Published in 2024
3 hours and 18 minutes
Sarah Nooter is professor of classics and theater and performance studies at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Greek Poetry in the Age of Ephemerality, The Mortal Voice in the Tragedies of Aeschylus, and When Heroes Sing: Sophocles and the Shifting Soundscape of Tragedy.
What is this book about?
The idea of sexual fluidity may seem new, but it is at least as old as the ancient Greeks, who wrote about queer experiences with remarkable frankness, wit, and insight. How to Be Queer is an infatuating collection of these writings about desire, love, and lust between men, between women, and between humans and gods, in lucid and lively new translations.
How to Be Queer starts with Homer’s Iliad and moves through lyric poetry, tragedy, comedy, philosophy, and biography, drawing on a wide range of authors, including Sappho, Plato, Anacreon, Pindar, Theognis, Aristophanes, and Xenophon. It features both beautiful poetry and thought-provoking prose, emotional outpourings and humorous anecdotes. From Homer’s story of the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus, one of the most intense between men in world literature, to Sappho’s lyrics on the pleasures and pains of loving women, these writings show the many meanings of what the Greeks called eros.
Complete with brief introductions to the selections, How to Be Queer reveals what the Greeks knew long ago-that the erotic and queer are a source of life and a cause for celebration.
