#anyway if anyone wants me to infodump about The Hidden Gay in the great gatsby | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

thesarosperiod · 4 years

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dear GOD please infodump about the Gay™️ in The Great Gatsby, I'm begging you!

okay! here we go! buckle in ladies, gents, and distinguished entities, we’re going for a ride. (below the cut because it’s Long)

So, there are basically two lines of reasoning when it comes to gay subtext in The Great Gatsby: the historical context and the book itself. I want to establish that I haven’t cited that many sources for the history section (I usually would) because this part of queer history was very hidden and thus it’s very hard to find record of it. If anyone finds information that affects the validity of my theories, please let me know, and I’ll be happy to edit this post to make it more factual. All text excerpts are taken from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. (Also- this is your obligatory warning that this post discusses sexual content, so if that makes you uncomfortable, feel free to click away now.)

We’ll start with the history, more specifically a practice called “dropping hairpins.” Dropping hairpins essentially refers to signals that gay people, especially gay men, would use to “drop” hints about their sexual orientation. The point of these hidden phrases or signals would be to show other gay men that you were gay without outright admitting it, so that if the man you were talking to was actually straight, you wouldn’t be found out. These signals were mostly known only to gay men, so there was no risk of being outed unnecessarily. With this in mind, I’d like to take a look at the scene where Nick and another man are in an elevator.

There’s obviously some build-up in the chapter previous to this moment, but Nick and Mr. McKee get in an elevator together. Mr. McKee, who Nick describes earlier in the chapter as “a pale feminine man,” asks Nick out to lunch with him, and then touches the lever for the elevator. In case you’ve never seen a lever in an old-fashioned elevator, it’s a round metal piece with a switch sticking out, sort of like this:

So… yeah. You can figure out the implications on your own. Additionally, there’s absolutely no reason why Mr. McKee would be touching the elevator lever. The elevator boy would be the one controlling the elevator at all times. The only reason for Mr. McKee to touch the lever would be to send some sort of sign. And it appears that he does- when we look at the text, some sort of understanding seems to pass between Nick and McKee after he touches the lever, since this is when Nick agrees to go to lunch with the McKees sometime.

After this exchange in the elevator comes the scene where Nick is next to McKee in his bedroom, with McKee on the bed, mostly undressed, and slurring his words as he talks. Given the signals that seem to have been exchanged between Nick and McKee in the last scene, I think it’s pretty clear what’s happening here. One could argue that Nick was helping McKee into bed, since they were both drunk in this scene, but there’s been no implications that McKee was so drunk he’d need assistance from a stranger- no descriptions of him as very intoxicated, or statements that he was stumbling or swaying on his feet. All of these details lead me to infer that Fitzgerald was implying some sort of sexual encounter between Nick and McKee. Also, bear in mind that this book was written in the 20s. No author would have been able to be straightforward about sexual content, especially not between people of the same gender. There’s a lot of reading between the lines that has to happen here.

Now, for my second line of reasoning: the language that Nick uses to describe different characters. In my observation, Fitzgerald tends to pick a distinctive feature for each main character and describe it in great detail, generally glossing over most of the other aspects of the character’s appearance. I’m not citing sections of text for this because it would take much too long, but (in my opinion), some of these features go as follows:

Daisy’s voice (and sometimes, her face)

Tom’s build

Jordan’s posture

Gatsby’s smile

The Great Gatsby is a book full of descriptions. Anything that Fitzgerald puts into the story has a very real reason to be there. I’d like to draw your attention to Nick’s initial description of various main characters in the story.

First, we’ll look at some of the women.

Daisy:

Jordan:

Myrtle:

And now, we’ll look at some of the men.

Tom:

Wilson:

Gatsby:

There are definitely a lot more examples I could pull here, but I think that this establishes the trend well enough. There’s a discrepancy between how Nick describes men and women in this book: he describes Tom’s body in vivid detail, spends an entire paragraph detailing the warmth and beauty of Gatsby’s smile, and even calls Wilson “handsome.” On the other hand, women don’t get this same treatment. Although he dates Jordan, the nicest thing Nick has to say about her appearance throughout the majority of the book is that he “liked looking at her,” and he describes Myrtle as not being beautiful at all. The woman he describes the most favorably is Daisy, and she’s his cousin. And because of this, Nick displays a lack of interest in women that is pretty constant throughout the book. I also want to reiterate that this book was written a century ago. The fact that Nick dated Jordan doesn’t really prove anything in my opinion (although if you personally interpret Nick as bi, that’s valid!) because I interpret his language as portraying a disinterest in their relationship, and in most women in general.

(anyway, i could go into even more detail here, but this post is getting absurdly long. sorry it took me so long to answer your ask! i hope the length makes up for it. also i bet most of you never thought you’d see me use proper capitalization- i did it to make the post easier to understand.)

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