Claudia and the New Girl was probably my very first encounter with a girl crush in fiction and I read along, enthralled, as Claudia nearly abandoned all her friends to spend all her time with Ashley, whom she describes in rapturous physical detail every time they interact (Ashley is beautiful! and fragile! and has THREE silver earrings in each ear). Just!!!!!!!! Everything about that.
IIRC Ann M. Martin is a lesbian, so I expect she knew what she was doing. It's kind of wild how much people just won't notice if you don't explicitly label it. Two girls gaze in each other's eyes while one of them rhapsodizes that the other is SO BEAUTIFUL and she'll just DIE when her friend gets married and people are like "friendship gazing! like girls do!"
I have some thoughts about how many people conflate queer in the sense of same-sex attraction and queer in the sense of being considered socially deviant, as if the first has to imply the second - I think it's because the two were so strongly linked in the 20th century and to a certain extent today - so much so that they just can't see same-sex attraction if it isn't linked to a sense of shame or defiance. If the characters are blissfully bopping along enjoying their girl-crush, it just doesn't register as queer.
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IIRC Ann M. Martin is a lesbian, so I expect she knew what she was doing. It's kind of wild how much people just won't notice if you don't explicitly label it. Two girls gaze in each other's eyes while one of them rhapsodizes that the other is SO BEAUTIFUL and she'll just DIE when her friend gets married and people are like "friendship gazing! like girls do!"
I have some thoughts about how many people conflate queer in the sense of same-sex attraction and queer in the sense of being considered socially deviant, as if the first has to imply the second - I think it's because the two were so strongly linked in the 20th century and to a certain extent today - so much so that they just can't see same-sex attraction if it isn't linked to a sense of shame or defiance. If the characters are blissfully bopping along enjoying their girl-crush, it just doesn't register as queer.