Is evelyn hugo gay

It was easy enough to not clock historical fiction megahit The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo as a gay book — for starters, we had the title of said book, which suggested its protagonist was not merely a woman who liked men exclusively, but in fact had liked seven of them well enough to marry them.

Its protagonist, Joan Goodwin, is an astrophysicist who joins NASA in the early ’80s, where she meets Vanessa Ford, “a woman who challenges her understanding of who she is.” Reid “wanted to explore how intimate a connection could be between one character in space and one on the ground, and that those characters would both be women.” (Interestingly enough, this dynamic actually has appeared before, in Netflix’s short-lived space series Away and in Apple TV’s Invasion.

Yes, she’s unapologetic, complex, flawed, and calculating. The tattoos. For example; after being accused of being “a straight woman writing shitty queer books for the straights, profiting off of communities [she wasn’t a part of],”, Simon vs the Homo Sapiens Agenda author Becky Abertalli came out in 2020, admitting that when she wrote the book, she hadn’t yet reckoned with her own sexuality.

She dated women, too, living her glamorous Hollywood life partially in the closet. Evelyn’s story doesn’t scream queerness from the rooftops — it whispers it into the spaces between the lines. Whether visibility is worth the risk.

There’s a brutal kind of beauty in watching Evelyn navigate all this while the world thinks it knows her, and it’s a reminder that every closet is different — not always built from shame, but from necessity.

Taylor Jenkins Reid quiet queerness, and why that matters

Until recently, Taylor Jenkins Reid — the author behind Evelyn Hugo, Daisy Jones & The Six, and other massive hits — hadn’t spoken publicly about her own queerness.

It’s a necessary one. The activism. In 2021, Reid said the rights to the book were no longer owned by Freeform, and in 2022 it was announced that Netflix would be adapting the series into a movie, adapted by Liz Tigelaar (Little Fires Everywhere) and directed by queer director Leslye Headland (Russian Doll, The Acolyte.) So it’s been languishing in development for years as fans continue to share our unsolicited casting ideas.

Hard.

Because so many of us know what it’s like to occupy that in-between space — where the world defines you by the surface, and the truth lives in a room you keep locked. "It has been hard at times to see people dismiss me as a straight woman, but I also didn’t tell them the whole story."

The 41-year-old—who is married to screenwriter Alex Jenkins Reid—noted that, while many of her early relationships were with men, she first fell in love with a woman when she was in her 20s.

"This was the late ’90s, so nobody was talking about bisexuality.

Who kept choosing each other, even when the world wouldn’t let them do it out loud.

Bi erasure, and the courage of naming yourself

Reid’s coming out also speaks to something many bisexual people know too well: the pressure to prove it. “But I also didn’t tell them the whole story.”

That hit.

A way of exploring her own identity through art before she felt ready to name it in real life.

Representation that doesn’t scream — it whispers

We often talk about queer stories in terms of boldness. The TikToks. Not literally, but emotionally.