Gays in the Great Gatsby

By Marc De Lima and Mary Duffy

While volumes of criticism and book reviews fill library shelves on The Great Gatsby, nowhere have I read any allusions to the fact that the key players in the story are of low morals and intelligence—or to be charitable: mediocre.

Daisy Buchanan is weak and of low moral standards, yet nowhere do I see that this character is "slow."  Yet there's abundant evidence that the narrator intended to show her—by her own actions, assertions, and in dialogue—hat she was of substandard intelligence.

Although the underlying theme throughout the novel is about the broken romance between Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan, a subtheme is a bout closeted gay life. This may be farfetched, but many instances in the book support this claim.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mary Duffy
• Release date: Jun 9, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201714376

Marc De Lima

Marc De Lima, a graduate of Columbia University, is a decorated and disabled Vietnam veteran, retired business executive, college professor, editor, translator, and author of over 105 books. He lives in NYC with his wife Mary Duffy and Mister Darcy—a Shih-Tzu.

Book preview

GAYS IN THE GREAT GATSBY

From the closet to Wallstone

By

Marc De Lima and Mary Duffy

INTRODUCTION BY MARCIANO Guerrero

The Great Gatsby in a new light

About F. Scott Fitzgerald

PART I

Chapter 1 — Literary antecedents

Plot summary

About this novel

The gay life

William Shakespeare

Mae West (1893 – 1980)

Oscar Wilde

Herman Melville

Chapter 2 — Nick Carraway, Narrator: Is He Gay?

Reliable or Unreliable Narrator?

Narrator’s Biases

Is Nick Gay?

About the word gay

Nick’s Moral Musings

Homosexuality

Chapter 3 – Daisy

A flawed beauty

Echolalia

Chapter 4 — Tom Buchanan

Cruel soul, cruel body

The butt of their jokes

Hypocrisy

Thrasymachus syndrome

Chapter — 5 — Jordan Baker

The mannish woman

The Big Apple

The origins of Jordan’s Gender Dissent

Chapter 6 — The Wilson group

Myrtle

Is Catherine a libertine and a lesbian?

Chapter 7 — Gatsby’s world

Wealth and the American Dream

Strong Men: The Testosterone Test

Chapter 8 — Gatsby’s Platonic Dream World

The incurable romantic

Love of country

The good soldier

PART II

Chapter 9 — Writing techniques

Musicality

Interiors

Atmosphere

Absolute phrases

Dialect

Innuendo

Alliteration

Antithesis

Antonomasia

Use of Adjectives

Sentence Openers

Foreshadowing

Clichés

Oxymoron

Objective correlative

Symbolism

Characterization by repetition

PART III

Chapter 10 — Out of the Closet, Stonewall riots, and same sex marriage

The value of fiction

A muffled plea for tolerance

The Stonewall riots

Chapter 11 — Same sex marriage

The 1970s

Times are changing

The Defense of Marriage Act

Civil Unions and Domestic Partnerships

United States v. Windsor

Obergefell v. Hodges

Full Marriage Equality Attained

Conclusion

END

Appendix A — Chronology

Appendix B Chronology — Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald

Introduction by Marciano Guerrero

The Great Gatsby in a new light

While volumes of criticism and book reviews fill library shelves on The Great Gatsby , nowhere have I read any allusions to the fact that the key players in the story are of low morals and intelligence—or to be charitable: mediocre.

Daisy Buchanan is weak and of low moral standards, yet nowhere do I see that this character is slow.  Yet there’s abundant evidence that the narrator intended to show her—by her own actions, assertions, and in dialogue—hat she was of substandard intelligence.

Although the underlying theme throughout the novel is about the broken romance between Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan, a subtheme is a bout closeted gay life. This may be farfetched, but many instances in the book support this claim.

About F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896 – 1940) American novelist, and short story writer, is among the greatest twentieth-century American writers, hailed from St. Paul, Minnesota. Although he wrote and seemed to be obsessed about wealthy themes, families, and characters, he was the son of a middle-class father and a working-class mother; as he himself described his mother’s family: straight 1850 potato-famine Irish.

While attending Newman School in New Jersey, he set his goals in attending Princeton University. Once there, he sought the friendship of the rich and the literati. His giving unbalanced preference and inordinate time given to literature and writing, caused his academic grades to fall; the dean of studies put him on a probationary period. Before the end of the fall semester in 1917, he left Princeton to join the U.S. Army where he obtained a commission as an infantry second lieutenant.

Being stationed at Camp Sheridan (near Montgomery, Alabama), in 1920 he met and fell in love with Zelda Sayre, the daughter of an Alabama Supreme Court judge.

Zelda Sayre became the great love of his life.

In 1921 they moved to New York and began a very important decade in his professional and personal life, writing stories for magazines like Saturday Evening Post or Esquire, in which he publishes, for example, The curious case of Benjamin Button. This is a story that even today draws interest. In 1922, he publishes his first novel, This side of Paradise, although he wrote it several years before. That same year he writes and publishes The Beautiful and the Damned, which represents an important step toward literary maturity. In 1925, his magnum opus sees the day of light: The great Gatsby.

During these years he travels to Paris, where he meets great American writers, like Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, and William Faulkner, writers aptly described by Gertrude Stein as The Lost Generation.

The Great Gatsby appeared in 1925 during the economic boom of the Roaring Twenties after World War I. At the end of the decade, Fitzgerald begins the writing of Tender is the Night, which he could not finish until 1934 because of the constant health problems of his wife. During the second half of this decade, he travels to Hollywood with his lover while Zelda remains in a psychiatric center in the East Coast.

Tormented by a glamorous marriage that went wrong, he drank himself to distraction and destruction while doing second-rate work to pay the bills; surely, he got lost in a Hollywood system guaranteed to dissipate his talent. Yet, he ekes out a living by writing short stories and scripts for films while outlining his next novel, The Last Tycoon. However, he died of a heart attack in 1940 before finishing it.

Having lived through the 1920s and 1930s, he drew on his personal experience to chronicle the social disorder that gripped the United States.

The ratification of the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution–which banned the manufacture, transportation, and sale of alcoholic beverages–ushered in a period in American history known as Prohibition. Despite its good intentions, Prohibition was difficult to enforce.

The increase of the illegal production and sale of liquor (bootlegging,) the proliferation of speakeasies (illegal drinking spots) and the accompanying rise in crime syndicates’ violence and other crimes (stock and bond market abuses) eroded the support for Prohibition by the end of the 1920s. With the onset of the lasting great economic depression, in early 1933, Congress adopted, passed, and ratified a resolution proposing a 21st Amendment to the Constitution that would repeal the 18th.

Prohibition was dead, and so were the Jazz Age and The roaring twenties.

As a result, F. Scott Fitzgerald had an abundance of material, which he was to use in his essays and fiction. In fact, in the Great Gatsby we read about bootleggers and stolen securities.

But before we delve into the criticism of the novel, a refresher of the plot is in order.

PART I

Chapter 1 — Literary antecedents

Plot summary

The events narrated in The Great Gatsby take place during 1922. To understand the innuendo and rumors about Jay Gatsby that he made his fortune as a bootlegger, and as a trafficker of stolen securities, we must go back a few years. The Prohibition Laws adopted in 1919, banned the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcoholic beverages, which led to the creation of a whole black market dedicated to the traffic of intoxicating beverages. But, the materialism, the excesses, conspicuous consumption, and greed of banks — which created a black market for stolen securities— led to economic chaos, causing thousands of commercial banks to close and the stock market to collapse in 1929.

With an account of a dinner in East Egg at the home of his cousin Daisy Buchanan and her husband Tom Buchanan, Nick Carraway, the narrator, begins his tale of woe. Nick is a Midwesterner working on Wall Street, where he is learning the bond business. Nick and Tom were classmates at Yale University. Afterwards, Nick and the Buchanan’s came East.

Nick has rented a house adjoining the mansion of his neighbor Jay Gatsby; they