‘You feel invisible. You feel like a ghost. And a ghost that nobody believes in.’ With these words, writer Susie Bright evokes the experience of being a queer spectator in search for representation in Hollywood cinema – which she likens to that of a spectre. Featured in Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s 1995 documentary The Celluloid Closet, itself based on Vito Russo’s seminal 1981 book of the same title, her reflection reveals the effect that the exclusion of queerness from life on screen has on queer viewers: a doubt cast on one’s very existence. Even in 2025, scholars keep sensing that a queer ghost is still haunting cinema (cf. Parrinello 2025). Recent cinematic productions, and especially queer films, including the highly popular film All of Us Strangers (2023), have been reactivating intensely the trope of spectrality, testifying to the entanglement of ghosts with queers in the cultural imaginary. For quite some time now, that is, the ghost has served as a compelling concept-metaphor through which queerness is presented within and in relation to cultural texts – and I believe there is a reason why.

Spectres are distinguished by virtue of an ambivalent ontological status, caught between presence and absence, existence and inexistence, and, ultimately, life and death. However, this ontological standing remains not just uncertain but constitutively precarious: meaning that ghosts have already been exposed to forces which undo life, and they are also consistently threatened to be dispelled out of being permanently, should the correct rituals be performed. It is this ontology put at risk, I propose, that ghosts share with queerness. Queer being has not only been endangered in the sense of having been invisibilised within cultural representation and ruled out from normative history; it has also been equated with a death-ridden and even death-worthy predicament. As demonstrated in The Celluloid Closet, an overwhelming number of queer-coded cinematic characters are killed off by the end of the films – their cinematic demises greeted, at times, with audience applause. Furthermore, trans-exclusionary public discourses and institutions, most recently the UK Supreme Court, have been targeting non-normative individuals and communities, and especially trans+ folks, debating and deliberating on the reality or unreality of their very existence. Starting from these premises, I am interested in the cultural uses of spectrality as a strategy for reclaiming the association with violence, death, and ontological precarity enforced on queerness.

In the context of international cinema, haunting has been identified as a tactic exactly for speaking back to the sorting of un/liveable lives orchestrated by dominant power structures (Papanikolaou 2023). In the field of Modern Greek Studies, Maria Boletsi’s book Specters of Cavafy (2024) dares to engage with the ghosts of an iconic queer poet of the turn of the 20^th century, C. P. Cavafy (1863-1933). ‘Hauntology’, Boletsi tells us, ‘is not only a theoretical approach but a practice of living more justly. […] Cavafy’s preoccupation with specters is linked to questions of historical injustice […] and foster[s] alternative chronotopes in which queer and other silenced or marginalized subjects may survive and envision different futures’ (11). In what follows, after unpacking Boletsi’s main argument on queerness and spectrality, I will focus on reading an instance in Cavafy’s poetry where the ghost is neither to be conjured nor banished, but, perhaps, to be loved. This possibility of loving the queer ghost, I argue, articulates a demand for inclusion which resonates particularly radically at a time of crisis, when non-normative individuals are being thrown out of being.

Boletsi pinpoints that, in the last decade of Cavafy’s career, ‘young men will enter the poems as full-fledged presences rather than transitory specters from the past conjured by a speaker. […] the “I am (not)” of spectral characters shifts toward a more confident “I am”’ (93-94). Nevertheless, this does not signal a narrative of linear evolution from one ontology to another. In fact, it launches spectrality as a laboratory for laying claim to an, even slightly more, liveable future. Bringing Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s landmark reading of Henry James to bear masterfully on Cavafy, Boletsi argues that the condition of this passage from spectrality to queer presence is loving, even erotically, the ghost, including the spectre of one’s former self. Boletsi argues that Cavafy’s spectres are endowed with a ghostly materiality, moving the flesh of the conjurers rather than their minds (57). In addition, ghosts are not just summoned through language or rituals, but also generated, as Boletsi observes, ‘through metonymical process of proximity of bodies’ (63). These arguments point towards a reciprocal and very somatic interaction between queers and spectres.

Boletsi, therefore, offers us the analytical opportunity to think about Cavafy’s poetics not just as spectral, but also infused with spectrophilia, a queer attraction that involves ghosts in its erotics. Following Boletsi, if loving invocations of spectres enable queers to be eventually called into existence in Cavafy’s poetry, I contend that stagings of spectrophilia in Cavafy’s later poems queer the workings of memory as well as the configurations that structures of relationships can take in the future – and even the future of Cavafy’s own unpublished writings.

As a case in point, I will turn to a poem from 1928, ‘Κίμων Λεάρχου, 22 ετών, σπουδαστής Ελληνικών γραμμάτων (εν Κυρήνη)’ [‘Kimon, Son of Learchos, 22 Years Old, Student of Greek Letters (in Cyrene)’]

«Το τέλος μου επήλθε       ότε ήμουν ευτυχής.
Ο Ερμοτέλης με είχε       αχώριστόν του φίλον.
Τες ύστατές μου μέρες,       μόλο που προσποιούνταν
πως δεν ανησυχούσε,       ένιωνα εγώ συχνά
τα μάτια του κλαμένα.       Σαν νόμιζε που λίγο
είχ’ αποκοιμηθεί,       έπεφτεν ως αλλόφρων
στης κλίνης μου το άκρον.       Αλλ’ ήμεθαν κι οι δυο
νέοι μιας ηλικίας,       είκοσι τριώ ετών.
Προδότις είναι η Μοίρα.       Ίσως κανένα πάθος
άλλο τον Ερμοτέλη       να ’παιρνεν από μένα.
Τελείωσα καλώς·       εν τη αμερίστω αγάπη.»—

Το επιτύμβιον τούτο       Μαρύλου Αριστοδήμου
αποθανόντος προ       μηνός στην Αλεξάνδρεια,
έλαβα εγώ πενθών,       ο εξάδελφός του Κίμων.
Με το έστειλεν ο γράψας       γνωστός μου ποιητής.
Με το έστειλ’ επειδή       ήξερε συγγενής
ότ’ ήμουν του Μαρύλου:       δεν ήξερε άλλο τι.
Είν’ η ψυχή μου πλήρης       λύπης για τον Μαρύλο.
Είχαμε μεγαλώσει       μαζί, σαν αδελφοί.
Βαθιά μελαγχολώ.       Ο πρόωρος θάνατός του
κάθε μνησικακίαν       μού έσβησ’ εντελώς…
κάθε μνησικακίαν       για τον Μαρύλο — μ' όλο
που με είχε κλέψει την       αγάπη του Ερμοτέλη,
που κι αν με θέλει τώρα       ο Ερμοτέλης πάλι
δεν θα ’ναι διόλου το ίδιο.       Ξέρω τον χαρακτήρα
τον ευπαθή που έχω.       Το ίνδαλμα του Μαρύλου
θα ’ρχεται ανάμεσό μας,       και θα νομίζω που
με λέγει, Ιδού είσαι τώρα       ικανοποιημένος.
Ιδού τον ξαναπήρες       ως εποθούσες, Κίμων.
Ιδού δεν έχεις πια       αφορμή να με διαβάλεις.

                                                       (Cavafy 2014: 75-76)

 

‘The end of my life has come       while in a state of joy.
Hermoteles had me as his       inseparable companion.
During my final days,       although he pretended
that he did not worry,       I quite often sensed
his eyes reddened with tears.       When he believed I was
asleep for a little while,       he threw himself distraught
upon the edge of my bed.       We were both young men
of the very same age,       three and twenty years old.
Destiny is perfidious.       Possibly another passionate
love-affair might have taken       Hermoteles away from me.
I ended my days well,       amid undivided affection.’—

This epitaph for Marylos       son of Aristodemos,
who died one month ago       in Alexandria,
was delivered to me       his grieving cousin Kimon;
sent to me by the writer:       a poet I once used to know.
It was sent to me because       he knew that I was
a relative of MaryIos;       he didn't know anything else.
My soul is full of       sorrow for Marylos.
We grew up together,       as if we were brothers.
I am deeply saddened.       His untimely death
blotted out completely       any feelings of malice...
any feelings of malice       against Marylos—even though
he took away from me      the love of Hermoteles;
so that if now Hermoteles       should want me back again,
it just would not be the same.       I know full well what a sensitive
nature I possess.       The image of Marylos
will always come between us,       and I shall imagine him
saying to me: well then,       are you satisfied now?
There, he's all yours again,       as you had wanted, Kimon.
There, you no longer have       a reason to malign me.

                                                        (Cavafy 2007: 183)

 

Scholars have suggested that this poem might have a very interesting previous life. Possibly, it was first composed in 1913 under the title ‘Μαρικού Τάφος’ (Tomb of Marikos, Cavafy 2014: 143) and partook in Cavafy’s series of literary tombs – a genre which has been construed as at once scripting and resisting the force of (antiqueer) governance through death (Panaïté 2022: 8). In its final form, the tea the poem spills goes as follows: Kimon had been dating Hermoteles. After they broke up, Hermoteles got together with Kimon’s cousin, Marylos. The poem thematises the reading of an epigram which informs Kimon of his cousin’s untimely death and then delivers his feelings and thoughts regarding the event, but also the prospect of reuniting with Hermoteles. This is when Marylos’ spectre emerges – the word ‘ίνδαλμα’ in Cavafy’s expressive lexicon carrying also the meaning of ghost (Boletsi 2024: xxiii).

Written by a poet who, if not queer himself, is a member of the inner circle and an ally of a queer community, the epigram in the first stanza introduces the poem as a reflection on commemoration. Indeed, Marylos is best remembered in a collective fashion, also because what keeps his memory alive after death is that the bodies of his partner and his cousin, who was also his partner’s ex, potentially come close. It is the potential reiteration of desire, its capacity to circulate and be reactivated, within the para/social context of a queer community that literally grants Marylos an afterlife. After all, desires are spectral, Boletsi tells us, for their iterative structure makes them always return (47). Kimon is right to say that, if Hermoteles will want him back, it won’t be the same at all, for it will mean also insisting on involving Marylos, even as a ghost.

Yet this is not, I feel, bad news at all. When the return of desire calls back Marylos’ spectre to squeeze him between the lovers’ bodies, this is not necessarily to separate them but to keep standing and connecting with them. If we take Marylos at his word, as he speaks in the epigram, his end comes amidst ‘undivided love’. Nevertheless, his end, that we know of, might not be death but his eventual return into a queer affective and sexual sociality. He might end, indeed, amidst undivided love exactly because Hermoteles and Kimon might get back together. Such queer relating is undivided love, not because it remains intact, privatised, and exclusive, but because it claims to be accessible, shared, and embracing. And this is not despite but by acknowledging all the messiness this relating entails: all the sassiness, grudges, sorrow, and mourning, but also all the waywardness of queer desire, love, and care to make sure that no one is left behind.

Traditional readings have seen in the poem the competitiveness of a triangulated desire. For me, however, this unique instance of spectrophilia in Cavafy radically imagines the possibility of socioaffective formations which strive to remain inclusive, queering the schemata of coupledom, kinship, and companionship in general. In the unfinished poem ‘Έγκλημα’ (‘Crime’) of 1927 and especially in the also unfinished ‘Συντροφιά από Τέσσαρες’ (‘Company of Four’), composed in 1930, Cavafy experiments exactly with how desire makes queers bond, how queer sexuality amplifies social connectivity, and how queer social groups might revise and render more capacious relational and societal frameworks (cf. Papanikolaou 2014: 312-314).

In sum, the conceptual, analytical, critical, but also very somatic prompt to love the ghost, I suggest, amounts to a powerful invitation to re-organise the social – to insist on including and, in doing so, to keep inclusion radical. In this vein, I argue that spectrophilia is not merely a poetic trope but emerges as a form of poetics in its own right: a way of making and pursuing alternative social futures in which, no matter how many exorcisms cis-heteronormativity puts in place, we ensure that no one is cast out from life or being.

* A version of this text was read at the event ‘Cavafy and His Spectres’ (Taylor Institution, Oxford, 23 May 2025), which included a series of responses to Maria Boletsi’s book Specters of Cavafy.

 

WORKS CITED

Boletsi, Maria (2024), Specters of Cavafy, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

Cavafy, C. P. (2007), The Collected Poems (trans. Evangelos Sachperoglou), Oxford: Oxford University Press.

_____ (2014), Ποιήματα Β΄ (1919-1933) [‘Poems II (1919-1933)’, edited by G. P. Savidis], Athens: Ikaros.

Epstein, Rob, and Friedman, Jeffrey (dir.) (1995), The Celluloid Closet, USA: Sony Pictures Classics. Available at: MUBI, https://mubi.com/en/gr/films/the-celluloid-closet/. Accessed 27 July 2025.

Panaïté, Oana (2022), Necrofiction and the Politics of Literary Memory, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

Papanikolaou, Dimitris (2014), «Σαν κ’εμένα καμωμένοι»: ο ομοφυλόφιλος Καβάφης και η ποιητική της σεξουαλικότητας (‘“Those people made like me”: queer Cavafy and the poetics of sexuality’), Athens: Patakis.

_____ (2023), ‘In the World of Double Haunting: Watching Mati Diop’s Atlantiques’, in Fantasmes (Thessaloniki International Film Festival), pp. 52-61 (in English) and 54-65 (in Greek).

Parrinello, Alice (2025), ‘A Spectre is Haunting Cinema: Queer Families and Affect in the Present Day’ (conference paper), Queer Kinship Across Space and Time, Christ Church, University of Oxford, 8-10 April.