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Shoulda Been a WAC
T'other day I was stumbling around ye old internets looking for a good cover of the song 'Drunk With Love' (which I was thinking needed to be on a Steve/Tony playlist if anything did, not that I've got a Steve/Tony playlist or anything) and I washed up on the website Queer Music Heritage, which is so awesome I felt the need to share it with you guys.
Queer Music Heritage is an almost ten-year's-long online archive of a radio show about, you guessed it, queer music heritage, mostly in the US. Every show also has a page on the website that's full of lyrics and extra information and scans of the records and record jackets and primary source material and links to pages full of even more information, most of it put online by the show's host from his own and his friends' collections and otherwise not available online.
I commend you particularly, and especially if you are at all interested in stories where Steve Rogers dates men, to the special double-length May 2010 episode on "The Pansy Craze" in 1930s New York (which is where I finally found that original-artist version of 'Drunk With Love', and is also an excellent overview of the sort of things 'being gay' might mean to a kid who grew up in '30s NYC) and the special double-length June 2004 episode on "Queer Music Before Stonewall", which repeats some of the music from the Pansy Craze episode but also has a lot of other material (wait for the WWII-era song about the little draftee from Brooklyn who taught Fort Dix to swish. :D )
A lot of the music in these episodes is either to modern ears homophobic or was outright homophobic even then, but the host does an excellent job of explaining the history in and around the songs, and the supplementary material on the websites is excellent - I haven't even finished digging around it in yet. Although warning that the website design does tend toward, um, lots of sparkly rainbows and bright purple, and might take some getting used to before you can find stuff...
Also note that access to this kind of music wasn't restricted to people in Greenwich Village and other lgbt enclaves - I even had a Rae Bourbon LP which I had from a highly respectable elderly member of our church who'd lived in the suburbs ever since she got off the farm. (I kind of regret getting rid of it now, except that these podcasts have taught me it wasn't just that record that I found tedious and highly annoying, it is Rae Bourbon's stage persona in general. Although not necessary all Rae Bourbon - the podcast has some songs where Rae isn't in the usual stage persona, although still performing female, and I actually liked those.)
Anyway of course I now I want to write a Steve/Tony fic (and it wouldn't even have to be movieverse, although that simplifies knowing canon so much, which is probably the only reason I didn't start writing this story three years ago, although I should probably still see Cap's movie before I try to write it, and at that point it might not work any more, which is why I'm writing it out here but it's not officially not!fic because I might still want to really write it for real after I see the movie)...
A Steve/Tony fic where they're in an established relationship, but they're keeping it an absolute secret from everybody (except JARVIS and Pepper, obviously ). Steve would happily sing it to the world, but Tony refuses - he says things like how he doesn't want the a press frenzy to distract from the Avengers' mission and he doesn't want to tarnish Steve's image even though Steve doesn't care about that, but getting Tony to examine his actual motives is like getting blood from a stone, even if you're Captain America and you're sleeping with him -
So anyway, they're having a perfectly normal friendly dinner out between friends one night, in a little restaurant in a neighborhood Steve used to like, and at the same time having a fierce but silent argument about whether a friendly dinner is good enough when they could be having a date, when a supervillain attacks and starts firing a strange weapon that makes things disappear, so they evacuate the restaurant and call for help because neither of them are geared up, and the rest of the team arrives just as Tony is saying, "Wait, I recognize that device, that's Stark tech, he stole that from me--"
And Steve says, "If you recognize it, what does it do?" and Tony answers, "We could never get it to work and neither could Dad, but what it's supposed to do is time tra--"
Before he can get out "--vel" the guy hits them with the beam and Steve and Tony find themselves standing on the same street, only it's night-time and there's nobody around and all the stores are different and the cars are from the late '30s.
So Steve drags them into an alley and makes Tony take off his sunglasses and his watch, and declares their suits good enough as long as they stay out of well-lit areas, and then takes off his watch - which is an antique from the '20s that Tony bought him after he idly mentioned once that his father had always wanted one - and pawns it, which gets them just enough money to eke it out for a few days.
Instead of eking it out Steve drags them off to buy new dinner suits, authentic 1930s ones this time (if second-hand and not quite tailor-fitted) and buys Tony a drink at the bar at the Astor Hotel. He gets into a fast-paced conversation with some of the patrons there that Tony can barely follow, and before he's even started to be able to decode all the jargon and cultural references, Steve's got them a room at a cheap boarding-house (no deposit required) and himself an under-the-table bouncer job at a fly-by-night bar somewhere in the Village.
And they're getting ready for their first night in the past, stripping down to their (authentic 1930s) underclothes, and Steve bounces back onto the bed and grins and says, "Aren't you going to help me christen our new digs?" and Tony freezes and says, "are you mad, Steve? What if somebody heard? We can't risk that here," and Steve gives him a pitying look and says, "Tony, I guarantee you that everybody who lives in this building already figured out that we're sleeping together, and probably three-quarters of them are gay boys themselves; the rest of 'em knew what they were getting into when they took a room here. What did you think I meant when I told ol' Sydney I wanted to show you a gay time in the city?"
Tony says, "Gay meant 'happy and fun' in the '30s, even I know that."
"It has more than one meaning, Tony, it's just that enough people still use it innocently that you can get away with plausible deniability. Trust me," he says, and his face softens - "I do know what I'm doing here."
So Tony trusts him. He works at the queer bar, and Tony hangs around the boarding-house, getting to know the other men, doing the occasional odd-job repair-work, and trying not to do any worse with culture shock than Steve did in his time, and trying to reconstruct what he remembers of the time-travel device (even though, as he tells Steve, it's a lost cause - he couldn't get it working even in the 21st century with a full lab - they're better off waiting for a rescue from the future).
And every night he meets Steve after the bar closes and they go to a different apartment party and dance together - they're terrible at first because Steve doesn't know the steps and Tony keeps trying to move to post-rock'n'roll beats, but there are plenty of pretty young things willing to teach them, and they get better. And Tony starts to forget that there was ever a time when he didn't move in a world where everyone knew that he was Steve's and Steve was his.
At some point they run into a disturbingly young Bucky at one of the parties - there's a reason Steve knew all the code-words, after all - and he's all over both of them, and I can't decide if they have a bittersweet threesome, or they both decide it's a little too disconcerting to go there.
When they run into Howard Stark at a party (there's more than one reason Steve knew all the code-words--) and he's all over them, they easily agree it's too disturbing to contemplate, but Steve points out that if they befriend him that might be their chance to get access to the resources they'd need for Tony to work on reconstructing the device (which actually already exists in this time period - Tony eventually recalls that Howard's earliest notes on it had been from a few months before they arrived, he'd been working on it for some top-secret government project in the lead-up to the war) so they start moving in slightly different, but still quite gay and rather temperamental, circles.
Then one afternoon Tony realizes he's figured it out: the key to getting the device to work is that you need to have an active device at both the sending and receiving time periods, and they must have been sent back to 1938 because Howard had gotten it working for a little while, and presumably not realized what he had, and turned it off again; assuming the Avengers have it working in their time, all he needs to do is get access to Howard's version and they can go home. And Steve looks pensive, and starts to say something, but he leaves for work without saying it: and Tony realizes once it's too late that his home isn't the same place as Steve's: this is Steve's home, he's never seen Steve as comfortable in his own skin as when they're dancing together to Judy Garland on a 78.
So he goes to the bar to try to talk to Steve -- just in time to get caught up in a vice raid that closes the bar for good and gets everyone on the premises sent to jail.
And when they come around collecting names, Steve pauses, and looks down, and gives his as, "Captain Jack Harkness," and Tony nearly chokes, but there's no privacy to explain until a couple of hours later when they're firmly in lock-up, and who should walk in but Peggy Carter (is 1938/39 too early for her to be realistically working with the US military? Do I care?) and says, "I've never seen any of you before in my life. If someone went blabbing passcodes to his bed-warmer, you are both going to be very sorry, and I promise you we'll find out who it is," and Steve stands up and drags Tony up with him and says, "um, actually, Miss Carter, that was me. We don't work with the project yet, but we have some information you might be interested in regarding a certain device -- what was the classification number, Tony?"
And Tony reels it off, and Peggy takes a few seconds to process it, and then her eyes widen and she drags them right out of there.
Howard puts together time travel + Tony being disproportionately skeeved by his flirting + family resemblance and figures it out in about two seconds flat, and there is some impressively awkward father-son bonding that happens while they make the last few adjustments to the device, and then just as he's about to turn it on Tony looks at Steve and says, "We don't have to. You missed the 20th century the first time, if you wanted to stay and see it through - I could show you all the good bits as they happen --" and Steve shakes his head and says, "We're going home. Both of us. I want to live somewhere where I can kiss my boyfriend in public if I want to. Even if I have to dump my current guy and find someone who will--" and Tony looks into his eyes, and flips the switch, and like that, they're back in SHIELD headquarters less than a week after they were gone.
(Meanwhile Steve, who was actually listening all those times Tony ranted about how the device worked, has instructed Peggy in how to disable it well enough that no-one else will figure it out for 90 years, because he knows better than to let people muck around with timelines, even if it would be nice to be able to go back.)
Of course they have to debrief with Fury, and Steve explains how he knew that gaining entry to the queer community in the Village would give them a place where they could live mostly underground and have a support structure, and eventually, he hoped, access to Stark Sr., so he and Tony decided to pretend to be boyfriends, and Fury's nodding along, until he gets to the point where he says, "So I used the old 'Harkness' codephrase for agents stranded outside the area of their original assignment--" and Fury interrupts him with a glare.
"Do you mean to say you could have contacted the SSR at any point you were in the past?" and Tony, who hadn't quite made the connection yet, what with re-adjusting to the future and everything, opens his mouth and stares at Steve.
And Steve shrugs, with an expression that wouldn't melt butter, and says, "Yes sir, but then I wouldn't have been able to go dancing with Tony."
(Tony outs them a week later. It's messy and public and spectacular and Fury grounds them for a month, which is fine, because Steve wasn't planning on letting him out of the bedroom for that long anyway.)
Queer Music Heritage is an almost ten-year's-long online archive of a radio show about, you guessed it, queer music heritage, mostly in the US. Every show also has a page on the website that's full of lyrics and extra information and scans of the records and record jackets and primary source material and links to pages full of even more information, most of it put online by the show's host from his own and his friends' collections and otherwise not available online.
I commend you particularly, and especially if you are at all interested in stories where Steve Rogers dates men, to the special double-length May 2010 episode on "The Pansy Craze" in 1930s New York (which is where I finally found that original-artist version of 'Drunk With Love', and is also an excellent overview of the sort of things 'being gay' might mean to a kid who grew up in '30s NYC) and the special double-length June 2004 episode on "Queer Music Before Stonewall", which repeats some of the music from the Pansy Craze episode but also has a lot of other material (wait for the WWII-era song about the little draftee from Brooklyn who taught Fort Dix to swish. :D )
A lot of the music in these episodes is either to modern ears homophobic or was outright homophobic even then, but the host does an excellent job of explaining the history in and around the songs, and the supplementary material on the websites is excellent - I haven't even finished digging around it in yet. Although warning that the website design does tend toward, um, lots of sparkly rainbows and bright purple, and might take some getting used to before you can find stuff...
Also note that access to this kind of music wasn't restricted to people in Greenwich Village and other lgbt enclaves - I even had a Rae Bourbon LP which I had from a highly respectable elderly member of our church who'd lived in the suburbs ever since she got off the farm. (I kind of regret getting rid of it now, except that these podcasts have taught me it wasn't just that record that I found tedious and highly annoying, it is Rae Bourbon's stage persona in general. Although not necessary all Rae Bourbon - the podcast has some songs where Rae isn't in the usual stage persona, although still performing female, and I actually liked those.)
Anyway of course I now I want to write a Steve/Tony fic (and it wouldn't even have to be movieverse, although that simplifies knowing canon so much, which is probably the only reason I didn't start writing this story three years ago, although I should probably still see Cap's movie before I try to write it, and at that point it might not work any more, which is why I'm writing it out here but it's not officially not!fic because I might still want to really write it for real after I see the movie)...
A Steve/Tony fic where they're in an established relationship, but they're keeping it an absolute secret from everybody (except JARVIS and Pepper, obviously ). Steve would happily sing it to the world, but Tony refuses - he says things like how he doesn't want the a press frenzy to distract from the Avengers' mission and he doesn't want to tarnish Steve's image even though Steve doesn't care about that, but getting Tony to examine his actual motives is like getting blood from a stone, even if you're Captain America and you're sleeping with him -
So anyway, they're having a perfectly normal friendly dinner out between friends one night, in a little restaurant in a neighborhood Steve used to like, and at the same time having a fierce but silent argument about whether a friendly dinner is good enough when they could be having a date, when a supervillain attacks and starts firing a strange weapon that makes things disappear, so they evacuate the restaurant and call for help because neither of them are geared up, and the rest of the team arrives just as Tony is saying, "Wait, I recognize that device, that's Stark tech, he stole that from me--"
And Steve says, "If you recognize it, what does it do?" and Tony answers, "We could never get it to work and neither could Dad, but what it's supposed to do is time tra--"
Before he can get out "--vel" the guy hits them with the beam and Steve and Tony find themselves standing on the same street, only it's night-time and there's nobody around and all the stores are different and the cars are from the late '30s.
So Steve drags them into an alley and makes Tony take off his sunglasses and his watch, and declares their suits good enough as long as they stay out of well-lit areas, and then takes off his watch - which is an antique from the '20s that Tony bought him after he idly mentioned once that his father had always wanted one - and pawns it, which gets them just enough money to eke it out for a few days.
Instead of eking it out Steve drags them off to buy new dinner suits, authentic 1930s ones this time (if second-hand and not quite tailor-fitted) and buys Tony a drink at the bar at the Astor Hotel. He gets into a fast-paced conversation with some of the patrons there that Tony can barely follow, and before he's even started to be able to decode all the jargon and cultural references, Steve's got them a room at a cheap boarding-house (no deposit required) and himself an under-the-table bouncer job at a fly-by-night bar somewhere in the Village.
And they're getting ready for their first night in the past, stripping down to their (authentic 1930s) underclothes, and Steve bounces back onto the bed and grins and says, "Aren't you going to help me christen our new digs?" and Tony freezes and says, "are you mad, Steve? What if somebody heard? We can't risk that here," and Steve gives him a pitying look and says, "Tony, I guarantee you that everybody who lives in this building already figured out that we're sleeping together, and probably three-quarters of them are gay boys themselves; the rest of 'em knew what they were getting into when they took a room here. What did you think I meant when I told ol' Sydney I wanted to show you a gay time in the city?"
Tony says, "Gay meant 'happy and fun' in the '30s, even I know that."
"It has more than one meaning, Tony, it's just that enough people still use it innocently that you can get away with plausible deniability. Trust me," he says, and his face softens - "I do know what I'm doing here."
So Tony trusts him. He works at the queer bar, and Tony hangs around the boarding-house, getting to know the other men, doing the occasional odd-job repair-work, and trying not to do any worse with culture shock than Steve did in his time, and trying to reconstruct what he remembers of the time-travel device (even though, as he tells Steve, it's a lost cause - he couldn't get it working even in the 21st century with a full lab - they're better off waiting for a rescue from the future).
And every night he meets Steve after the bar closes and they go to a different apartment party and dance together - they're terrible at first because Steve doesn't know the steps and Tony keeps trying to move to post-rock'n'roll beats, but there are plenty of pretty young things willing to teach them, and they get better. And Tony starts to forget that there was ever a time when he didn't move in a world where everyone knew that he was Steve's and Steve was his.
At some point they run into a disturbingly young Bucky at one of the parties - there's a reason Steve knew all the code-words, after all - and he's all over both of them, and I can't decide if they have a bittersweet threesome, or they both decide it's a little too disconcerting to go there.
When they run into Howard Stark at a party (there's more than one reason Steve knew all the code-words--) and he's all over them, they easily agree it's too disturbing to contemplate, but Steve points out that if they befriend him that might be their chance to get access to the resources they'd need for Tony to work on reconstructing the device (which actually already exists in this time period - Tony eventually recalls that Howard's earliest notes on it had been from a few months before they arrived, he'd been working on it for some top-secret government project in the lead-up to the war) so they start moving in slightly different, but still quite gay and rather temperamental, circles.
Then one afternoon Tony realizes he's figured it out: the key to getting the device to work is that you need to have an active device at both the sending and receiving time periods, and they must have been sent back to 1938 because Howard had gotten it working for a little while, and presumably not realized what he had, and turned it off again; assuming the Avengers have it working in their time, all he needs to do is get access to Howard's version and they can go home. And Steve looks pensive, and starts to say something, but he leaves for work without saying it: and Tony realizes once it's too late that his home isn't the same place as Steve's: this is Steve's home, he's never seen Steve as comfortable in his own skin as when they're dancing together to Judy Garland on a 78.
So he goes to the bar to try to talk to Steve -- just in time to get caught up in a vice raid that closes the bar for good and gets everyone on the premises sent to jail.
And when they come around collecting names, Steve pauses, and looks down, and gives his as, "Captain Jack Harkness," and Tony nearly chokes, but there's no privacy to explain until a couple of hours later when they're firmly in lock-up, and who should walk in but Peggy Carter (is 1938/39 too early for her to be realistically working with the US military? Do I care?) and says, "I've never seen any of you before in my life. If someone went blabbing passcodes to his bed-warmer, you are both going to be very sorry, and I promise you we'll find out who it is," and Steve stands up and drags Tony up with him and says, "um, actually, Miss Carter, that was me. We don't work with the project yet, but we have some information you might be interested in regarding a certain device -- what was the classification number, Tony?"
And Tony reels it off, and Peggy takes a few seconds to process it, and then her eyes widen and she drags them right out of there.
Howard puts together time travel + Tony being disproportionately skeeved by his flirting + family resemblance and figures it out in about two seconds flat, and there is some impressively awkward father-son bonding that happens while they make the last few adjustments to the device, and then just as he's about to turn it on Tony looks at Steve and says, "We don't have to. You missed the 20th century the first time, if you wanted to stay and see it through - I could show you all the good bits as they happen --" and Steve shakes his head and says, "We're going home. Both of us. I want to live somewhere where I can kiss my boyfriend in public if I want to. Even if I have to dump my current guy and find someone who will--" and Tony looks into his eyes, and flips the switch, and like that, they're back in SHIELD headquarters less than a week after they were gone.
(Meanwhile Steve, who was actually listening all those times Tony ranted about how the device worked, has instructed Peggy in how to disable it well enough that no-one else will figure it out for 90 years, because he knows better than to let people muck around with timelines, even if it would be nice to be able to go back.)
Of course they have to debrief with Fury, and Steve explains how he knew that gaining entry to the queer community in the Village would give them a place where they could live mostly underground and have a support structure, and eventually, he hoped, access to Stark Sr., so he and Tony decided to pretend to be boyfriends, and Fury's nodding along, until he gets to the point where he says, "So I used the old 'Harkness' codephrase for agents stranded outside the area of their original assignment--" and Fury interrupts him with a glare.
"Do you mean to say you could have contacted the SSR at any point you were in the past?" and Tony, who hadn't quite made the connection yet, what with re-adjusting to the future and everything, opens his mouth and stares at Steve.
And Steve shrugs, with an expression that wouldn't melt butter, and says, "Yes sir, but then I wouldn't have been able to go dancing with Tony."
(Tony outs them a week later. It's messy and public and spectacular and Fury grounds them for a month, which is fine, because Steve wasn't planning on letting him out of the bedroom for that long anyway.)
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ETA: And I'm working from the assumption that the Jack Harkness that Torchwood!Jack took his name from was an American agent using the codephrase. :D Of course where *they* got the codephrase from...
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Huh! "agents stranded outside the area of their original assignment" fit Torchwood!Jack stuck in the past so well I just assumed it originated with him somehow. It would be nicely circular if he *was* the source of the codephrase after all, and then unknowingly picked it up from an American agent in the linear future but his personal past. (Oh, time travel and grammar.) And now I wonder what the 1940s Jack Harkness was doing in London....
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Investigating Bracewell? That thing on his chest might be related to the arc reactor.
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Of course I'm guessing that there's also a lot going on that Tony isn't really catching (who can blame him really) because Steve is a different person (and looks very different) from when he was in that time the first time. (Also, I totally just rewatched Captain America and now I'm convinced that Bucky was totally in love with Steve and mostly gay, but Steve is bisexual (enough) and never acknowledged his attraction to boys/men (easy enough to write it off as a desire to HAVE that body) at least before he became Cap and overall this makes me sad for Bucky and feel guilty sometimes for shipping Steve with Tony (if there's an option to bring movie verse Bucky back) and this is getting to complicated now!)
And I really think that Tony's freedom to act however he wanted has a lot to do with nobody knowing who he is. He isn't the son of Howard Stark, he's just Tony. (Also, as you said, the different time doesn't feel as real, but I think the anonymity is more imortant.)
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