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

by Anna-Marie McLemore

“I want to survive, Daisy,” I said. “I want to have a decent life. A quiet one.” “Oh.” She sounded like I’d pricked the fragile balloon of her very soul. “Aren’t your dreams any loftier than that?”

“Are they—” I cut off my own rude question before I could finish it. But Martha said, “Yes, Nick. They’re also lesbians.” She laughed. “Look at your face.” “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m not used to people saying a word like lesbian without whispering it.” “Would you rather I whisper it?” Martha asked. “No,” I said. “I like being around people who speak who they are instead of whispering it.”

“Where are we?” I asked. “The gayest place in New York.” Gatsby pushed on a wood panel that turned into a door. “In more ways than one.”

Was a boy like me even allowed to love another boy? What did that make me? I had parents who’d respected me telling them that I was a boy, and who’d helped me live as the boy I was. Shouldn’t that have been enough? Shouldn’t I like girls as more than friends by now?

Please, claim me. Claim the brown of my skin and the black of my hair and my eyes that are a darker version of yours.

“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.”

Just before I opened the door, I said, “I hope you find her.” “Who?” Martha asked. “A girl you want to smudge your lipstick.”

It didn’t matter if I made my way as a quantitative analyst. It wouldn’t matter if I made a hundred thousand dollars. I would still be a brown boy from a family of betabeleros. I had come into the world smelling of red beets and damp earth. I would forever vanish into the shadows of men like Tom Buchanan and his family’s aged money.

Some people wore their broken hearts with careful grace. I didn’t. The pieces of mine scraped against everything, and everyone could hear the grinding noise, even if they didn’t know what it was.

We all didn’t belong in some way, and we were forever announcing ourselves or clearing our throats when we entered rooms so we wouldn’t startle each other. We all had reasons to startle easily.

She looked like a siren among sea foam, and I realized I’d been in love with her for a long time and hadn’t known it, and that she’d been in love with me for a long time and had known it. Maybe sometimes I’d known a little, when I saw the bloom of her lipstick on a champagne glass,

no because. i’m crying. like real tears.

That sounds exhausting. Does he have any idea how tiring it is to be someone else’s dream?

“Fairy,” he said. “It’s a word I forgot to tell you about. It’s a word they use for boys like us. They mean it to be an insult, but I take it to mean there’s something magic about us and they know it.”

For Daisy, the most romantic a gesture could be was if it was in front of no one except the woman she loved.

It happened fast, Jay Gatsby becoming more legend than memory. The rich sons and daughters who drank champagne on his lawn whispered his name as though trying to grasp something, wondering if everything they remembered about the great Gatsby had been a dream.

When I first read The Great Gatsby as a teen, I knew three things: 1) I was pretty sure Nick Carraway was in love with Jay Gatsby.