The books are very dull. I made it half way through the first and said "No More!"

This is an old device as has been pointed out. Wilkie Collins, Bram Stoker, and Dickens (Bleak House alternates onmiscient and first-person chapters).

My favorite example is Shaw's "An Unsocial Socialist" which concludes with a letter from the main character itemizing how the novel we just read is unfair and inaccurate.

It is a parody. It is a satire of gothic novels. Asking for a drawn out ending is like asking for a developed denouement to a SNL skit.

It is just not that kind of book.

It has been awhile since I did research on this so it is a bit of a blur, but in the 90s and 00s a lot of books came out on gay history and gay people in the 19th century. They all will discuss this.

But it wasn’t understood as an orientation. It is like today we might describe someone as a thief or an teacher. We do that as a description of behavior. And we might find that behavior abhorrent or admirable.

But we don’t consider it as someone’s orientation. Or even part of their Personality. We are just describing behavior that any human being is capable of.

So just like today you can look at something in someone’s house and say I’d love to swipe that, without being considered part of the thief orientation, one could Be more sensual in one’s appreciation of another person of the same gender, without being considered part of a homosexual class.

You mention the word "queer" but the first recorded use to describe sexuality was not until 1894--and even there is it not clear that sexuality was was being referenced or if we are reading a later use of the word into an earlier reference.

Even "heterosexuality" was defined as an abnormal attraction to people of the opposite sex up until the 1920s. So what we think we are reading is not always what we are actually reading.

It gets more confusing in a Homosocial world, Where the majority of one’s emotional attachments are to people of the same gender.

You may want to look at some books on the history of sexuality. The words homosexual and heterosexual did not even exist when David Copperfield was written. They came two decades later and even then were not understood the way we do today.

Attraction and sexual acts existed, but in general they were not seen as markers of an identity or orientation.

This article gives a simple background of the general understanding of the history of our understanding of sexual orientation.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20170315-the-invention-of-heterosexuality

If you really get down to it, there was not concept of being gay. It was recognized that people did have sex with other people of the same gender, but there was no concept of a gay or straight sexual orientation.

A good book designer makes the choices that reflect the vision of the book. A lot of times writers have ideas about what they want. They will mention specific fonts and margins. But if you actually talk to them about WHY they want those things, a good designer can accomplish them better without sacrificing readability.