Am I the Monster?

Once again, we are in the throes of a sex panic — a tired crusade that demands fresh blood. The old complaint is that queer and trans people are an alleged danger to children. Lawmakers and journalists, Christians and conservatives and liberals “just asking questions” have all whipped themselves into a frenzy over “youth seduction.” Asking a student their pronoun? Hosting a drag story time in the library? Grooming. Respecting a young person’s choice of name? Helping your child access gender-confirming care? Child abuse. According to the panicked, queer and trans children¹I don’t want to flatten the material differences between how such adults perceive and punish kids for queer and trans identities, intertwined though they are. In this essay, I am discussing literary characters who don’t yet have a defined understanding of their own sexual or gender identity but do have an understanding of their sexual and/or gender difference. have no agency: They are both influenced by nefarious adults and susceptible to sexual delusions. The panic serves to pathologize and criminalize queer and trans existence as an act of public perversion — and to disempower any caring adult who wants to help a child understand who they are. 

It’s an interesting moment, then, to be reading queer and trans novels that complicate the Lolita plot. I’ve read three in the past year — not so many as to diagnose a trend, but enough that I wonder if we aren’t reckoning with something in our own culture, too. We’ve seen the Tadzio trope before. We’re a well-read group of people, turning, as we so often do, to books, especially when we’re young and need answers to questions we don’t yet know how to articulate. We do know, however, not to ask just anyone.

I was 14 when I first read Lolita, which I reckon might be the median age for the precocious. As Patricia Lockwood writes in her essay about Nabokov, 

If you read Lolita as a young girl, you feel clearly, colourfully, photographically seen — someone is paying attention to the little tendon twitching at the side of your ankle! ‘The thousand eyes wide open in my eyed blood.’ I know many women of my generation who bear a half-shamed attachment to it, for the same reason many of them love Léon; the girl is still nominally the focus. It is easy — it seemed easy to me, when I was a teenager — to discard the surrounding pervert, and simply keep his eye.

Queer and trans teen readers of Lolita are perhaps less likely to discard the pervert because we worried we shared his eye. Yes, I saw my own bare ankles on the cover of that book, but I also saw something I feared about myself on those pages. To be a young girl looking at other young girls, waiting, hoping to see something in them that lets you know they see you, that maybe it is safe to … what, exactly? The wrong peer can poison your social sphere with a flick of a slur: Quit looking at me, fag, sissy, lesbian. And therein lies the danger. It would be enough to know that someone else, anyone else, sees what you see. 

If you’re a young person who wonders whether something is wrong with you, you are on the lookout for someone to trust with this question. What you don’t know is that needing that question answered is what makes you vulnerable because you don’t yet know who has good intentions or what experience you’re seeking. You have not yet learned to read either the behavior of adults or your own intuitive reactions. Lolita narratives suggest to the young reader that there might be people out there who are interested in your sexuality, your anxieties, your beauty — even if they exploit it. Queer Lolita novels stray from their straighter source text by letting the abused young person ask what they are especially desperate to know: Am I the monster? 

Antiquity by Hanna Johansson was marketed as a “queer Lolita” novel by both her Swedish publisher when it came out in 2020 and her American publisher in 2024. Both covers are straight out of the Lolita playbook (which Nabokov himself asked his publishers not to do): close-ups of a young girl’s body parts — her limbs in Swedish, her lips in English. 

The unnamed narrator of Antiquity does not profess to have a predilection for underaged girls, but she does seduce one: Olga. “Had I done anything wrong?” the narrator asks in the last pages of the novel. “No. All I wanted was to be loved.” She reasons that she was truly loved by this girl because it was Olga’s first love, and in return, she has given Olga a story she could tell about her first seduction, a story that would begin, “I was fifteen years old, and it was summer, well, technically, it was fall … ” It is only in the final pages of the novel, when the narrator slips into fantasy, that we learn Olga’s exact age.

Like Humbert Humbert, the narrator of Antiquity is preoccupied with how the story of their “love” will be told. Unlike Humbert, she knows, “It was not my summer. It was not my childhood.” She leaves the importance of the story up to Olga, perhaps for her to judge for herself, when she is older, what happened to her. Like Humbert, she luxuriates in the pronunciation of Olga’s name, asperating the O, just as she does Ermoupoli, the capital city of the island Syros, where she follows Olga’s mother, Helena, a photographer she’s interviewing for a magazine and with whom she is briefly infatuated. Lo-li-ta, c’est Er-mou-po-li. And like Humbert, she is fixated on the long, permissive history of Europe by way of ancient Hellás — so she is surprised to learn that Ermoupoli is not, in fact, ancient, but a nineteenth-century port city, newer than the United States. How embarrassing. The house is, of course, on a street named Persefonis, littered with pomegranate trees. Yes, there is a description of breaking open the fruit or, in the narrator’s words, “the moment it gave.” (There are a lot of flagrant fruit metaphors in this novel: cherries that must be enjoyed before the birds get to them, split oranges, “childish” persimmons.) As much as Antiquity is a narrative of youth seduction, it is also a narrative of rich Northern Europe enjoying the fruits of the poor Balkans, indulging in a fantasy of somewhere age-old that is in fact young and vulnerable, of hospitality that will cure loneliness. “I longed to be welcome,” the narrator says, “in a place that was beautiful.”

For the narrator, a queer life is a lonely life, inevitably tragic. She observes an older man she assumes to be gay step to the edge of the dock but not jump in the water (he has a bandaged foot) and sympathizes with her perception of his life: “without ties to other people … without God, without family, without friends, without sexuality, without pleasure.” She confesses to being “robbed” of her social world every time she breaks up with someone, for her friends view her choices as “immoral, almost illegal, and this made me feel even more lonely, fundamentally lonely, a loneliness I was never free from.” Like most unreliable narrators, you can count on this one to tell on herself. “But I never did anything wrong,” she immediately avers. “I was just looking for love. I was looking for someone who could reflect me back to myself.” Ah, poor pink Narcissus!

Helena is a narcissist of another variety, the artistic, free-spirited mother who believes her neglectfulness is really teaching her daughter to be independent. She condemns her uncultured nieces for their interest in fantasy books, for playing dress up and collecting toys, and she attributes their “disrupted childhood” to being overparented, which she likens to kids being sent to “Michael Jackson’s Neverland.” But Helena, like Lolita’s mother Charlotte, is also exasperated with her daughter. She doesn’t know what to do with her, so she does nothing. She doesn’t even make her go to school come September, which is when the seduction starts up.

At first, the narrator quietly observes Olga. She wants to tell her the lie that makes seduction possible: We’re not like other people; we’re like each other. She lets Olga have a cigarette — their little secret. Olga starts following her, her “shadow.” The narrator is sure “we were in the midst of something eterna l… I was close to a great love.” She asks if she can take her picture, tells her she’s beautiful — oldest trick in the book. And then: “We merged in the mirror. When I looked at her it was as if I saw myself. When I kissed her I liberated her from something: her childhood, her mother.” And later: “Our whispers in the night: this is absolutely secret. What we are doing is very risky.” She lies to Olga and says she knew right away that it would be a great love. She knows Olga needs that story — “Olga’s entire emotional life was built from the shadows of things she’d read” — and tells her to read The Songs of Bilitis, a fake found “ancient” text in the style of Sappho from a nineteenth-century fictional poet. She’s convinced she didn’t take anything from her, she gave her something — a story, a past, a future.

Spoiler alert (if only Olga had one!): The narrator does not get found out. The relationship takes its course with the summer. The narrator watches for “the person she was about to become, a person I suspected — knew — I would never meet.” Awash with melancholy, she sees Olga’s future stretch out and assures herself it won’t be a tragedy as her own future will surely be, convinced, as she is, that a queer life is meant to be lived on the margins, never diving in. “Homosexuality made me terrified of homoeroticism,” she explains. “It was too real. Nothing is innocent when you have something to hide.” The book ends as the trio takes the ferry back to Athens, the narrator sucking on the nostalgia to come like a hard candy, Olga scrunched up in her hoodie, inscrutable to us all. Her questions are never revealed and are, in fact, beside the point for the narcissistic narrator and her self-justifying fantasies of instruction.

In Thrall is a novel in which a 16-year-old girl narrates her first lesbian sexual experience with her 37-year-old teacher. The teacher’s done it before. I read this book in a feverish few days. It’s incredibly funny, articulate, crass, surprising, smart-ass, juvenile, and Jewish, narrated in precocious city kid prose. The author is Jane DeLynn, and the main character’s name is Lynn. Could it possibly be autobiographical? 

In the introduction, Colm Tóibín compares In Thrall to The Price of Salt and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and indeed, all three novels share a sense of desperation and danger and illicit desire. But Lynn and Miss Maxwell are not exactly like Therese and Carol because Therese is not in Carol’s care, even if Carol does give her warm milk and tuck her in for a nap. Nor are they exactly like Miss Jean Brodie and the Brodie Set because while Miss Brodie does groom her acolytes, it is toward fascism and heterosexuality, pushing some of the girls into the arms of her married lover instead of her own. 

First published in 1982, In Thrall was reissued last year by Semiotext(e). The cover features DeLynn’s own yearbook photo and quote: “If you cannot love me as I am, I will be lonely forever.” What a brilliant improvement on the cover that pops up on Goodreads, which features skinny limbs, a demure face hiding behind a bare shoulder, a peek of triangle bikini top, and what look like hand-drawn tattoos with the word “teacher” with a heart around it and two overlapping women symbols. Never mind that the novel’s narrator, Lynn, spends most of the novel clomping around in Village Cobbler shoes and keeping her braces from showing when she smiles. Semiotext(e), thankfully, is not interested in marketing a lesbian Lolita novel. Their jacket copy begins with a quote that encapsulates the novel’s tension and the narrator’s voice: “I had been an official female homosexual for less than twenty minutes, and already I had become a dangerous person.” 

Lynn tells us from the first sentence that “I was always getting crushes on my teachers. The fact that these teachers were women didn’t bother me or my self-conscious Freudian friends very much; the phenomenon was common in our school.” In the grand tradition of Mädchen in Uniform, Claudine à l’école, and Olivia, Lynn attends an all-girls school where it is common to fawn over a young, unmarried teacher — in her case, her English teacher, Miss Maxwell. Lynn isn’t afraid to cop to her crush, nor does she hold back when she meets adults she thinks are queer. Her aunt’s boyfriend, Rudolf, is a man of expensive taste with a roommate named Christopher and an impeccably renovated closet, and Lynn knows what it’s for. “If people told the truth about sex instead of being so creepy,” she tells her friends, “there’d be no need for a Sexual Revolution.” 

The adults in Lynn’s life do not know what to make of Lynn’s self-conscious bluster, except for Miss Maxwell, who identifies it as hubris. But Lynn can tell she’s charmed her teacher, even though the title of the novel appears by way of Miss Maxwell’s withering sarcasm: “Every quiver of your feverish sensibility holds me in thrall.” When Miss Maxwell nags Lynn to get her hair out of her eyes, it’s so she can notice, as Lynn points out, that “they’re blue.” (Of note, for a Jewish girl.) After Lynn complains that Miss Maxwell has given her an F for writing about herself when she was supposed to write about being a tragic hero, the teacher surprises her student by inviting her for tea in her apartment. There, she at turns sympathizes with Lynn for dealing with “the tyranny parents exert over children” and negs Lynn about how little she knows. The teacher can “see through [Lynn’s] head as if it were made of glass, right into the heart of your terrible misery … because you find yourself full of thoughts you can’t express to anybody — even your best friend Shelly — because you suspect there’s something terribly wrong with them.” 

“I’m not miserable right now,” Lynn says and then walks home, reciting a love poem in her mind.

The reader knows something Lynn doesn’t: Miss Maxwell is following a recognizable strategy. She doesn’t treat Lynn like the crème de la crème, à la Miss Brodie, but she does see something in those blue eyes (like Rudolph, only the queers in the novel see it in Lynn’s eyes — the gays get the gaze.) She tells Lynn she’ll never get into Radcliffe; she calls Lynn an “infant sociopath” when she takes her to see Picasso and Braque. And when Lynn gets cold feet — “I don’t think we should see each other any more” — Miss Maxwell nudges her toward admitting what she wants. Lynn demures; Miss Maxwell insists, lifts her up by her coat, and kisses her on the mouth. Then reminds her there’s a paper due tomorrow.

Lynn’s reaction to the kiss is “surprise at her lack of surprise.” Now she knows she’s a homosexual because, as she tautologizes (Miss Maxwell taught her that word), she was kissed by a homosexual. Lynn’s attraction to Miss Maxwell is ambivalent and recognizable to many queer people whose first queer sexual encounter, or even just their first queer longing, was simply with the first fellow queer they got to know. Lynn isn’t bored with her teacher and feels understood by her. And yet, she also feels “permanently and irrevocably marred.”

The next time she goes over to her teacher’s apartment, Lynn is miserable with dread. When Miss Maxwell seduces Lynn, she can’t move away from her on the couch and has an anxiety attack. Lynn can’t bring herself to act like her more famous smart-ass city kid narrator counterpart, Holden Caufield, who reacts to getting fondled by his English teacher by yowling, “What the hellya doing?” and running out of there quicker than you can say “pervert.” (“I know more damn perverts, at schools and all, than anybody you ever met,” he explains, and then later admits, “That kinda stuff’s happened to me about twenty times since I was a kid. I can’t stand it.”) Miss Maxwell assures Lynn she won’t die of the anxiety attack (“The fact that I was all right before doesn’t mean I’m all right now,” Lynn protests) and moves things into the bedroom, where she undresses Lynn. 

I want to be precise here, and I want to take Lynn at her word. She’s excited and scared, and she goes along with something she doesn’t quite want to do or even understand. Eventually, she calls lesbian sex “Land of Undifferentiated Slime,” and I laughed out loud both times I read the book. She also calls it “sodomy with an innocent sixteen-year-old” when she complains that Miss Maxwell doesn’t write her a good enough letter to get into Radcliffe, to which the teacher retorts, “I don’t really think ‘sodomy’ is an appropriate word to describe our rather innocuous sexual activities, and as far as innocence goes — in terms of who led who on — ” But Lynn knows that’s bullshit. 

Is Lynn in her teacher’s care? Yes. Does the teacher lead her astray or bring her closer to herself? Hard to say. Miss Maxwell has slept with two other students before, and she’s terribly lonely. Unlike her colleague at school, Mr. Pauley, who goes cruising every Wednesday and Saturday night, she’s gone years without meeting anyone. When she does condescend to go to a gay bar since “the Jewish culture is not a bar culture,” she asks what she could have in common with a nurse from New Jersey. In other words, she could be having a little more age-appropriate fun (pre-Stonewall was not Stone Age) if she were less of a snob and a little braver. She admits to “the total inappropriateness of the love object” (Lynn) but immediately asks, “Who could believe I could fall in love with such a monster?”

Lynn wants to tell her friends; Miss Maxwell tells her it’s the one thing she must not do. When Lynn tries to tell her best friend, Shelley says that if it’s what she thinks it is, she doesn’t want to hear it. Lynn’s reaction is measured: “If I had any guts, I’d jump out of the window right now, instead of waiting for the inevitable day when I’d molest some young girl and get arrested.” In her agony, she confesses to her closeted gay uncle Leonard, who betrays her by telling her parents. When they threaten to call the school, she turns their bourgeois worries against them — what if people found out? Instead, Lynn agrees to never see Miss Maxwell again and to go to Europe for the summer instead of counseling at a summer camp. And her father suggests she try hormone therapy. 

It is easier for her parents to read Lynn’s sexual deviance as a gender deviance, a threat Lynn has already internalized. No one has the words to express it yet, but everyone knows Lynn’s cisness is conditional. As soon as she suspects herself of being a lesbian, she waits for her inevitable mustache to sprout. After she has lesbian sex for the first time, she turns to books (what a gay thing to do) to explain what’s going on — outdated books, Miss Maxwell points out, that try to “correct” intersex identity. And yet, Lynn also appreciates her difference — she describes herself as “drenched in anomaly.” As she explains to Miss Maxwell, “I knew, but I didn’t know that I knew. I mean, I always knew there was something wrong with me.” She dreads the inevitable alienation she foresees as part of queer life, which Miss Maxwell does little to dispel. The agony of being identified as something you yourself do not fully understand is a monstrous feeling. Let it swallow you whole, and you’ll be convinced that you, yourself, are a monster — and maybe you’ll start acting like one. Maybe that’s what happened to Miss Maxwell, or the narrator of Antiquity. Better to jump out a window.

As Susan Stryker reminds us, the word “monster” comes from the Latin “monstrum,” derived from the verb “to warn.” “Monsters,” Stryker notes, “like angels, functioned as messengers and heralds of the extraordinary. They served to announce impending revelation, saying, in effect, ‘Pay attention; something of profound importance is happening.’” In Thrall is Lynn’s encounter with the monster as a warning or herald of something profound and extraordinary to come. Impending revelation indeed: You will soon meet a version of yourself more true and strange and bold and beautiful than you can imagine — and more than your family and friends can imagine — and for that reason, you will likely be severed from all of them. The Miss Maxwells of the world (and I hope there are fewer of them than ever, thanks to the good news of queer and trans liberation) experience that warning as a threat that drives them to alienation. This is the bleak misreading of the monster — to not pay attention but to cower, to convince yourself that you’re doomed to be expelled from all society and to prey on those you might otherwise love.

For months after I read In Thrall, I wanted to write about it, and I couldn’t. I didn’t know what to say about the relationship. I didn’t judge it, but I recognized it. Something like that had happened to me, with a teacher, when I was a little older than Lynn, and the differential was closer to the 34-year age gap between Salinger and Joyce Maynard. So I sat with the book for a while longer. And then I read an interview with DeLynn in BOMB where she describes Miss Maxwell as a predator and Lynn’s reaction to her as a mixture of disgust and desire — all based on DeLynn’s own life experience. Taylor Lewandowski quotes an essay of DeLynn’s from a collection of lesbian coming-out stories: “Even after all these years, my body responds to the thought of it with a surge of adrenaline more suited to a horror movie than to a relatively consensual sexual experience. Why I reacted this way is unclear — no doubt the disparity of age and the physical unattractiveness of her own sexual life and agony about being homosexual that got transmitted to me.” DeLynn notes that “most dyke writing tends to be memoir — the writer talking about the past with supposedly wiser eyes. I didn’t want that. The narration sticks to the present of whatever period the novel is set in, with no knowledge of what the future holds. Lynn could not conceive of a world where gayness was accepted.”

I think this is what I couldn’t write about. Reading In Thrall enthralled me to that moment of shame in my own life. When I was a seduced youth, I didn’t know what the future would hold, who I was, or how I would live in a world that wouldn’t accept me. I couldn’t love myself as I was, and I was afraid of being lonely forever. It’s a naive declaration based on fear, not fact. Forever isn’t real, but there might be long years ahead in which you ponder what happened to you. This is the uncomfortable age where In Thrall lingers.

Lucas Rijneveld’s My Heavenly Favorite was marketed as a modern Lolita, and indeed, it is about a 49-year-old man grooming, molesting, and raping a 14-year-old, told in a first-person confessional, in a “fancy prose style.” It’s also a book about books, about reading. At the beginning of the novel, the favorite reads Harry Potter and Goosebumps and the works of Roald Dahl: “Willy Wonka still frightened you, he was a weirdo, he left the horrible children to their fate, he got them worked up with all those sweets in the factory and didn’t protect them.” The narrator takes the favorite to see It, and soon, the favorite has taken It out of the library and is scared to keep reading and scared to put it down. The narrator quotes Beckett, Sartre, Eliot, Rilke, Moby Dick, and the Bible; he jerks off into In Search of Lost Time and sticks the pages together. The primary hermeneutical lessons of adolescence, song lyrics, are equally pored over: Kate Bush, Lou Reed, Leonard Cohen, The Cranberries, and the favorite’s own, once she’s grown up and become a famous musician. Her album is called Kurt12 after the name the narrator asks her to call him — after Kurt Cobain — and now primary evidence in the criminal case against him.

Yet for a book about books, no one talks about Lolita, even though Kurt quotes it directly more than once: “You were the fire of my loins.” In the end, it’s reading that sends Kurt to prison. The favorite’s brother reads her diary, and the narrator’s wife reads the printouts of his MSN messages, and they both interpret the text correctly.

The favorite wants. Most of all, the favorite wants to have a penis, wants to pee standing up. Her experience of her own gender — mediated through the narrator, of course — is terrifically imaginative and capacious of all manner of affect, from covetous to curious to delirious to despairing. It does seem like a fair observation, however, that “your imagination was endless and you could scare yourself to bits.” The narrator believes he wholly sees his beloved — “I saw you struggling with the twilight zone between girl and woman” — but in fact only sees the gap of opportunity where he can prey on a religiously raised child with no sex education. He takes advantage of her fantasies by telling her that by having penetrative sex with him, she’ll grow a penis. The favorite imagines herself to be a person who might one day have a penis, as a naked putto, a cherub. And also as an otter, a frog, and a bird. If anything, she sexually identifies as the second airplane that hit the World Trade Center on 9/11 — she spreads her arms out like wings and fantasizes that she was the plane that did it, that she was the thing capable of such destruction, all stemming from the magical thought that 9/11 happened because she was writing the word “catastrophe” in a dictation at that very moment. She also has conversations with Freud and with Hitler, with whom she shares a birthday. (So does Rijnefeld, and so does the protagonist of his previous book, The Discomfort of Evening, which shares several plot points and some of its most bizarre characterizations with My Heavenly Favorite). 

Several times, the favorite confesses that she thinks something is wrong with her. Kurt turns this around on her when confronted by his wife, by the police: “I tried to distract the officials by saying there was something wrong with you, something seriously wrong.” She is learning about how she desires, and he reads her. He tells her about otter penises, which are hidden underneath their fur, and how you can dissect an otter and extract one. She wants to dissect an otter, and then asks him to dissect her, and then plunges the scalpel into her own leg.

The favorite is a victim, but she also has a terrible agency. She dates Kurt’s son and, later, a boy in town. She wants to have her own wants, and she does shake him off, in the end, after a suicide attempt (she spreads her wings and falls) and after a final rape in the hospital. From his jail cell, Kurt laments that he knows he damaged her, that he touched the butterfly’s wings. He avers that he could never love a woman because he never became a man, that he has been 14 since he was molested at that age by his mother. Yet he cannot apologize, only excuse himself: “From the start I’d seen how you hovered between child and woman, between girl and dear boy, I had sullied your childish longings for a prong for good, I had only wanted to show you the things I already knew, and didn’t realise you should discover them for yourself.” But though she had tried to gain knowledge from him, it had never been his intention to let her learn enough to read him for what he was. 

Though she struggles to learn how to read, to discern and connect and intuit, she does eventually learn how to write. She becomes a famous musician, and her lyrics are sprinkled throughout My Heavenly Favorite. On the permissions page at the end of the book, those lyrics, written in English, are credited to the author himself, Lucas Rijneveld. I thought that was a funny final nod to Nabokov — who else would have written them? 

I had a very hard time reading My Heavenly Favorite, but I had this strange feeling that I could have stomached those molestation and rape scenes when I was younger, and not just because it was before those things happened to me. I would have recognized myself in the desired girl, maybe, understood something about her obsessions, her desire to know. My own curiosity about the narration of sex acts, even coercive and violent ones, might have been prurient, but it wouldn’t have been wrong. 

It’s not the point of literature to instruct, though it can and it may (American literature is rooted in Puritan moral education — we all came out of John Bunyan’s overcoat). But it is true that young readers do often look to literature for guidance, not because they want to know what to do but because they want to know what is happening to them. The secret thing that the queer kid doesn’t know yet is that their curiosities aren’t unnatural, that they don’t have to be lonely, that more often than not, sex can be interesting and fun and even simple. The monster you fear you are is really a portent of revelation to come. This manufactured moral panic preys on so many fears, but the threat of the predator remains real: It’s the seducing adult, whether the molester or the sex-panicked morality police, who lies to you and makes you think the world is only big enough for the two of you and everywhere else is hostile. It is the responsibility of the teacher — and we are all teachers when it comes to the young people in our care — to, as Amia Srinivasan writes, “redirect the student’s desire toward its proper object” and not take advantage of their desire for knowledge, or worse, mold them into the image of one’s own fears. 

Queer Lolita novels show the danger of looking to an adult for understanding and safety and reading them wrong. I haven’t read Lolita in a long time, but I don’t worry about Humbert anymore because I learned how to recognize him. I’m not going to go back and reread it right now, but I do wonder if maybe Lolita was for children all along.

Natalie Adler is an editor at Lux and author of the forthcoming novel Waiting On a Friend.

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  I don’t want to flatten the material differences between how such adults perceive and punish kids for queer and trans identities, intertwined though they are. In this essay, I am discussing literary characters who don’t yet have a defined understanding of their own sexual or gender identity but do have an understanding of their sexual and/or gender difference. ↩︎