You wake up to the sound of Lady Gaga playing, your neck cramped from sleeping on the sofa. Your brain feels super foggy, but you’re pretty certain this is not your house. It looks like you’re in a tiny apartment, the kind of cramped space you haven’t seen since you last crashed with a friend in NYC.
Two women with slightly dubious noughties alternative lifestyle haircuts are hunched over some vintage-looking Macbooks, deep in concentration. You peer at what they’re working on, which seems to be some kind of blog with a mild Geocities vibe. How quaint! You do a double-take when you clock that it’s the Autostraddle front-page, but from way back when it first launched!
When Poker Face comes on for the third time in a row, the whole room starts wavering before your eyes and you realise that something is seriously wrong. You’ve somehow been thrust back to the year 2009, and something is playing havoc with the space-time continuum. The laptops suddenly power off, to panicked yelps. You look down at your arm and see your stick ’n poke tattoo has vanished. It’s like something is removing everything queer from existence! Before you know it, the room collapses in on itself, and you have been sucked into a swirling time vortex. Oh boi!
Will you jump through 100 years of queer history, across 10 posts during the 13 Days of A+, solving puzzles to help out LGBTQ icons to ensure the queer timeline remains stable and Autostraddle comes into existence?!
Your journey begins on the next page…
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.
The guests are sat at a long table, with five “tops” sat along the top side of the table, and five “bottoms” sat along the bottom side of the table
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:
Pages: 1 2See entire article on one page
I have been secretly wishing for an Autostraddle puzzle hunt! I AM SO EXCITED!
I AM SO EXCITED THAT YOU’RE EXCITED. And also personally thrilled about Sally’s puzzles! <3
Well, I’m so excited that both of you are excited!
This is so excellent!
holy bananas I am so excited about this.
AS team, this is so awesome!
But also, I’m having flashbacks to the logic games section of my LSAT exam…
When I was looking up different sorts of puzzles I discovered about the LSATs having a load of logic puzzles and was amused/horrified by this!
I’m thinking anyone that completes this series of puzzles should get a QSAT!
I’m GOOD at logic games like this, and genuinely enjoy them, so that section caused less pain for me than for a lot of other people I know. But even still, 5 games like this in 35 minutes?!? It was 12 years about and I still shudder at the thought.
I LOVED THIS and also I’m really proud of myself for getting it
Second that sentiment! This was so much fun!
I am proud of all of you!
Same!
SALLY! I *love* this, what a gift, thank you.
I think this is the part where I say that you and all A+ members are a gift!
This is amazing, thank you! I got it on the second try but I still think my first answered works too? I must be missing some gossip, good thing I’m not hosting historic homosexuals for the holidays!
I feel immensely fulfilled at this chance to live out my childhood dream of solving a logic puzzle to advance in a challenge just like Hermione!!!
It’s actually even better than that because instead of solving a puzzle written by a TERF so the storyline of some dumb boy can get advanced, I get to solve a puzzle written by Sally to save the future of all queerkind!!! Words simply fail me!!
This!!!!
And the good news is that as we are all here today, you can be pretty confident that YOU personally have saved the future of all queerkind already!
this was fun, I love a logic puzzle
This is SO EXCITING I love puzzles
alexa, play “So Emotional” by Whitney Houston
EXCUSE ME is this a perfect holiday gift designed JUST FOR ME (and a bunch of other excited nerdy queers)!?!?!?!?! Sally you are rivaling Shelli’s perfect strap week for queer pulitzer candidates this year.
Ok, now I need to talk to Shelli and see if there could be some kind of strap-themed puzzle
🤩
Okay wow I finally got it when I realized…
SPOILER
Natalie considers everyone she slept with her exes because she’s a Scorpio.
😂 Facts
This is incredible????
This was SO MUCH FUN and I can’t believe there’s going to be more??
This was so fun! Thank you!!
Ooh! This solidified for me that while I have the skills, I do not have the desire to put together a seating chart for my wedding. Bitches can stand if they can’t figure it out for themselves.
MY FAVORITE AS THING. Would pay so much money for a book of queer logic puzzles.