Nick Carraway is gay and in love with Gatsby

For a long time, I hated The Great Gatsby. I thought it was one of the most boring, pretentious novels of all time. I firmly believed it wasn't just bad; it was downright meritless. This, correspondingly, led me to believe that its widespread acclaim was a sort of disingenuous, performative cultural lie. Nobody actually likes The Great Gatsby, I told myself. They're just pretending to because it's "important".

I carried this belief with me for a long time, starting from when I first read it in high school. The Great Gatsby became sort of a literary heuristic for me for judging an entire person. If someone said they liked it, well, then I knew they weren't to be trusted, or at least had a bit of falseness to them. Whether that was deliberate on their part or more just a caving to the social pressures of "the canon" didn't really matter to me. What mattered was what I genuinely convinced myself was true: Nobody actually likes The Great Gatsby.

If you're familiar with the content and themes of the book, there's a pretty obvious metatextual read here, but I promise that's not what I'm setting up for. Instead, I'm setting up for how someone changed my mind.

A few years ago I was on a team with a new teacher at our school. Sure enough, early on in one of our discussions, she mentioned her love for The Great Gatsby and I, in my insufferably paternalistic way, assumed that was some bullshit, whether she was aware of it or not.

Over the next few weeks though, I got more glimpses into her "love" and I started to have my doubts -- not about her convictions, but about myself. Her copy of The Great Gatsby was the most heavily annotated book I'd ever seen. Post-it tabs everywhere, highlighting on every page, copious notes in the margins. Furthermore, one of the notebooks she wrote in had a Fitzgerald quote on the cover. She didn't conspicuously show this around in order to garner attention or praise -- it was just there, for her, and I happened to notice it one day. That didn't seem very performative to me. What was her angle here?

And then one day we had a conversation that left me with chills.

Early in the book, one of the characters, Daisy, says that she hopes her newborn daughter grows up to be a "beautiful fool". We were talking about this line and the different ways it could be interpreted. My colleague shared that she believed it was a powerful comment on the gender roles of the time. Being a "beautiful fool" was the easiest possible life for a woman, because to be anything but beautiful meant you had no or lesser value, and being anything but a fool meant you were aware of this. To be a beautiful fool, then, was to live a life unaware of the unfairness and unkindess the world of that time put upon women, even and possibly especially those that were very privileged.

I was particularly moved by all of this. It was complex, relevant gender and social commentary, and in such short phrasing! The author of this article, and many others, have praised the book for its word economy. Here was my first appreciation for that specific praise. The idea that a mother would want to spare her own daughter the understanding of her own suffering, and that the mother implicitly believes there's no way out from that suffering in the first place, left me floored. It captured a pre-liberation objectivity and lack of agency in a deeply resonant way. Instead of "I want more for her," the message was "I hope she never knows how bad it really is". Every parent wants their kids to have better lives than they did, but the highest her sights could rise, on the day of her daughter's birth, was that of "beautiful fool". Heartbreaking.

That wasn't what gave me chills, though. What gave me chills was when my colleague said: "You know he [Fitzgerald] took that line from his wife, right?"

I didn't know that. And it's true! Factoids like that are often apocryphal, but apparently Fitzgerald had a well-known and documented habit of taking quotes and stories from people he knew, and the "beautiful fool" line came directly from, Zelda, his own wife, after giving birth to their daughter.

In actuality Scott stole the words right out of Zelda's mouth, or, to be more accurate, out of the ledger in which he'd jotted down the words his wife said, while still floating on waves of ether, as she learned the sex of her child: "I hope it's beautiful and a fool--a beautiful little fool."

My chills came from the realization that those words weren't just a carefully constructed fiction for thematic resonance in the story, but instead were a genuine truth with genuine resonance, hidden as fiction under a pseudonym. As my arms tingled with the feeling of a mournful frission, I realized that maybe there was more to this whole "Great" Gatsby than I originally thought.

Through our conversations and a directed re-reading of the story, this teacher helped me develop a strong appreciation for The Great Gatsby in the way that great teachers can. I still don't love it, but I can now acknowledge that there is actually a "there" there. The book has much more to it than just its lofty status in "the canon". I no longer roll my eyes at it when I hear about it being "the Great American novel".

I think what I initially disliked about the book, and what my colleague helped me to appreciate, is that the entire book is indirect. Everything is only hinted at, or talked about in circumspect ways. There's innuendo and subtext behind everything, but it's all seemingly shellacked over with a finish of nothingness. When I first read the book it seemed like the longest short book I'd ever read. Nothing happens! I would scream in my mind to myself, page after page, Nobody cares about any of this!

As I re-read it, under her guidance, I started to "get" it more. I started to see behind the curtain. I was floored when I got to the scene mentioned in the article, where Nick goes home with a man, because the obvious truth was there, plain as day, but only because I was intentionally reading with implication in mind. I'd read the book twice before, and I'd missed it both times, and I'm someone who's liable to invent a queer subtext where there is none, just for fun! Nick wasn't gay on either of my first two reads, but suddenly, on my third read he stood out like a gaudy rainbow flag.

I talked about it with my coworker the next day and asked her, tentatively, if she maybe thought that Nick was gay or bi or something like that? I'm used to that sort of thinking being either wishful or reaching on the part of queer-folk like me, so I didn't expect her response to be a certain, forceful "Oh, most definitely."

This conversation led us to discuss points similar to those brought up in the article: how Nick describes women in largely disconnected terms yet has an eye for Tom's muscles, how Nick's "romance" with Jordan is uninvolved and unspectacular, even in Nick's own retelling.

Ultimately, my colleague came to the same conclusion as the author of the linked article, and she believes that it's central to understanding The Great Gatsby in the first place. What, if not love -- or at least a deep infatuation -- can describe Nick's affinity for Gatsby? Why else would Nick write an entire book about him?

It's a compelling take on the story, and admittedly one for which there is a good amount of support. I've seen debates about this very thing, with some arguing that it's too much of a reach or it's trying, as I often do, to find the gay subtext where none exists. Literature is hardly ever definite, but I would argue Gatsby requires a more indirect read than most. The entire book is a book of inferences -- of things hinted at but not outright said. That Nick is queer in some way is not necessarily the "right" way to read it, but at the very least it's a plausible and compelling one.

Also lending weight to this reading of the text is the cultural context of the book. Even if Fitzgerald definitely intended Nick to be interested in men, he would have faced great difficulty in being direct about Nick's sexuality. Three years after the publishing of The Great Gatsby, Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness went on trial in England, where it was found to be obscene. The book was subsequently banned, and copies were seized and destroyed in response to the ruling. It also went on trial in America, though it was upheld as literature there. The most obscene passage in the book?

and that night, they were not divided

in reference to two women.

That's it. That's the obscenity. We cannot say with certainty whether Nick is actually gay or not, but it's also the case that Fitzgerald likely literally couldn't as well.

There's also lot of discourse about whether we can even retroactively apply modern identities in historical contexts. This is a complex and often nuanced issue. What we can and should do while reading, however, is try to make sense of what we're given and use the text and its context for corroboration. It's no secret that Nick has a powerful, blinding, idealized affinity for Gatsby. It's a centerpole for the text, around which the entire story is built. One of the possible, if not most plausible, explanations for this is that Nick's love for Gatsby went beyond platonic affection.