The American novelist describes how she overcame her fears of a classical backlash to write a gay love story about Achilles and Patroclus Many seeds grew to make this book. My mother reading myths to me as a child. The teacher who taught me Greek. An independent LGBTQ+ bookstore near my house in Philadelphia called Giovanni’s Room, filled with luminous, potent stories. But if I have to name a single beginning, it was the early months of 2000. I was about to graduate with my classics degree and begin a master’s. 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’d read Plato’s _Symposium_, where Achilles and Patroclus are not just presented as lovers, but the ideal romantic relationship. 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. Continue reading...
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