By Eleni Stephanides, Illustration: Shutterstock, LGBTQ Nation, July 19, 2023
Though it wasn’t explicitly marketed as LGBTQ+ literature, I consider Middlesex my first foray into a queer narrative. It played a pivotal role for my then 15-year-old self in the early 2000s, and I would return to it many times in the years that followed.
The character of Calliope is intersex, but they live their first twenty years with a female gender expression. As a closeted teenager also grappling with same-sex crushes, I found the passages about their infatuations and submerged desires particularly powerful.
When Calliope and her crush, referred to as “The Object,” do finally act on their mutual attraction, it takes place in the quiet dark of the night, never to be mentioned in the days after (“Wordless, blinkered, a nighttime thing, a dream thing,” Eugenides writes; the Object “made it clear that what happened at night, what [they] did at night, had nothing to do with daylight hours”).
Comments (0)