How to Be Queer: An Ancient Guide to Sexuality (Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers)

This charmingly produced little book is a new volume in the Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers series put out by Princeton University Press that aims to show how our contemporary preoccupations have already been extensively addressed by the ancient Greeks. Other recent publications in the series concern How to Make Money (Pliny & Co), and How to Get Over a Breakup according to Ovid.

The selector and translator of the literary texts presented aims in her introduction to place these texts in the contexts of “the revolution in sexuality” which “the past decade” has witnessed. She would probably have done better to stress the circularity of revolution, which is what the publication illustrates. As she notes, the Greeks wrote about sex, and specifically queer sex in the case of her book, in a number of closely related modes: erotically, lustfully and emotionally, so “we have quite literal guides among ancient authors as we navigate the “new” forms of being that are finding their place in modern society.”

So, who is this book for? It is divided into 12 chapters of varying lengths, and with jokey titles (“The Origin of Love: Halves and Holes”) in each of which Nooter’s excellent and often lyrical translation is accompanied by the original Greek text, though translation and text are sometimes fragmentary.

This format seems destined therefore (if not so designed) to appeal primarily to actual or former students of Greek language and culture, though it is difficult to imagine that this audience would not already be thoroughly familiar with Greek thinking on, for example, Sapphism! And with the range of meaning and implications covered by the term “eros.”

At some points the author appears to envisage How to Be Queer as a kind of self-help guide “a resource offering paradigms for a full and erotic life,” while listing all the very interesting things that the book does not do, which are precisely those items which would possibly have interested students of gender equality issues more broadly. Her volume “does not suggest that ancient Greece was utopia of tolerance.” Importantly it does not address the fact that in ancient Greece, and Rome also, sexual relations between men were usually considered appropriate only if class and age hierarchies were strictly observed.

At the same time Nooter also wishes to appeal to a very broad church of readers who do not consider themselves queer, by throwing the very categories “queer” and “straight” open to doubt and discussion. Time and sales will tell!

The 12 chapters deal with texts, both prose and poetry, beginning with Homer’s Iliad composed in the mid-700s BCE, which depicts “Achilles’ inconsolable grief after Patroclus’ death”; and Plato’s Symposium in the early 4th century BCE, which shows men at a party making competitive speeches in praise of Eros.

Female love is well-represented by fragments of poetry from ancient Sparta about homoerotic rites of passage sometimes thought to be training exercises for future “normal” heterosexual lives; and some extensive passages from Sappho (7th to 6th centuries BCE) from her island of Lesbos, on “the female gaze.”

Possibly one of the most interesting, amusing, and beautifully expressed chapters is Chapter 12. entitled “Who Wants to Live Forever: Killer Queen,” which details the unrequited love of Alcibiades (“loved by many, adored and feared, passionate and resolute”), for the seemingly impervious and unaware Socrates, as presented in Plato’s Symposium.

Probably the best advice for a prospective reader, of any persuasion, would be to select the jokey title that most appeals and jump right in—“Crash into Me: The Scorch of Lust” for example?—and leave the Introduction for later.