Back To The Queer Future #1: Sapphic Seating Situation
You come around in a wooded garden, surrounded by women draped all over each other whispering sweet nothings in French. This seems like a really excellent way to start your journey through queer time. Before you can dust off your high school French, you feel a ripple in reality. Something’s about to upset queer history and you need to fix it!
An American woman raises a glass of champagne and invites everyone to sit and eat – that’s notorious heiress and seductress Natalie Clifford Barney! You must have been flung back a whole century, to one of her infamous salons in the back yard of her Parisian home on Rue Jacob.
You can’t help but notice a simmering tension in the air, with jealous glares and pining gazes flowing between the party-goers like sapphic leylines. If you don’t intervene, there’s a high chance a huge fight will break out, taking down countless icons of queer modernist art and literature (and their partners)!
Can you help Natalie seat her guests without causing carnage?
You must seat the ten guests at a long table. Five people can sit along the top and five along the bottom. If you follow these rules, you’re pretty sure that no-one will throttle anyone:
- No-one can sit next to or directly opposite an ex
- People in a new relationship (less than 1 year) are clingy and must sit next to their partner
- Tops must sit along the top of the table, bottoms along the bottom. Anyone undeclared is a switch and can sit either side.
From the gossip you’ve overheard, you know that:
- Natalie has slept with everyone except for Alice and Gertrude, but is currently single
- Renee and Olive had a brief fling a while back, but it didn’t work out as they’re both bottoms
- Colette is always the centre of attention, so has to sit in the middle
- Dolly is feuding with her exes Romaine and Olive, who just started going out with each other
- Alice and Gertrude have been going out for several years
- Elisabeth is a bottom who is guzzling champagne to get over her affair with Romaine
- Gertrude and Missy are tops
- Missy and Colette have just celebrated their 6 month anniversary
- Alice is sat on the far left, so she can be at least three seats away from Olive, who recently insulted her cooking, even her hash fudge!
You’ll know you’ve got everyone in the right place when you can say who is sat opposite Gertrude?
Additional Tools:
Click here for a print-a-ble version of the table.
Listen to an audio file of Nicole describing the puzzle below:
