Life as an Iphis
Ancient and Modern Perspectives on Your Hopeless Gay Crush
According to Ovid, a couple thousand years ago in Crete there lived a sweet and honest married couple who, because this is a myth, were pregnant. Because this is a myth, they were as poor as they were kind, so they could only afford to raise a son, though it broke their hearts to admit it. Because (say it with me!) this is a myth, the wife secretly gave birth to a daughter.
A goddess had visited the mother the night before and promised that things would work out okay for the baby, and so the birth went off without a hitch. Typical man: Dad was too busy farming that day to watch his kid be born. He had asked to call the child Iphis, after his own father, and as luck would have it that was a gender neutral name back then. So he came home, greeted his new son Iphis, and went to bed none the wiser.
Then 13 years pass, and still only Iphis, her mother, and a shockingly loyal midwife know that she is a girl. Her father certainly had too much on his plate to change any Cretan diapers, so he was still in the dark. Again, as the goddess had promised, things seemed to be working out fine. Better than fine: Iphis had made a best friend while growing up, and her name was Ianthe. She was the coolest and most beautiful girl in their small town. So beautiful, even, that when it came time to marry, her good looks and charm would suffice as a dowry.
That was relevant because the two of them had fallen in love with each other, as young people who get along in mythology tend to. Their fathers decided that the lovebirds should be engaged. Ianthe was over the moon, but Iphis was not, for in all their tween flirting it had never come up that Iphis was actually a girl.
Iphis started to freak out when she learned she was going to marry her best friend. And for this part of the story, I’ll give a less editorialized translation (Met. IX.726–734; my translation; yes I know that all cows are girl cows):
Scarcely holding back tears, she said: “A problem has taken hold of me,
that of a new kind of love, known to no one and
absent from nature — what solution awaits me? If the gods wanted to spare me,
they should have spared me. If instead they wanted to ruin me,
they could have given me an evil from nature, at least, something customary.
Girl cows don’t love girl cows, and girl horses don’t love girl horses,
[recall, Iphis lives on a farm, so her points of reference are somewhat limited]
a boy sheep loves girl sheep, and a girl deer chases her boy,
birds do it this way too; and among all the rest of the animals,
no girl has ever been swept up by a girl crush.”
Iphis continued saying this kind of stuff for a while, not upset that she would be in trouble, or that she faced embarrassment or anything of the sort. She just had to reckon with the understanding that, in loving another girl, she was utterly and completely alone.
I first read this myth from the Metamorphoses in my senior year of high school Latin. And had you asked me then what it means to be queer, without a doubt I would have said that it means being alone. I had no gay family members, no lesbian or bisexual female friends. Even finding a connection online was hard — it was a couple years past the heyday of message boards, and Tinder would not exist for a couple more. I was the only out girl in my grade and ran the school’s gay-straight alliance with the only out boy. Our faculty advisors comprised the rest of the group’s membership that year.
It took a bit of time for me to see the full irony of the situation — that I, who spent at least three hours a day drowning in the well of loneliness that housed me as a teenage lesbian, was apparently part of a community of girls that spanned millennia, united by the conviction that we were unique. At first, my thoughts on the Iphis myth focused on a few translations I’d found after reading the original text at school: in them, for some reason, the authors had written that Iphis called her own feelings “monstrous” (prodigiosa) in between the sobs and cattle comparisons.
I’m a stickler for details, so perhaps I was more offended by the inaccuracy than the judgment evident in that word choice. These translations seemed to project an assumption that Ovid, and Iphis, would call Iphis a monster, but that’s not what prodigiosa means. Lewis & Short (for the uninformed: a Latin dictionary, not a little pair of colonizers) defines the adjective as “unnatural, strange, wonderful, marvelous, prodigious” — anything that you would never expect to see while canoeing along the Missouri River. The word shows up one other time in the Metamorphoses to describe a witch’s lavish palace.
To render prodigiosa and Iphis’s other descriptions of her crush in those lines (cognita nulli, novaeque Veneris) as “monstrous” would require an embarrassing and vicious lack of intuition about the female experience. “Unknown, prodigious, and of a new kind of love.” Unfamiliar to nature — even unfamiliar to Venus! These words are clearly ancient girl-speak for our most prized and self-pitying retort: You wouldn’t understand.
Iphis didn’t spend those lines telling herself that desiring girls was grotesque, she told herself that it was different. Unique, among cows at least. Quite inconvenient; certainly not monstrous. I‘ll point out, not for nothing, that Merriam-Webster defines “queer” as “differing in some odd way from what is usual or normal,” too.
But to be fair, how could those translators have understood what she meant? Iphis was utterly and completely alone.
Billy the Blue Ranger on Mighty Morphin Power Rangers would exclaim “Prodigious!” whenever he saw an advanced piece of technology or learned something new. Billy fought monstrous creatures from the moon on a monstrous robotic dinosaur. Did you know that the actor who played Billy, David Yost, is gay? I saw him once at a pop culture convention. I wanted to tell him that in my youth, in my backyard, I was also a gay Power Ranger. We were both prodigious.
In any case, Iphis found herself engaged and miserable, mourning rather than celebrating this landmark life event. And at the time I read her story, all that I knew of my own identity was that being gay involved watching your peers grow up and go through the supposed milestones of adolescence without you.
I didn’t get to tell friends about my crush at sleepovers and get tips on how to ask him out, or to date my first love, or to kiss a stranger at a party because I was 17 and what else did I have to do that night? Instead, I would sit and stew in the fact that I was the only person I knew who’d ever been swept up by a girl crush. I told no one, suffocated my identity in silence. When I finally came out and opened up to friends about this problem (after years of thinking about nothing else, and scared beyond reason), the very best that anyone did was frown in sympathy and promise, “It will get better when we’re in college.” Imagine telling that to Iphis. She would probably ask why you think women get to go to college.
To learn that I was not in fact alone — that I was in the company of a teenager two thousand years my senior — was extraordinary. It is amazing to read your inner monologue translated into Latin on a page. In retrospect, however, this was all a bit problematic. How in the world was that still an issue? How was it acceptable that my inherited legacy had been to torture myself over secret crushes on my close friends?
Iphis eventually moves on from detailing the woes of being lonely to sobbing about how much she loves Ianthe. The myth gets pretty sad for a few lines. She pleads with herself to give up hope. Hope that she would ever be anything other than alone. Hope that another girl could somehow, in some way, love her back for who she was. She sighs, and tries to accept what she knows to be her reality: “Oh Iphis … it is not possible for you to be happy.”
Then she keeps crying about it, because she is a teenager, and even in the most relatable circumstances they tend to be a bit extra.
My first Ianthe was a girl named Sarah. I was 14, and she was a year older than me and the captain of the JV volleyball team. Unsurprisingly I fell head over heels. My crush was not monstrous, though it did consume me. And in my desperation to have this person in my life, we ended up really good friends, which as Iphis can attest, meant that just I saw her more often and fell even harder for her.
Sarah and I had a running joke where we would get into fake arguments, and one day we fake-fought so hard that she declared, “Looks like we need to have a rumble.” To this I of course shot back, “It looks like we do,” and then we made plans to “have a rumble” in a couple of weeks. Whenever I tried to follow up about what she’d actually meant, she just kept saying the word “rumble,” so I spent the next 10 days both terrified and thrilled that Sarah was planning to lead me into an alleyway and beat me up. We ended up watching Degrassi and having dinner with her parents.
Apparently J.T. Yorke took the brunt of our rumble for me — he was murdered on that night’s episode. He got stabbed in an alley, but was able to kiss the girl he loved before making his way to Canadian TV Heaven. I used to wonder what it would take for Sarah to kiss me. Perhaps a school transfer, but probably a terminal disease.
One time Sarah described a mutual female friend of ours as “hot” and the shock hurled my consciousness from my body for a bit. Then I remembered the context: I had asked why Sarah called me a nerd a lot but never said it about our equally dorky friend, and her response was a deadpan, “Because Jen is hot, what have you ever done?” I still remember how it felt to hear that; I just wilted. There you go, Iphis — this prodigious love of mine still took plenty of cues from nature.
Iphis probably wouldn’t relate to all the hours I spent writing and rewriting opening lines to say hi to Sarah on AOL Instant Messenger, only to be greeted with an aloof away message. Or that she was the reason I set foot in a record store years before I was pretentious enough to buy used vinyl for myself. Sarah liked musicals, so I got her the original cast recording of A Chorus Line as a Hanukkah gift. I wonder if Iphis gave Ianthe any presents on the Saturnalia. Wait, did people observe the Saturnalia in Crete? I was too busy daydreaming about making out with Sarah after she finds me in the wreckage of a car crash to pay attention in Latin class that week.
Iphis and Ianthe ended up married, despite the apparent impossibility, when that goddess from earlier followed through on her promise to take care of her. She turned Iphis into a boy on the night before the wedding. Iphis was thrilled with the outcome, so I don’t need to chastise him for making the story a bit more heteronormative. Spend a decade farming in drag on Crete before you claim that he didn’t deserve a happy ending.
I did not end up marrying Sarah — but what a twist that would have been!— though eventually we spent enough time apart that I was able to let go of the idea of us ever smooching on top of the smoldering remains of an overturned school bus. Ovid was right: love feeds on hope. I guess Ianthe never ditched Iphis for music camp over a summer holiday.
In college, I was surprised to learn that Sarah had actually been involved with a girl in my class for most of her senior year. Apparently a lot of people knew about this then, too. Sarah had been queer this entire time, but my laments about being the only person in history to have feelings for another girl kept me from picking up on that.
My first instinct after hearing this was to mourn what could have been, as these kinds of crushes always leave a vague imprint behind. But more than feeling sad, I was thrilled. Vindicated. All those years ago, I had recognized something in Sarah that meant she had the capacity to like me back. Even though she hadn’t said it to me, or potentially even to herself, I had not been alone!
I noted before that Sarah was my first Ianthe. Over the course of my high school career, there were a couple more. Each crush felt unmoored and hopeless. Each girl turned out to be queer.
If Ovid had more of an interest in longform, character-based storytelling, perhaps we would have stayed with Iphis and Ianthe long enough to realize that their saga is also a story about two queer women, not just one. At some point after the wedding, Iphis would have revealed the truth about their younger years, right? And then poor, sweet, beautiful Ianthe would discover that she fell in love with someone who was female for her entire life before marriage. That when she was able to connect with another human on a deep, core, romantic level for the first time, it was with a girl just like her.
Somehow in the couple thousand years since Ovid decided to sprinkle a gay love story into the middle of his etiology of the universe, writers and audiences have become more interested in talking about Ianthe. Queer media is filled to the brim with books, films and TV shows about women who grapple with the feelings they never expected to have for other women in their life. Most of the time, those other women are already out; on occasion, the feelings are new to them too, but they have a much easier time accepting it than our protagonists.
Some may remember how in the pilot of The L Word, a wide-eyed Ianthe moves to West Hollywood to live with her boyfriend Tim and immediately finds herself being kissed by Iphis, an exotic and well-read stranger, in the bathroom at her neighbor’s party. Ianthe explores her confusing feelings by cheating on Tim with Iphis until they break up, then sleeping with a bunch of other people. After that we get five more seasons of Ianthe’s self-discovery, while Iphis fades into a mysterious ether, presumably to mack on other unsuspecting baby queers at other dinner parties.
A few million people watched the coming-out story last year on The CW’s Supergirl, in which the hero’s sister Ianthe meets a gorgeous and sardonic detective named Iphis who inspires Ianthe to rethink her entire worldview. They fall in love, but split up after a year or so. “I didn’t know I had it in me to be happy, or to be accepting of myself — I never would have gotten here without you,” Ianthe sobs as they part ways. What goes unsaid is that Iphis didn’t know those things either, at some point in her life, but had to learn them on her own.
In the single most famous piece of lesbian media ever made, an Ianthe who looks a lot like Ellen Degeneres attacks her new friend Iphis for casually admitting that she thought Ianthe was gay. “It’s not enough for you to be gay, you have to recruit others,” Ianthe stammers. Iphis is unfazed; without missing a beat, she quips back, “I’ll have to call National Headquarters and tell them I lost you. Damn! Just one more and I would have gotten that toaster oven.” In a few days, Ianthe will admit that she is indeed gay over the loudspeaker at an airport terminal, the studio audience will explode with applause, and Iphis will give her a hug.
Stories that center Ianthes are often beautiful. But they depict only one kind of journey, and there is another that we do not articulate often enough.
Look, I get it: Coming-out stories are very compelling when portrayed through romance. “Show, don’t tell” is the cornerstone of contemporary media, and it seems easier to show lesbianism as “Two girls kiss and one of them panics, but then eventually accepts it,” than as, “One girl develops feelings for her friendly classmate and spends a lot of time mentally berating herself.” But any writer who mistakes exposition for the only way to depict queerness in isolation has never experienced the gut-wrenching, absurd, vivid reality that this kind of loneliness fosters in people.
A storyteller can show moments of being casually misidentified as straight that swell and swallow a person whole. They can show how rejection from loved ones transforms from a worst-case scenario to a presumed outcome. Life as an Iphis is like the world’s most particular detective story — a never-ending scrutiny of the behavior and clothing and appearance of every human you come across, while being acutely aware that you have no idea what you are even looking to find.
I would love to read a hundred lines from Ovid about Ianthe’s journey of bisexual self-discovery. But while I wait on archaeologists to unearth those fragments, perhaps I’ll be lucky enough to find a handful of modern stories that take the necessary pains to acknowledge how beautiful it is to be an Iphis. There are a few, but not enough. I want us to center that girl more often — to center the strength it takes to survive in the world before Ianthe figures out that she has it within herself to love Iphis back.
Four years of queer solitude prepared me to accept the love I later would find in others with open arms and my whole heart. They made me introspective and obsessive. They made me never want to let another person in my life believe that they are monstrous, or alone.
Lisa Franklin is a comedian and writer from New York. She used to be a Latin teacher and made all of her students read the story of Iphis, regardless of its relevance to their curricula. She has a webcomic called My Two Lesbian Ants, which you can find on Instagram and Twitter.
