For so many years, books had been homes for me, places I’d found welcome when I couldn’t find it elsewhere. Because while I hoped that at least some classicists might like the book, I wanted this story to be for everyone, whether they knew classics or not, maybe even especially if they didn’t. One of my professors had started his course with the following salvo: “This is a class on Greek history, so I don’t want to hear any questions about women or slaves.” A young woman taking the revered and traditionally male epic material of the Iliad and centring it as a gay love story might not thrill people.īut still I kept writing. Attempts to expand the lens of scholarship have sometimes been met with open hostility, and women and scholars of colour have been undermined and belittled. There is a long history of gatekeeping in classics. I feared that my classics peers and professors would hate the idea.
That summer, I began to write with his voice. I had no theatre experience, but he said he was directing Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare’s version of the Iliad. He planned to direct that year, and he wanted me to direct with him. He was involved with a Shakespeare theatre group, which put on plays every spring. I knew that interpreting their relationship as romantic was a very old idea, and I was angry at the way homophobia was erasing this reading.ĭuring this time, a good friend called me. I’d read Plato’s Symposium, where Achilles and Patroclus are not just presented as lovers, but the ideal romantic relationship. I was already working on my thesis, on a topic that had long frustrated me: the way that some scholarship dismissed the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus, labelling them “good friends”. I was about to graduate with my classics degree and begin a master’s. An independent LGBTQ+ bookstore near my house in Philadelphia called Giovanni’s Room, filled with luminous, potent stories.īut if I have to name a single beginning, it was the early months of 2000. My mother reading myths to me as a child.
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