Is evelyn hugo gay

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.

Married to a man, often assumed to be straight, she was routinely celebrated (and sometimes criticized) for writing queer stories as an “ally.”

But in a recent interview with Time, Reid came out as bisexual. The activism. It’s about finally being seen. "I started to get people who would say, ‘Oh, I get why you dress like a boy—you’re gay.'"

She tapped into this part of her identity for her upcoming book Atmosphere, which tells the story of astrophysicist Joan Goodwin who meets another woman named Vanessa Ford while working for NASA in the '80s who "challenges her understanding of who she is." 

While she was writing Atmosphere, Reid felt the full support and encouragement from her husband.

"My attraction to women is a room in the house that is my identity—Alex understood this book was about me spending time in that room," she explained.

And those are vital.

But there’s also power in softness.

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.

Meanwhile, he and Reid do envision a global theatrical release for Atmosphere, a situation which is unfortunately rare for lesbian love stories.

In conclusion, if you haven’t read it yet, I really would like to recommend Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo! 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.

Writing Celia and Evelyn wasn’t just a craft exercise — it was personal. Her first three novels did well, but Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo was her breakout book, followed by Daisy Jones & The Six (2019),Malibu Rising (2021) and Carrie Soto is Back(2022). Both series feature one woman in space, while her secret lover works the mission’s ground game.)

Time writes that Reid knew “this choice would lead her into another debate about identity.” There’s a lot of controversy in book publishing around who gets to tell which stories, and that conversation tends to be especially heated in queer spaces.

Who to trust. 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. 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 structure — a reclusive, Elizabeth Taylor-esque icon offering up a tell-all to an unknown journalist — is brilliant. The fan casts. The TikToks. Reid described that room as part of her identity, and said that her husband, Alex, fully understood that Evelyn Hugo was her way of spending time in that space.

There’s something deeply moving — and deeply queer — about that metaphor.