RERUN: Rapid Onset Greek Dysphoria

Hi there! I'm on vacation this week with my family, so I'm re-running this 2024 essay on The Bacchae and fascism. It is, I promise, related to this month's comment. First, though, book announcements:

Be Not Afraid #2, the second issue of my horror comic series with Lisandro Estherren, comes out on July 17. If you're on the fence, you can see a preview of it here and read some reviews of the first issue, which people actually liked for some reason.

Also: My non-fiction book DILF: Did I Leave Feminism is due out October 14. You can pre-order that anywhere you get books. The best way to support your local bookshop is to use Bookshop.org.

“Truth is terrible,” says Cadmus, surveying the carnage at the end of Euripides’ The Bacchae. “It always comes at the wrong time.” 

I have had a copy of The Bacchae moldering on my shelves since junior year of college, when I picked it up in a free book pile. I only decided to read it after reporting a piece on the feminist spirituality of Rachel Pollack. In her book The Body of the Goddess, Pollack wrote about Dionysus as a god of gender fluidity, whose cult looks (from the vantage point of the present day) intensely trans. 

Dionysus was raised as a girl, Pollack wrote, and went mad in adolescence; his madness was only cured when he sought initiation from the goddess Cybele, who was famously served by an order of transfeminine priestesses, and who was herself depicted as intersex. Dionysus’ cult, the Bacchae, struck terror into the heart of civilized Greeks – a lot of their activities involved pulling live animals apart with their bare hands, so it makes sense – but it was also a haven for gender transgression. At ceremonies, “female” worshipers strapped on phalli, and “men” wore women’s clothing. 

The idea that the Greeks had a god of transing your gender was new to me, and I’m someone who’s spent a lot of time with Greek mythology. It shouldn’t have been surprising: It’s all over The Bacchae, which is a story about a male-presenting character named Pentheus who puts on a dress, leaves the stage to attend a ritual of Dionysus, and comes back as a woman named Agave. Cybele is mentioned in the opening monologue. Tiresias — the seer who spent half of their life as a man, and half of it as a woman — is a supporting character. 

What really surprised me, though, is that The Bacchae is not just trans, but strikingly queer — queer in the present-day, political sense; queer as in outcast and marginalized and opposed to a repressive and violent social order. It is a story about a fascist regime that cracks down on gender non-conformity, only to be undone by the anarchic nature of desire, which lives in the hearts of fascists and dictators as surely as it lives anywhere else.