Self-Made Boys: A Great Gatsby Remix (Remixed Classics)

by Anna-Marie McLemore

Please let him come to New York? I promise, he’ll have the gayest of times.

“Boys like us always know one another about a thousand years before anyone else knows us, don’t we?”

“Boys like us get used to having to lie about everything else just so we can tell the truth about ourselves.”

I wasn’t the distant allure of a green light. I was close. I existed in the play script of Gatsby’s life for no reason except to facilitate his reunion with the girl he loved.

There’ll always be someone trying to make you apologize for something about who you are. But you learn not to feel it quite as much. It helps to choose my own company whenever I can. People who don’t want those kinds of apologies.

“You think I’m gay?” I asked. “Aren’t we all?” Martha gave me a smiling glance. “Young and gay and radiant, and ready for all sorts of gay exciting things?” I tapped the window as though starting a toast. “Gay and radiant, all of us.”

“First, it’s none of my business deciding what you are. Second, every word they call people like us is an insult. That really tells you something. Even gay, they say it as an insult. Even lesbian. But I don’t much care how they use it. It’s our word.”

I tried to acquaint myself with the idea that an insult could be reclaimed into something softer, something fit for the space inside a heart or between sheets.

I was a boy kissing a boy. Our fingers slipped into the starched belt loops of each other’s trousers. Our thumbs glided over the close-cut hair on the back of each other’s heads. We grabbed suspenders and shirt collars and the buttons on undershirts like the only way to hold each other together was to tear each other to pieces. We kissed between rivers of blue hyacinths and gold daffodils. We kissed in the tide of the sound, still in our clothes, and the ocean dusted its reflected stars onto our skin. We carried salt and the moon on our bodies, sprinkling light and sea onto Gatsby’s sheets.

I could never learn all of him. It was as impossible as finding the true length of the shore along the sound. But I wanted to get as close as I could.