This is very interesting, thank you. I began to wonder, while reading it, if the basic difference between 'queer' vs. 'normal' sexuality might be that queer states begin from imagination, and the normal begins from facts of reality, i.e. biology and present day culture. In that sense, Gilbert was queer, for he was not the kind of husband available at the time; he was as much a dream.

About the Coleridge poem, the paper I cite notes: "Geraldine has actually seduced Christabel sexually; the tale is strikingly about lesbian sexuality."

I know of the poem from Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae (1992) which describes the two women lying together: "O Geraldine! one hour was thine-- / Thou'st had thy will!" The next day Christabel says: "Sure I have sinn'd!"

Geraldine is a vampire, and lesbian intimacies as a mode of vampirism seems to haunt Montgomery's imagination. A passage in the journal from 1928:

“The other day I noticed two young girls who called themselves ‘friends’—and may be. I noticed the way they caressed and kissed each other—with mouths, by the way, which looked as if they had been making a meal of blood. A lip-stick is really a vampirish thing…” (3: 365)."

Lipstick lesbians!