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

by Anna-Marie McLemore

I said it in halting words, as though admitting an awkward, inconvenient fact, like a sweater a relative had knitted me didn’t fit.

Daisy Fabrega-Caraveo made things beautiful, starting with herself, her efforts then billowing ever outward. Anything close enough for her to touch came away dusted with perfumed powder and magic.

Her posture was so straight she looked like a painted portrait of a duchess greeting a crowd.

Gatsby had a way of making my tongue forget what it was supposed to be doing.

I had gotten my hopes up that Daisy might hesitate about marrying a polo mallet of a man called Tom Buchanan.

This boy whose shoulders I held in my hands, I wanted him to have the shimmer of the whole world. And for him, it was all held in the dark honey of Daisy’s eyes.

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

Gatsby looked back at me how any boy in the world would want to be looked at—as though there was such infinite possibility in me, such infinite light, that I was one endless, longest day of the year.

I would have sworn to a priest that Gatsby’s smile pulled light in through the windows.

I was a moon for him to throw sunlight on. In the glow of Gatsby’s gaze or laugh, I was luminous. When he directed the ray of his attention on my cousin—my beautiful, white-passing cousin—I was a cold and forbidding landscape.

She was the sun around which his being orbited, and I was his moon, shadowed and undetected.

Gatsby and I may have been nothing to men like Tom Buchanan, but men like that did not know we were as divine as the heavens. We were boys who had created ourselves. We had formed our own bodies, our own lives, from the ribs of the girls we were once assumed to be.

We find the ways we can to make ourselves. Ways to be ourselves.

He kissed me, and I felt the contours of that reclaimed word in my own mouth. He kissed me, and I saw the tinsel flashing in his hair at that first party. He kissed me, and those silver threads bloomed into heat and fire.

I came to New York as a handful of Wisconsin earth, but it was that precise earth, this precise body and heart, that Jay Gatsby wanted. Falling stars may have been spectacularly misnamed, but in this moment, I understood the impulse. The earth I was made of blazed like cosmic dust, lighting up brighter the faster I fell.

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.

As trans boys, we make ourselves, but we don’t do it alone. None of us makes ourselves alone.

As you leave West Egg, I hope you leave knowing this: You are worth being seen as you truly are. You are worth imagining your life for yourself instead of how you may have been told your life must be. You are worth your own dreams.