Notes

To borrow Sedgwick’s terms, the attempt to contain infinite earths within a resolutely modernist grand narrative, ironing out inconsistency and enforcing linear history, was a reduction of a chorus to ‘one voice ... and the monolith so created is a thing one can come to view with unhappy eyes’. Sedgwick goes on to describe a queer response to this forced order as a commitment to ‘not letting very many of these dimensions line up directly with each other at one time’. The phrase is a neat echo of Flex’s parallel narratives and meanings that overlap, conflict and hang in the balance as equally-weighted options; its realm of possible worlds and multiple-choice origins. Flex offers no single answer, no certain history and a glorious opening of potential futures at its close; flirting with straightness and gayness but never going steady with either, it embodies a queerness that is complex, fluid and liberating.