Jay Gatsby And Nick Carraway

In the middle of a grade word of F. Scott Fitzgerald'southward The Not bad Gatsby some years ago, a student raised his hand and asked, in essence: What are we supposed to brand of the scene where Nick Carraway goes off with the gay guy?

And I said, in essence: Wait, what gay guy?

He pointed me to the scene that closes Chapter II. This is the chapter in which Nick accompanies Tom Buchanan and his mistress, Myrtle, to an apartment Tom keeps in Manhattan. Myrtle invites her sister and some neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. McKee, to join them, and they throw a raucous party that ends with Tom breaking Myrtle'due south olfactory organ. Amidst the blood and the screaming, Mr. McKee awakens from an alcoholic slumber:

Then Mr. McKee turned and continued on out the door. Taking my hat from the chandelier, I followed.

"Come to lunch some twenty-four hours," he suggested, every bit we groaned downwardly in the elevator.

"Where?"

"Anywhere?"

"Keep your hands off the lever," snapped the elevator boy.

"I beg your pardon," said Mr. McKee with dignity, "I didn't know I was touching it."

"All right," I agreed. "I'll be glad to."

…I was standing abreast his bed and he was sitting up between the sheets, clad in his underwear, with a bang-up portfolio in his hands.

"Dazzler and the Beast…Loneliness…Old Grocery Horse…Brook'due north Span…"

Then I was lying one-half asleep in the common cold lower level of the Pennsylvania Station, staring at the morning Tribune, and waiting for the four o'clock railroad train.

I had, I'm embarrassed to say, never seen that passage before. Except that's non truthful. I'd read the book half a dozen times since college, and taught information technology once, but I had somehow missed the fact that the narrator wanders off in a drunken daze with a stranger and ends upward in his chamber.

Whether my pupil knew it or not, he was tapping into a strain of scholarly enquiry into the sexual orientation of Nick Carraway that dates dorsum at least to Keath Fraser's 1979 essay "Another Reading of The Nifty Gatsby." Fraser ultimately equivocated on the question of Nick's sexuality, but in 1992, Edward Wasiolek argued in "The Sexual Drama of Nick and Gatsby" that the gay subtext in Gatsby is crystal articulate: "I do not know how one can read the scene in McKee's sleeping accommodation in any other manner, especially when then many other facts well-nigh [Nick'south] behavior support such a determination."

In the decades since, suggestions that perchance, possibly, there'due south more to Fitzgerald's narrator than he's letting on accept given way to ever more self-bodacious, even faintly indignant, assertions of Nick'due south queerness, with titles like The Atlantic's 2013 article "The Cracking Gatsby Picture Needed to Exist More than Gay" or BookRiot's 2017 piece "Nick Carraway Is Queer and in Love with Jay Gatsby."

Nigh queer readings of Gatsby brainstorm with that scene with Mr. McKee and branch out from there to note that Nick's dear involvement in the novel, Jordan Baker, is an athlete who carries herself "like a young buck" and is most attracting to Nick when they play tennis and "a faint mustache of perspiration appear[south] on her upper lip." When she and Nick interruption up at the finish of the book, Jordan tells him she had thought he was "an honest, straightforward person," to which he responds, "I'm xxx. I'm v years as well onetime to prevarication to myself and call information technology honor"—a line that rings differently if you read Nick every bit a closeted gay man.

Of grade, all of this shapes how we view the human relationship between Nick and Gatsby. In a straight reading of the novel, Nick is merely an interested observer who helps facilitate Gatsby'due south mad dream to rekindle his beloved affair with Daisy, at present unhappily married to Tom Buchanan. That Gatsby, the one taught for generations in high school and higher classrooms, is a classic tale about the American Dream and doomed love and the impossibility of turning back fourth dimension. In that novel, Nick loves Gatsby, the old James Gatz of Northward Dakota, for his capacity to dream Jay Gatsby into existence and for his willingness to risk information technology all for the love of a beautiful woman.

In a queer reading of Gatsby, Nick doesn't just love Gatsby, he'south in love with him. In some readings, the tragedy is that Gatsby doesn't love him dorsum. In others, Gatsby is as repressed equally Nick, each chasing an unavailable woman to avoid admitting what he truly desires. "Nick chooses Jordan for some of the aforementioned reasons Gatsby chose Daisy," writes Wasiolek in "The Sexual Drama of Nick and Gatsby." "Daisy is Gatsby's defence against women, and Hashemite kingdom of jordan is Nick's against women."

That last 1, I'll admit, is a touch too Freudian for me, but if Nick were gay and in dearest with Gatsby it sure would articulate upwardly some things—such as what exactly Nick sees in Gatsby, a social-climbing fabulist with gangster friends who moves sky and earth for a woman Nick plainly sees as a ditz. Information technology would besides make sense of Nick's emotionally sterile affair with Jordan. And, of course, if Nick is queer, his trip to Mr. McKee'south bedroom isn't simply a mysterious interlude in a canonical book, but a secret central that opens the door onto one of America's kickoff swell gay novels.

And then and so, is Nick gay? The curt answer is we'll never know. The only person who could say for sure is F. Scott Fitzgerald, and he's been dead since 1940. Only it'southward worth noting that when he wrote Gatsby, Fitzgerald was the golden boy of American messages at a time of nigh-universal homophobia. Had readers picked upward fifty-fifty a whiff of gay subtext in Gatsby, he risked losing everything: his career, his marriage, his reputation, his friends. Simply no one did come across information technology, and, in fact, as Wasiolek notes, among the thousands of essays and critical studies of one of America's most widely read novels no one noted the gay subtext in the McKee bedchamber scene until Fraser wrote about it in 1979.

And so, making Nick a closeted gay human being makes little emotional or artistic sense unless Fitzgerald was using Nick'southward sexuality to explore in a securely coded way his own guilt and shame over his unspoken desires—a theory that runs into the non inconsiderable hurdle that there is zero evidence that Fitzgerald was attracted to men. Yes, his wife Zelda did once accuse him of being in beloved with Ernest Hemingway, just at the time their marriage was unraveling and she was months from existence hospitalized for schizophrenia. (Zelda besides despised Hemingway, whom she reportedly saw as "a pansy with pilus on his chest." Hemingway, for his function, hated Zelda correct back, times approximately a million.)

But hither's the affair: If Fitzgerald had wanted to scratch a sexual itch badly enough to make him write coded gay characters into his books, he suffered no shortage of opportunities. For the last decade of his life, he lived apart from Zelda in European resort towns and in Hollywood, where he was surrounded past men living more than or less openly gay lives. However not one apparent story of Fitzgerald having sex with another human being has turned up, either in his journals or in the famously gossipy movie colony. Instead, he had a few pocket-size flings with female starlets before settling into stable relationship with gossip columnist Sheilah Graham, who was with him when he died.

Just okay, people are complicated. Perchance Fitzgerald had a secret life he was able keep under wraps his entire adult life despite the fact that he was falling-downward drunk for much of that time, or perhaps he desired men, simply was and then disgusted by this need that he never acted upon it. There is, I retrieve, a deeper reason to question a queer reading of The Great Gatsby: Information technology doesn't audio much like a novel F. Scott Fitzgerald, gay or direct, would write.

cover Fitzgerald was a compulsively autobiographical writer who wrote his flaws into his work, unflinchingly and in plain English. When he drank, his characters drank along with him. When his matrimony failed, his characters lost their wives, as well. When he had a nervous breakdown, he wrote a searingly honest set of essays chosen "The Crack-Upwardly" for Esquire. It strains credulity to suggest that if Fitzgerald were gay, he would expiate his guilt and shame by writing a veiled gay love plot nobody would notice for one-half a century. It'due south just not how his artistic apparatus worked. As a writer, Fitzgerald wore remarkably few veils. For 20 years, he opened a vein and dazzler flowed onto the folio.

None of this, of course, proves that Nick isn't gay—that can't be proven one way or the other—but I suspect the queer readings of Nick Carraway say more almost the way nosotros read now than they do about Nick or The Great Gatsby. We read with a perpetually queered middle, forever on the hunt for coded language or secret lives in characters. This is not in itself a bad thing. It layers our reading, opening our eyes to stories within stories that nosotros missed before, but it tin can bullheaded us, too, because in one case we know the code, we start to remember all writers are in on it, when some of them might not be. Merely because Fitzgerald wrote a scene that reads to us like a gay tryst doesn't hateful that Fitzgerald was gay and trying to send us a message in a bottle. Similarly, the fact that Nick meets a gay man and doesn't run screaming doesn't make Nick gay. Maybe it just means he'south tolerant and curious near people, whether they're closeted gay men or bootleggers who want to turn back time.

Let'south go back to that scene with Mr. McKee. No writer every bit attuned to wordplay and symbols as F. Scott Fitzgerald could have written that line about touching the elevator lever before a scene in which two men cease up in a chamber and not meant for a reader to take hold of the double-entendre. Any his sexual persuasion, Fitzgerald wasn't an idiot.

To the states, reading with our queered eye, the double-entendre must be a veiled hint that Nick is gay, merely that'due south us now when the closeted gay man has become a stock grapheme in moving-picture show and literature. Fitzgerald's original readers wouldn't necessarily have come up to the aforementioned conclusion. The savvier among them might accept picked up that Mr. McKee is gay. It'south McKee, after all, who invites Nick for lunch and gets defendant of touching the lever. Information technology's also McKee who'south in bed in his skivvies while Nick stands, outside the bed, listening to McKee drone on about his photo album.

Of course, Nick does follow McKee from the party and accept his lunch invitation, just that'southward Nick's role in Gatsby: he follows people and agrees to things. Nick's tolerance, his curiosity near people, isn't merely some pocket-sized graphic symbol quirk. It's key to Nick's character and central to Fitzgerald's narrative strategy. Over and over, Nick meets bizarre, interesting people and reserves judgment until they reveal themselves to him—and us. It'south right there on the first folio of the novel, when Nick relates the advice his begetter gave him about keeping in heed that not everyone has had his advantages. "In consequence," Nick explains, "I'm inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and as well made me the victim of not a few veteran bores."

Thus, when Gatsby's friend, the gangster Meyer Wolfsheim, winds up a story near a mob hitting by showing off his cufflinks fashioned from the "finest specimens of homo molars," Nick doesn't back slowly out of the room and call the cops. He looks closer at the mobster's cufflinks and exclaims, "Well! That'due south a very interesting thought." Subsequently, when Gatsby arranges for Nick to ready upwards a date with Daisy, a married woman Gatsby hasn't seen since he was a poor boy most to be sent off to war, Nick doesn't tell Gatsby gently and firmly that he's out of his mind. No, he calls Daisy to set the date.

This, to my mind, is what a queer reading of Gatsby misses: Nick's tolerance, his willingness to reserve judgment virtually things his world found frightening or wrong. Aye, it's possible Fitzgerald was using the scene with Mr. McKee to speak in code of his own hidden desires, but more than likely it's a scene in which a directly man in 1920s America meets a closeted gay man—and listens to him. As well, maybe Nick'due south dear for Gatsby is queer, simply more likely it's queer in the nonsexual sense, pregnant odd, uncanny. Mayhap Nick really is who he says he is: a nice, decent, rather conventional bail salesman from the Midwest who knows he shouldn't admire Jay Gatsby, but does anyway. Maybe he loves Gatsby, non because he wants to accept sexual activity with him, only because he wants to empathize him, brand sense of his queer and improbable dreams.

Michael Bourne is a staff writer for The Millions and a contributing editor for Poets & Writers Mag. His nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, The Earth and Mail, The National Post, Salon, and The Economist. His fiction has appeared in Tin House, December, The Southampton Review, and The Cortland Review. His debut novel, Blithedale Canyon, is due out from Royal House in June, 2022