Greetings, book and treat people! This week is my last week with the ocean and I’m soaking it up. I’m also feeling excited about August, because it means we’re a little bit closer to September, which means we’re a little bit closer to October…

A few lovely things, because we all deserve lovely things:

• The Sealey Challenge started on August 1. It’s my favorite! Yesterday I read this chapbook in the quiet early morning as the sky brightened. It was gorgeous (the book, the sky, the ocean, the morning).

• A book I read recently reminded me of this show, which I watched this spring. It’s so good! You should watch it if you can!

• This book is out in the U.S. this week and I love it with the fire of a thousand suns.

• This comic brings me joy.

I’ve been working on this essay for a while. I hope you enjoy it.

A Brief History of Queer Desire

Earlier this year I read Olivia by Dorothy Strachey, a fierce yet quiet novel full of yearning and desire, first published in 1949. It’s about sixteen-year-old Olivia, who arrives at a finishing school in France and immediately falls into intense lust/love/infatuation with her teacher, Mlle. Julie. Julie was, and probably still is, in love with her co-teacher Mlle. Cara. She’s also clearly slept with students before. She has extremely questionable boundaries. There is so much lesbian drama. Everybody makes terrible choices.This book captures teenage sapphic desire so brilliantly. Julie isn’t really a person here; Olivia’s love for her has nothing to do with who she is. It’s about Olivia becoming aware of herself, her body, her needs. There are so many brilliant passages that express this, passages that felt like they were taken directly from the journal I kept when I was 16.

Perilous stuff! I’m still not entirely convinced I didn’t write this paragraph myself.

I remember almost nothing about the first girl I had a crush on. Not why I liked her (did we even have a conversation?), not what she looked like (brown hair, I think). She is not really a person in my memory, the way Julie isn’t really a person to Olivia. What I remember is the anguish. How Important and Intense and Unbearable it felt. It was not a nice feeling, it was not a safe feeling, it was an all-consuming, illogical, reckless feeling.She was 16, and I was 16, and yes, there are a lot of different and complicated power dynamics in Olivia’s crush on her teacher, especially since Julie she also wants her, even if she does manage not tumble Olivia into bed. But there is a lot in these two experiences that is not different at all, because, again, the desire in this book is not two-way. Olivia wants Julie because of how Julie makes her feel about herself. None of that desire is reciprocal or specific. This is so true to how I experienced coming into self as a queer teenager. 

A few weeks before I picked up Olivia, I read Jamaica Kincaid’s incredible novel Annie John. It’s the third work of fiction by Kincaid I’ve read this year, thanks to Kiki’s We Read Jamaica Kincaid project. Kincaid is incandescent. Her books are endless, ongoing marvels. Of the three I’ve read so far (At the Bottom of the River, Annie John, and Lucy), Annie John is the queerest, although they are all, undeniably, queer. So desire—especially queer sapphic desire—was already on my mind when I encountered it in Olivia. Olivia is about a white girl in France; Annie John is about a Black girl in Antigua. They both take place sometime in the first half of the 20th century. They both feel incredibly urgent. They take place then, but they are also about now.

Annie John follows the titular Annie through her girlhood and adolescence, as she struggles to define her identity both within and outside of her family. She falls in love with a classmate, Gwen, and later has similar feelings about another girl. There are so many passages in which she imagines a queer future. Dreaming about a girl she has a crush on, the Red Girl, she says:

In a moment with Gwen, she longs to be “sitting in some different atmosphere, with no future full of ridiculous demands, no need for any sustenance save our love for each other, with no hindrance to any of our desires.”

The relationships she has with other girls, for a time, are a site of ease and refuge away from everything else she’s wrestling with. These queer relationships and fantasies are one of the ways she begins to see a way into another kind of life. Queerness becomes portal and possibility and invention. In queerness, Annie is free to play and experiment. Her relationships with girls don’t have the same weight and heft that any potential relationship with a boy would have. Like the desire Olivia feels for Julie, Annie’s desire for the Red Girl isn’t specific—it’s not so much about who the Red Girl is as it is about where she might take Annie. Queer desire acts as a pathway toward something new that Annie is trying to articulate and imagine.

***

There’s a scene in Olivia I will never forget. Olivia and Julie have made plans to meet in Olivia’s room. Earlier, Julie has called Olivia pretty. Now Olivia is alone in her room, waiting for her:

“I had never thought of my body till that minute. A body!” Perilous stuff! I am stunned every time I read this passage, which so precisely describes what it feels like to see yourself, as if for the first time, because someone else sees you (or because you think they see you; either way, you feel seen). And then—the overwhelming terror of this realization, that you are something that can be seen, that can see and be seen. The quickness with which Olivia puts her clothes back on and flees from the mirror is almost violent.

A few weeks ago, I listened to K. Patrick’s Mrs. S, a heady novel about an Australian woman who takes a job at a girls’ boarding school in England and falls in love with the headmaster’s wife. It came out in June, and though it’s set, presumably, in the present, it feels, like Olivia and Annie John, timeless. Perhaps time-full is a better descriptor—it’s happening now, it was happening a century ago, it might still be happening next year.

There’s a scene in Mrs. S that stunned me in the same way the scene of Olivia looking at herself in the mirror did. The unnamed narrator is alone in the water at a secluded swimming hole. It’s a place she’s been with the object of her frenzied desire, and later, her lover, the headmaster’s wife:

The narrator is in her early twenties, older than Olivia, and though they both fall for older women at the boarding schools where they live (Olivia is a student; the protagonist of Mrs. S works at the school), their experiences are very different. This narrator is working through gender in a way that Olivia does not. But both Strachey and Patrick write with incredible clarity about the disconcerting experience of coming into knowledge about your own body in the context of desire for another body. Both characters, in the aftermath of these experiences, crave invisibility, or, at the least, a kind of disappearance. To remain clothed, to become water, to not want, which means, of course, to not hurt.

Interestingly, Annie doesn’t flee away from herself in the same way—though she does leave home.

***

The only detail I remember about the first girl I had a crush on is that she was on the swim team. But the details about what that crush felt like—the sensation in my body when she came into a room, the exhilarating act of writing her name in my journal—are still vivid. Queer desire, and especially the awakening of queer desire, is rarely specific. Desire in the context of self-discovery is rarely safe or neat. All three of these novels are about teenagers and young people coming into themselves. All three characters use their desire for women as a way to learn about who they are. And while desire teaches us about ourselves throughout our lives, there is something particular to queer girlhood that these books illuminate. Olivia and Annie John and the unnamed narrator of Mrs. S all desire women, but more than that, they desire the life they think those women will give them. Their desire becomes an exercise in imagining another world.

This kind of imagining is fraught because to experience queer desire is to experience otherness. This was true in 1949, when Olivia was published, and in the 1980s, when Annie John was published, and in 2001, when I was in high school. It’s true today. I did not experience much homophobia as a teenager. I didn’t agonize over my queerness. I did grapple with the strangeness of experiencing desire as an unexpected possibility, and not the possibility I had been taught to want.

One of the biggest (unintentional, but welcome) themes of my reading this year has been a rejection of the idea that we are on a neat and linear timeline of progress. These novels, all of which are intimate and specific, are not about progress or lack thereof. They take place in different countries and they’re concerned with different problems. But they feel like knots in the same story, a story that is ongoing and endless, though it’s always changing.

It thrills me to be able to slot myself in, tie my own knot, see a familiar lineage in these stories about the sharp and messy truths of queer desire. What’s exciting to me isn’t that I see myself in these characters, though I do. It’s seeing my own experiences alongside theirs. This is what I’m always looking for in queer literature—and in all literature: not to see myself reflected, but to see myself a part of. To be here, and there, and in the midst, both with and of, muddling through.