Why The Great Gatsby Needs a Queer “New Telling”
Speculations around the narrator in The Great Gatsby, Nick Carroway, center around his sexuality. Literature professors point to the interactions between Nick and Mr. McKee in Chapter Two as evidence of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s veiled references to Nick’s homosexuality—veiled on account of the homophobia of the time. David Giunta provides an excellent treatment here. Queer theory points to Fitzgerald’s penultimate magician’s trick of distraction. While the reader is misdirected by Gatsby’s futile dream of winning over Daisy, Nick is pining away for Gatsby himself behind the curtain.
But was there something more profound than homophobia at work when Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby? The culture editor at The Wall Street Journal, Cody Delistraty, thinks so. In his article in The Paris Review, Distncly Emasculated, he writes, “Fitzgerald didn’t use his writing to mask his sexual insecurities to the extent that Hemingway did, but he perceived his lack of control—in his marriage with Zelda, his writing, and his “emotional bankruptcy,” which he wrote about extensively in The Crack-Up—as not just feminine but homosexual. It was an identity in which he saw emotional chaos.” The article goes on to suggest that it was Fitzgerald’s fluid sexual identity that drove him to relocate to Europe seeking “the freedom from moral scrutiny.”
But is the Hemingway/Fitzgerald connection strong enough to suggest that Fitzgerald was trying to work out his inner demons in Gatsby? Maggie Gordon Froehlich makes a startling observation in her essay Jordan Baker, Gender Dissent and Homosexual Passing in The Great Gatsby:
…throughout his life, Fitzgerald was terrified of being identified as homosexual and uneasy about his sexuality and sexual performance, and he expressed a vehement hatred of, in his word, “fairies.” Homosexuality is treated explicitly in Fitzgerald’s next novel, Tender is the Night (1934), and the author’s notes for the novel show that he was, at least by that time, familiar with works on sexology: “Must avoid Faulkner attitude and not end with a novelized Kraft-Ebing [sic]—better Ophelia and her flowers” (qtd in Bruccoli 334). So in some ways, it seems strange that homosexuality is not addressed in The Great Gatsby. Strange, that is, unless we recognize sexual transgression as the open secret of the novel.
When I began researching Gatsby after it entered into the Public Domain, I wondered how an alternate version—a new telling, not a retelling—might go. If Fitzgerald was alive today and could have evolved beyond his own bias of sexuality and gender, could his “great American novel” include diverse characters, specifically from the LGBTQ+ community? The answer to this question became The Magus and The Fool, a modern new telling of The Great Gatsby where my narrator, Carry Iverson, is openly gay and quite attracted to Oskar Jacobi—the rich, mysterious neighbor who is in love with Carry’s cousin Donovan, a bisexual man married to a powerful and cunning woman who is out to destroy Jacobi to keep her husband from straying. I also transformed Jordan Baker into a trans man, Levi Safran, who has a romance with Carry; their relationship explores the passions and the challenges between a gay CIS gender male and a trans person.
I chose to follow the form of the original loosely. My goal was to update the setting and language, some of the themes, and the plot. However, I resequenced a few key scenes and, of course, added new scenes and dialogue in service of queering the text and making it more diverse.
Finally, there is a twist ending. In my view, the way I ended The Magus and The Fool is consistent with the spirit of Fitzgerald’s novel. Still, it offers a resolution to the major crisis and character arcs that Fitzgerald may not have been able or willing to reach for.
