice that he is attracted to literally everybody while having no desire for exclusivity in sexual relationships, and show how that intersects with John and Philip’s preferences and desires, in order to make the core Murder’s entanglements a working part of the plot and character growth.
4. How did you think about consent and power differences (gender/class/reputation) in a historical framework while still meeting modern reader expectations?
Consent is one of those areas where I feel that human nature is probably constant. When I see comments like “People didn’t think sexual consent was important,” it strikes me as very like “People didn’t think slavery was wrong”: I’m going to need a definition of who counts as “people” in those sentences.
In Philip and Guy’s relationship, consent is crucial because of the power differential: Philip is wealthy, titled, socially secure, sexually experienced, used to doing as he pleases, and has powerful friends who give him confidence in living as a queer man. Whereas Guy is a powerless, isolated, anxious virgin in an oppressive society, whose sister is helpless under Philip’s roof. Even outwith a modern framework of affirmative consent, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to me that a decent human being who cares at all would realise Guy needs a sense of control and confidence in order to enter into a relationship. Getting him to find his voice—or, as we would now say, give affirmative consent--is absolutely part of that.
I wrote a blog post on consent in romance, which breaks down the lengthy consent scene and gives my thoughts on how to use consent.
5. How does chosen family operate alongside—or in tension with—biological family in the novel?
It’s very much a book about chosen family, in that of the five most important characters (Philip, John, Corvin, Guy, Amanda), four come from catastrophically failed families of origin and one from an externally destroyed one (John’s enslavement). Both sets (the Murder and the Frisbys) have had to learn to rely on one another in the absence of parental figures, and it’s clear that none of the five would have had a good life without the mutual support.
Ultimately, this is a book about supporting one another. That’s the tension in the title: a band (or bar) sinister denotes illegitimacy, an offence against the traditional family, but banding together is what lets excluded people survive—even if it gets them the opprobrium of normative society.
6. Where do you see this book sitting in the broader tradition of historical romance—what authors/books were you in dialogue with?
See question 1! Very directly Georgette Heyer. Specifically, this started as a riff on Venetia, which is an m/f romance with the heroine’s bookish brother breaking his leg and being put up in the rakish neighbour’s house. Venetia is a terrific book, but it’s notable that Venetia remains fairly isolated, and her relationship with Damerel, the rake, doesn’t open up her secluded life much—she chooses him in the teeth of society. That’s a common trope in het romance (all for love, and the world well lost), but I wanted love to mean the opposite for Guy. I wanted his love affair to open up his world and bring him wider joys, precisely because so often queer romances in historicals are obliged to remain hidden and secret, and if we’re going around offering wish fulfilment and happy ever afters, they can include a wider world too.
7. What do you love about the (historical) romance genre and why did you choose to write in it? How has your relationship to romance novels changed over time?
My imagination is very firmly set in the past: I’m a great reader of older pulp. I enjoy the research and making stories work within the settings. Also, there is nothing more plot-ruining than a mobile phone.
I moved from glomming Georgette Heyer, to a job as editor at Mills & Boon, after which I didn’t read romance for years because wow, saturation point, to discovering modern historical romance: the m/m historical romance of Josh Lanyon and Harper Fox, the Black historicals of Beverly Jenkins, the feminist historicals of Courtney Milan, all of which opened my eyes as to what the genre could offer.
I love how much I learn from historicals, and I really enjoy seeing characters work against the constraints of their time and society. (Obviously, there are plenty of social constraints operating on people now, but those are the ones we live with, and it’s nice to take a break!)
8. What does it mean to claim space for queer stories within a genre so strongly associated with heterosexuality?
Queer romance has staked out its place in the romance world to a spectacular degree over the last few years. Authors like Alexandra Bellefleur, TJ Klune and Alexis Hall and many more are widely available, and not just online: queer romances are taking up serious shelf space. There’s always more work to do, but the window has shifted in publishing towards much more in the way of queer stories—Mills & Boon now do m/m and f/f books in their main lines, which was just not thinkable when I worked there. Nobody should be complacent in our scary times, but I have great faith in publishers’ willingness to do the right thing when there’s money in it, and as Heated Rivalry shows, queer romance sells.
9. Over the years, I’ve had more students taking my classes specifically because they love romance novels and want to engage with them more seriously. This means we often talk about our favorite themes and tropes and how they’ve shaped us. What’s your favorite trope or theme and why?
I am ambivalent about the whole concept of tropes, tbh. It’s all in the treatment, not the trope itself, and also the focus on tropes in current (TikTok) marketing is to my mind a bit reductive to the genre. An enemies-to-lovers story can be a completely different beast depending on the severity of the enmity, the stakes, the context, and how they get to being lovers. ‘His muffin shop opens next to her cupcake shop’ is not the same in any meaningful sense as ‘One is a Russian agent and one’s British Counterintelligence during the Cold War’. Equally, I’ve written a couple of road trips which I thoroughly enjoyed doing, but ‘road trip’ has probably a 50% DNF rate in my reading because it can so often be aimless or picaresque in execution.
All that said, I am an absolute sucker for agonising sexual tension, which can be strung out as long as the author likes with my goodwill.
10. What can people new to romance get out of these books? What do you wish people knew about the genre in general?
I wish people knew just how good the best romances can be: wonderful, compelling stories that give you hope people can do better by one another. It is absolutely the genre of hope, forgiveness, uplift, and we all need that.
I also wish they realised romance contains multitudes. People are so reductive about the whole genre (“it’s just boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl”) and that’s absolute nonsense. Post on Bluesky asking for a romance about pretty much anything (spider gods, Brexit, doors, taxidermy, funeral homes, gay dolphin shifters engaged in a house renovation project) and someone will give you a suggestion!
Guest Contributor Bio
KJ Charles was an editor for twenty years before switching sides to become a full-time author. She has written some 40 books, mostly queer historical romance, some with fantasy. She lives in London with her family and a retired murder cat.
Recent books include All Of Us Murderers (Poisoned Pen Press, 2025) and How To Fake It In Society (Tor Bramble, 2026) and her craft book on writing romance, Think, Write, Edit, Romance, comes out with Hay House in December 2026.
The Bruja Professor, a witchy take on literature, the occult & pop culture, is the scholarly sister to Enchantment Learning & Living, an inspirational blog celebrating life’s simple pleasures, everyday mysticism, and delectable recipes that are guaranteed to stir the kitchen witch in you.
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