Is there a secret gay sex scene in The Great Gatsby?

When’s the last time you sat down with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby? High school, right? Absolutely no shame there, but if you were considering dipping back into the Jazz Age classic, now’s a better time than ever. Why, you ask? Well apparently there’s a louche gay hookup that happened beneath all our gay noses!

Holy JC Leyendecker, how did this happen! We all knew that Nick Carraway—the dubious narrator of the book and the only character Gatsby could truly consider a friend—was a lil bit fruity. But apparently he’s fruitier than any of us thought. He’s out here touching levers and sh*t!

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So how far-fetched is this theory? Well, let’s backtrack a bit. Gatsby is famous for being the ur-text of the raging 20s, a time when queerness wasn’t yet forbidden on the big screen or the Broadway stage. So while the book we all remember might not seem queer on recollection, there are signs and signals aplenty. Queer fans have long speculated that Nick Carraway and his sometime-love interest Jordan Baker are both secretly queer, with Carraway pining after Gatsby and Baker dreaming of Daisy Buchanan, Gatsby’s impossible golden girl. But this has remained mere speculation, until this utterly random snippet which seems to find Nick in his BVDs with a dude he just met. Not only that, but the guy he’s with seems to be an ad man “holding a large portfolio” of copy. Let’s not forget that Gatsby takes place during the heyday of queer artist JC Leyendecker, whose public domain works are often borrowed to create covers for Fitzgerald titles. Leyendecker’s work, often featuring sharp-looking besuited men gazing across each other while smoking, lends itself perfectly to Fitzgerald’s tales of jaded, too-rich youth in crisis.

And what about Fitzgerald himself? While there’s no evidence that he ever had gay affairs, he did find himself in close proximity to gay culture quite often. One of his early mentors, Father Sigourney Fay, is given quite the queer treatment in Fitzgerald’s first novel This Side of Paradise. And let’s not forget Fitzgerald’s famous friendship with Ernest Hemingway, during which the two engaged in a literal dick-measuring contest. Sounds heterosexual to me!

So Nick Carraway having sex with some ad guy he just met? Honestly, sounds about right!

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