Are They Gay? - Nick and Gatsby from The Great Gatsby

have you been acting a little straight lately i know they get a bad rap but cargo shorts just go really well with every outfit anyways uh here's wonderwall straight don't forget to act daily daily by taking a moment to check out the are they gay merch store are you a budding town lesbian bisexual or gay just looking for a way to express yourself do you want a more low-key way to show your pride well check out the gay bi pan and trans umbrella merch are you a member of the homosexual agenda and need a way to identify yourself in public you can check out these products and several others at www.it'sall.gay use code caragay to get free shipping by checking out the store you're supporting this channel hey students mr are they gay here you know the great gatsby reminds me of a simpler time where dreams seemed on the cusp of coming true and america sat in innocence towards the days ahead ah 2015 my sophomore year of high school do you remember sophomore year english class what an exquisite example of literature's saddest white people now there was always a special place in my heart for gatsby as an edgy degenerate teenager i really enjoyed reading nick's petty critiques of rich straits i especially enjoyed the clear homoeroticism bleeding from every interaction between him and gatsby in fact i kept the exact book that i read in high school this is the homoerotic lump of paper that defined one and a half months of my high school experience and even back then i was pointing out the gay subtext in my annotations so if you were gay and read this book class discussions might have taken an interesting direction perhaps there were a few people in class calling jordan a ethereal lesbian or nick a gossiping gay well that person was me and i was joined by a few woke people ready and willing to coo the instructor now after several philosophical discussions on nick i am a homosexual caraway's homoerotic prose with my friend maria i realized an untapped void there must have been at least a few thousand gays out there who saw the same thing who understood the pressing importance of nick and gatsby's undying romance if there's a few thousand people bored enough to homosexually defend some assigned reading that they highlighted sporadically to create the illusion of annotation then there must be people out there desiring subtextual queerness in other ways so i started this channel this is the original the inspiration the beginning of the series are they gay and in that vein i guess you could call nick and gatsby the mothership but what is the great gatsby some of you are an american and although i envy you profoundly for that you might have never heard about this so-called great american novel well don't worry i'll be your guide your willy loving willy wonka of gatsby's queerness just sit back relax and enjoy the video so a disclaimer much like the president at any given moment this book is at least 60 percent racist probably more but also like the president we can't just ignore what the president is doing the president's kind of important and their actions are consequential gatsby has been constructed to be an important part of american literature so a lot of other works and cultural discussions mention it so we can't just pretend it doesn't exist what we can do is acknowledge where it exhausts the yikes meter and work towards making literature more inclusive the great gatsby is set in 1920s america in this story nick carraway is a generally well-off middle-class closet case who decides to move to new york to get in the bond business he moves to west egg a neighborhood where a bunch of newly rich people like to party and die he has family in the east egg neighborhood which is right across from the west egg where he is east egg is where all this fancy bourgeois decadence i've been hearing so much about takes place so the characters nick has a cousin in east egg daisy and she lives with her husband tom nick i'm totally not in love with him carraway is totally in love with his next door neighbor gatsby gatsby is young newly rich and gay so he's essentially like the makeup youtuber of his time jordan who is daisy's friend and nick's love interest also plays a role in our analysis to get what she's all about just just picture a lesbian gatsby's in love with daisy because they used to hang but she's with tom and basically gatsby uses all of his illegal wealth to try to get with daisy now that's basically what's going on so here's what we're gonna do there's four film adaptations of gatsby one family guy special and a bunch of stage versions and an army of homosexuals about to annihilate the now public domain source material basically there's a lot of gatsby's and a lot of ways to think about this story for the purposes of this video we're going to focus mostly on the book and the two major movies the 1974 version and the 2013 version that way we get to see how different moments are interpreted in changing context sometimes there's a scene in the book that's totally innocuous but on film feels like the murmurs of a cabal of the gay agenda elders queerness then isn't necessarily something proclaimed explicitly when someone claims an identity sometimes it's just a set of shared meanings that change over time but you know what doesn't change over time nick's homosexuality remember all those themes that teachers would absolutely cram into your head about this book you know like the sparknote stuff like the american dream and disillusionment and something about class or something probably racism and there was one other conflict in the book that we all once studied as late pubescent academics expectation versus reality despite the images were given of gatsby or nick or the vast wealth flaunted by easteggers the book tries to convey that things aren't always what they seem i told her she might fool me but she couldn't fool god perhaps there is a homoerotic reality underneath this entire book despite years of american language arts teachers insisting to generations of gays that nick is a red-blooded heterosexual male thousands of people even academics insist otherwise let's keep in mind that i'm not advocating for a single queer reading maybe gatsby's bisexual or gay or even straight maybe he and nick even kissed a little bit although i think that gay nick is pretty consistent in every version it's questionable whether or not this love is reciprocated there are reasons to believe that gatsby might also be gay and in love i mean aren't we all but there's other readings of this book in which nick is just defining gay like castiel in the english version of supernatural is nick bi though he could be but i think a lot of the text makes more sense if we read nick is gay gatsby though who knows we'll explore all of these avenues another thing about the great gatsby colors are really important in this book and they'll be important for this video so look out for these colors so f scott fitzgerald author of the great gatsby was a complicated guy he was a part of this cohort of writers that made up the lost generation and as we know there's nothing gayer than getting lost there's not a lot to suggest that fitzgerald wasn't straight his wife randomly thought he was having an affair with ernest hemingway and now while i wish that were true there's just no evidence but fitzgerald spent a lot of time in europe in the 1920s and europe in the 1920s had a decent amount of queer subcultures in france where fitzgerald wrote the great gatsby there was a thriving sapphic subculture we also know that fitzgerald was aware of the gays and fitzgerald himself was insecure about his masculinity and sexuality he mentions it in his letters and there's early drafts of his novels and which he actually has scenes with gay people whether he was tolerant of queerness is another question that has no clear answer what we do know is fitzgerald used queerness as a device to convey a character's morality according to scholar agnes p collins to fitzgerald homosexuality is unequivocally synonymous with moral irresponsibility because it is fitzgerald's private emblem of the moral carelessness he was trying to repudiate in himself so it's actually highly likely that all hints of nick's queerness is a device used to conveys nick's moral character while these notions of sexuality are antiquated and harmful it's the way fitzgerald intended his characters to be written we as modern readers have to recontextualize that the real question is is it out of the realm of possibility that nick's love for gatsby surpasses the platonic level of what's brocially acceptable [Music] of all the great literary homosexuals out there nick may be the most homosexual according to the book he's recently moved to new york's west egg and after some partying at gay raves he gets involved with his neighbor gatsby now nick carried away with men carraway here introduces himself as a non-judgmental middle-class hippie who never lies i'm inclined to reserve all judgments from the beginning we get the sense that he is an open-minded character he's someone you could really drunkenly come out to in the back of an uber you know although whoa is that a red flag approaching i didn't expect the communist uprising this soon oh false alarm it's just nick bullshitting i am one of the few honest people that i have ever known are you sure nick are you really being honest with yourself about why you dedicated several paragraphs to describing a man's smile listen if someone ever outright says that they're totally honest and trustworthy they're probably not do not rely on this narrator friends being the petty gay that he is nick also notes that people like to gossip to him i was guarding other people's secrets once again i was within and without nick knows a lot about other people but what about his own secrets with all this skill and guarding other people's shame he must be instinctively trained on how to hide his homosexuality yet genus bleeds through this entire novel maybe nick does try to narrate as truthfully as possible while still concealing the truth as he said he's totally 100 trustworthy right but he has to talk about his attraction to men in ways that aren't obvious or at least completely obvious he might be performing a complex balancing act between queerness and covertness so where's the evidence we may live in a post-truth world but to prove that this beloved american classic has a gay narrator whatever you think let's get into it time to whip out those half-assed annotations [Music] i suppose that it is technically possible for an allegedly straight man to become so intoxicated that he platonically ends up at the bedside of a decently naked man and i suppose that these moments may still be platonic despite a previously sexually charged elevator ride so when this happens to nick the reader has the option of ignoring a version of this story in which the situation between mckee and nick was completely fine and heterosexual but let's just go over the facts and you can judge whether or not nick and mckee are doomed to a life of awkward eye contact across the room so for context nick and his bro tom decide to go to a little get-together with tom's mistress myrtle nick isn't a big drinker so he gets incredibly drunk now a man named mr mckee is also in attendance of this imminent orgy his first description in the book pins him as a pale feminine man involved in the artistic game nick describes his wife as horrible cool so mr mckee is an artsy femme boy and nick takes an interest in him in fact nick is so interested in him that he decides to get physically closer to mckee mr mckee was asleep on a chair taking out my handkerchief i wiped from his cheek the remains of the spot of dried lather that had worried me all the afternoon that's quite interesting nick i know when i meet strangers i also approach them in their most vulnerable state and touch them intimately on the face nick's completely platonic interest in the further mckee erupts as he watches mckee leave the building towards the elevator without any narrative explanation nick follows mckee into the elevator and they interact just so we're clear mckee is described as feminine and the fact that fitzgerald explicitly decided to include that fact in a time when the connotations of femininity and queerness were clear should tell you one thing and now that nick has taken an acute interest to the point of pursuit that should tell you another thing so what happened in the elevator come to lunch someday he suggested as we groan down the elevator where anywhere keep your hands off the level snap the elevator boy i beg your pardon said mr mckee with dignity i didn't know i was touching it all right i agreed i'll be glad to oh my god can you imagine this exchange in 25 square feet of space the two sharing the same air while nick looks into mckee's eyes as he asks where and the key flicks his eyes onto nick's lips as he whispers abreathy anywhere well nick agrees to this thinly veiled euphemism for homosexual exchange and then i was standing beside his bed and he was sitting up between the sheets clad in his underwear with a great portfolio in his hands as i said uh it is possible that nick's heterosexuality remains uncompromised from this exchange but something about this interaction the pale feminine mckee and nick agreeing to their lunch their exorbitant drunkness and the ensuing suggestive images it all seems kind of you know well maybe it's not gay okay after all we don't know what happened in those ellipses for all we know they did something exceedingly straight like binge five seasons of the big bang but i find it very interesting that of all the scenes in the world to write fitzgerald decided hey why not have an ambiguously drunk exchange between two men also let's talk about levers which totally isn't phallic imagery at all anyways uh where's mrs mckee i also find it highly suspect that this scene isn't in any film you know why cause it's gay can you imagine watching a movie and then suddenly nick and this dude are in a tiny elevator talking about levers and lunch and then somebody is suddenly half naked in bed clear homoeroticism that had to be heterosexualized for the big screen it's weird how that is isn't it the queer people are mocked for supposedly reading too much into a scene and then they get erased from a narrative that they were already laughed out of mckee isn't the only man that nick has appreciated when he describes his cousin's husband tom nick talks about the enormous power of that body great pack of muscle granted it's not inherently gay to languish over your cousin's racist arm candy but compare how nick describes tom over how he describes his love interest jordan she was a slender small breasted girl like a young cadet let's be clear none of this is inherently gay but within this context within fitzgerald's flawed perception of gender and sexuality what is he trying to tell us nick comments on his male counterparts attributes with the enthusiasm of well frankly he's a simp but when it comes to this so-called love interest jordan he calls her a young cadet he compliments her one scornful mouth there's also things nick mentions that seem to align with the experiences of a lot of queer people for example this sentence but i am slow thinking and full of interior rules that act as breaks on my desires like many gay men socialize in a heteronormative world he's had to learn to adapt to the norms of his society even if he feels a certain way about the men that he gushes over in his diary he's aware of what the rules say later in this book nick talks about this one fling that he had with another girl but he doesn't explain why they broke up according to academic keith frazier an early draft of the manuscript starts hinting at something before it gets cut off at the end but her brother began favoring me with favoring with what the love of a thousand sons what happened fitzgerald i'm dying here did nick accidentally hook up with some random dude unfortunately this excerpt is all that survives the biggest indication that nick is gay or maybe bisexual is his relationship to gatsby but that's to be covered in another section of this video before we get to the real meat of this homoerotic meal let's take a look at gatsby could gatsby be gay could he be bi does he embody a queer metaphor these are the questions that defined my high school experience just kidding i'm not straight there were a lot more questions if you've read the great gatsby or at least the spark notes the night before a due date you probably understand that gatsby is a complicated dude nick writes that the image gatsby has created for himself as a successful socialite is actually the platonic conception of himself there's different interpretations of this allusion to plato and of course they're all necessarily gay because ancient greece but without getting into plato's theory of forms or whatever nick is trying to say this the persona that gatsby presents to the world is an idealized fabrication a lie the gatsby made for himself to live up to gatsby represents a straight american ideal and when nick isn't talking about how hot gatsby is nick sees right through the facade gatsby carries himself very carefully he doesn't want people penetrating his lies penetrating other things perhaps but not his lies gatsby picks his words with care he's careful as many non-straight men had to be in the 1920s where homosexuality was illegal in several countries including the united states as jordan describes later you see he's a real tough under it all gatsby doesn't fit into the heterosexual ideal he's built for himself he doesn't fit into mainstream life wow is it getting hot in here or is it just that queer metaphor that's boiling hot so the first night that nick and gatsby meet nick notices that although several girls swooned backwards on their male partners no one swooned backwards on gatsby although gatsby is rich and attractive he doesn't seem interested in other women now the obvious interpretation is that he's hopelessly in love with daisy but heterosexuals have no sense of subtlety this book tells us that daisy is also a lie an ideal fantasy woman that gatsby has created in his head and without this fantasy keeping his heterosexuality at bay gatsby is just a rich lonely gay like a gentrifying single accountant in san francisco nick even goes as far to say that gatsby knew women early he became contemptuous of them wait that that kind of does sound like a straight man never mind all right just kidding fellas you know i love you straight dudes but let's consider what fitzgerald has laid out for us even if it is as the kids say problematic gatsby is secretive gatsby shows no general interest in women gatsby lives through a fake persona it seems like gatsby might be a little uh queer coded listen sometimes things don't have to be explicitly gay to be gay like let's say you order an iced coffee total homo moment or as the kids say homand or a more academic example let's say that in response to sensors banning portrayals of positive queerness a long-standing movie trope developed in which monster stories often became queer-coded queer metaphors or textually queer for example this vampire is a lesbian this vampire is gay so is this one and this one and this one so considering these general attributes and the context in which fitzgerald is writing it's not totally off to say that gatsby's character is a little queer coded expectation versus reality remember it might seem like gatsby lives a heterosexual lifestyle but for all we know he has a drawer of patterned socks like the rest of us gays so we're gonna go through the plot and check out all the greatest hits basically we're gonna cover most of the book and talk about how some of the greatest plot points in the book are also handled homoerotically in the movies now the book is famous for being a gay agenda handbook so there's no real questions there but what are the movies known for i mean those longing descriptions in the book translate into prolonged staring in the movies right well yeah no yeah no yeah yeah no let's talk about 2013 gatsby for a moment it's somehow frighteningly straight like somehow they managed to make edm straight in fact i heard there's this curse where any time you watch this movie a bisexual person across the world loses their favorite corduroy jacket so the movie itself is okay if you have two hours to kill then watch my videos and then if you still have two hours to kill start writing your manifesto on the history of european class struggle and then watch this movie the 1974 version of gatsby is strangely homoerotic not that homoeroticism is strange i mean it is the life force that powers the entire universe but in this movie it just feels so unintentional and yet so right like stumbling on a 300 000 word fan fiction at 2 56 a.m apparently there's a really early version of the script that's pretty explicitly gay but got rejected because 1974 but at least that tells you what was going on in the minds of 1970 screenwriters rebooting classic works of literature alright so let's get into the great gatsby it reads like nick's middle school diary in which he writes about all the boy crushes he has but that's okay that's what we're here for he starts out by talking about this one summer he moved to new york to be closer to the gay scene and ends up mentioning this one dude a lot gatsby and although gatsby represented everything that he has a unaffected scorn for he was also the exception out of all the people that nick interacted with gatsby was the only one that he begins to mention by name nick appreciated gatsby's gift for hope a romantic readiness a romantic readiness that nick shares for gatsby clearly in the 2013 movie nick writing the novel is framed as something his therapist encourages him to do to i guess cope with lost love and it's clear that that's what this is about his therapist intrigued by the morning homosexual in front of him asks so he was your neighbor my neighbor yeah okay this has big i'm hiding my gay lover from my parents so let's just call him my roommate energy or like you know a dying 19th century sapphic leaving everything she owns to her very special friend energy either way okay nick he was your neighbor although gatsby does embody everything nick hates about the upper class nick reflects that gatsby wasn't actually a bad dude it was the stuff around him that caused his demise the foul dust that preyed on gatsby in the wake of his dream i think i'm starting to get what nick's dream is but that foul dust i think nick's referring to all that bourgeois decadence he experienced you know the tom and daisies of the world that lie without regard for others tom and daisy who not only embody their class but heterosexual society at large all right moving on and it's only been two pages so after nick gushes about his dream man he gets into the actual story we get this bit where he visits his cousin daisy and her husband tom for a little get-together he meets a lesbian named jordan stray people are being sad there's racism and importantly jordan mentions a man named gatsby to nick after these events nick becomes interested i'll spare you what you don't need to know but let's just say that nick and gatsby's relationship starts out concerningly basically in every depiction of this story we get romeo and juliet-esque staging levels gatsby was watching me watching you gatsby was always watching me they haven't said anything to each other and yet they're like telepathically communicating their intentions to ravage each other kind of gay telepathy is this they're jamming the radio waves the gay agenda needs those you know after several days of mutual romantic stalking gatsby decides to make the first move he sends nick an invitation to one of his famous parties the thing about gatsby's parties is that no one is invited people from all over town just show up to get drunk you know like a kid's soccer game but nick is the exception it's never explained why gatsby sent an invitation to nick and it's never explained why nick decides to compliment gatsby's handwriting by calling it majestic of course nick would do that now if you're uninformed you could make some assumptions about what all this means but let's just say that gatsby intentionally left out a no homo at the end of that invitation like a lonely old gay nick enters the party and tries to look for gatsby to no avail he hangs out with jordan a bit you know as the gays tend to stick together but we all know what he's really here for after a thousand desperate uh hey have you seen gatsby nick starts to give up and he bumps into a random fellow that claims to recognize him from the war but a new war starts the war on nick's heterosexuality as this person actually is the one and only gatsby of course when you meet the love of your life the least you can do is dedicate an intricately detailed paragraph to their smile he smiled understandingly much more than understandingly it was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it that you may come across four or five times in life it faced or seemed to face the whole external world for an instant and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor it understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that at your best you hoped to convey precisely at that point it banished and i was looking at an elegant young roughneck a year or two over 30 whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd [Music] okay shakespeare we get it you don't have to rub it in gatsby already does that for you alright so uh what about 2013 gatsby how are you doing oh i see uh platonic staring fireworks fine okay sure this is this is completely heterosexual definitely the 1970s version is a bit different and frankly almost disturbingly gay their first meeting in this version wasn't a chance encounter instead gatsby sends someone to retrieve nick like a piece of fresh meat and then very forthcomingly says i thought we should get acquainted since we're neighbors i hope you're enjoying yourself yes thank you if there's anything you want or need no no no no everything's fine thank you good very nice good interesting like a shy gay pickup and there's no explanation for this either from gatsby or the movie in general for all we know gatsby's just hidden on his shy gay neighbor now in the book gatsby tries to get closer to nick by asking if they could go on a hydroplane together which granted is a very heterosexual pastime but here perhaps we can have lunch sometime tomorrow fine good good uh lunch lunch i i think i think we know what that means noah heterosexual hydroplaning but lunch the second gayest meal alright let's go back to the book for now after nick writes the most romantically charged paragraph ever written about another man that includes dear unpublished fan fictions by the way gatsby says he has to do some official gay agenda business and leaves nick with jordan nick starts to hear gossip around the party about gatsby and he says it had the effect of stimulating my curiosity stimulating anything else nick clearly it is because he starts to stare at gatsby from a distance again and what does he say my eyes fell on gatsby his tan skin was drawn attractively tight on his face oh whoops sorry that's actually from a fan fiction i found sorry my mistake guessed i mixed up my gay literature but you know what i i fooled you didn't i you really believed that this random gay fanfic was actually from the book didn't you and you're right because it's actually from the book nick nick stop please it's too obvious fitzgerald the sensors as all my fan fiction reading viewers know every fanfic gay slash story has an essential brushing of the hand moment what many of you don't know is that fitzgerald actually pioneered the art of gay subtext as nick swoons over the hand which reassuringly brushed my shoulder uh these are a lot of details about pans and tight skin on men nick just kiss goodnight let's please let's get this over with i think that nick and fitzgerald are aware that the gayness is a little too much and they start no homo damage controlling their way out of the gay literature section of a bookshop i have given the impression the events of these weeks absorb me i don't know nick maybe uh you shouldn't write about it like it was the greatest love affair of your lifetime like i know when i'm not absorbed i dedicate entire books to events and people during this brief damage controlling aside nick talks about how lonely he is he describes watching other young couples in love and living vicariously through them as he says imagining that i too was hurrying towards gaiety and sharing their intimate excitement oh our poor pal nick just wants to be in love if only the book would introduce a heterosexual love interest oh wait it did but nick what about jordan well literally in the next few sentences he's talking about his feelings for his lesbian gal pal i wasn't actually in love but i felt a sort of tender curiosity oh nick that's that's friendship nick sure there's a possibility you're bisexual and crushing on a woman that's totally fine but literally two sentences ago you were talking about all that excitement you wanted what do you want nick is it because you're gay my friend because i actually know someone extremely exciting with a romantic readiness that you wouldn't believe not to mention it sounds like nick is kind of experiencing some compulsory heterosexuality here or compete society expects that his interactions with jordans should be romantic because you know they're a man and a woman but nick doesn't feel romantic attraction here even though he understands the situation should be romantic remember the breaks on his desires that nick talked about there is a complex set of rules motivating his actions and heteronormativity is likely a factor here so jordan and nick are talking and jordan tells nick that gatsby really wants to go on a lunch date and nick is like oh my god what am i gonna wear eventually nick does find the coat that compliments his eyes and he meets with gatsby on the way to lunch they have a sexually charged drive gatsby is direct he asks nick what's your opinion of me anyhow now this might be gatsby's equivalent of asking nick if he has a crush on him after all nick does mention that he gets a little overwhelmed and to be fair it is a provocative thing to ask gatsby might as well be asking so nick what do you think of me and is it homosexual just wondering now in the 1974 movie gatsby asked the same question and some curious eye sex ensues in the context of this movie this drive is the result of that oddly charged invitation to lunch like imagine some random dude invites you into his office seductively insists that you two should be acquainted over lunch and then picks you up first date style while asking you how you feel about him what could possibly make this gayer look here what's your opinion of me anyhow [Music] i hadn't really thought about it i'm gonna tell you something about my life oh okay so uh he's uh we're just he's just gonna come out now all right for the queer people watching this movie who are constantly aware of queer subtext these scenes make total sense if gatsby were a gay hunky millionaire it might not necessarily be the first thing that a straight person would pick up but it at least makes sense right and the fact that a movie written nearly 50 years after the original gives off the same gay vibe should tell you something about how much gayness just drips from the source material all right let's focus back on the book um we're worried let's see gay eye sex gay cope yearning ah okay here we are so gatsby is like what do you think of me twink boy and then nick is like oh this is it as he puckers his lips but before they get caught in a kiss gatsby decides he wants to set the record gay and explain his life story to nick nick is kind of skeptical while listening and what's funny is that gatsby is totally lying although nick does try to resist a little there was that smile again but this time i held out against it even the smile the smile that nick wrote elegant words about gatsby's smile is enough to get nick under his spell and nick's fully aware of the power of that smile just imagine nick fingernails digging into his chair sweat beaming down his back biting his lip trying not to feel the power of this other man that was not supposed to be that suggestive later on in the book nick mentions this smile again i suppose he smiled at cody he had probably discovered that people liked him when he smiled no nick that's just you pining so clueless gatsby accidentally invites someone else on his date with nick wolfensheim he's an eccentric character but he tells nick some hints about gatsby yeah gatsby's very careful about women he would never so much as look at a friend's wife cause he's gay okay fine it's probably because gatsby's fixated on daisy or whatever snake oil the straight agenda is peddling these days maybe it's that maybe there's other reasons could there be gay reasons there must be because in the 2013 movie they're eating each other's sight the 1974 movie treats the scene a little differently wolfensheim honestly seems like he's setting them up together fine fella isn't it handsome to look at the perfect gentleman yes glad there's a a consensus here cool okay so back to the romance novel new scene nick is now hanging out with jordan again and his narration divulges into pettiness he mentioned something about how tom and gatsby think about their women unlike gatsby and tom buchanan i had no girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs and so i drew up the girl beside me according to honest saint nick over here common gatsby's love is unhealthy what nick has with jordan although not as exciting is healthy enough for that moment nick feels that what gatsby feels for daisy is an illusion to cover up insecurities about not living up to an american ideal on the other hand maybe tom and gatsby are totally fine in their love and it's actually nick who doesn't understand maybe nick doesn't understand that love is kind of wild and romantic maybe nick is too gay and too forced into this heterosexual role to understand the love that gatsby and tom share for their women so nick assumes that what he has with jordan must be the true iteration of love and what's just delightful is that the only person that nick feels so exceptionally about is gatsby the man he dedicated an entire book about the man whose smile can turn over nick's entire perception of reality what i mean is no matter how you read this book it comes out kinda gay as a lot of coming outs tend to be here's two interpretations both equally valid number one gatsby and tom's feelings aren't true healthy love and what gatsby feels for daisy is a facade to cover up his insecurity over his sexuality or number two gatsby and tom are actually super in love and nick can't relate these feelings to his relationship with jordan because he's gay so who's actually gay and who's actually in love i guess it's up to whoever is interpreting it so i don't really know but either way it could be read as a queer story alright so there's a scheme afoot here's what you need to know jordan asked nick on the behalf of gatsby to perform a convoluted scheme so gatsby and daisy could start an affair here's gatsby's plan nick invites daisy over for tea gatsby shows up unannounced nick and gatsby sneak out the back and run away together sorry i accidentally started reading nick's plan okay nick invites daisy over for tea gatsby shows up unannounced gatsby and daisy reunite straight stuff happens between gatsby and daisy everything works out totally fine and nothing happens nick is fine with going through with it due to his undying love and him and jordan say goodbye after nick's talk with jordan nick goes back to his house and gatsby is there waiting for him jesus what time is it 2am what the hell jay or should i call you gay clearly gatsby wants to talk about the plan or does he because instead of you know doing the normal thing and saying hey so can we talk about the plan he asked to go swimming with nick like this dude is really out here at 2 am like hey bro want to go to coney island bro it's 2 a.m it's not coney island hours jay maybe it's like some kissing hours but not coney island no need for these homosexual theatrics 1974 and 2013 know what's up because we get these really tense prolonged unadulterated gay staring scenes eventually they actually talk about the favor and nick's totally down to do it but gatsby's not used to having actual friends it's apparent because when nick agrees to do the favor gatsby thinks that nick wants something in return so gatsby offers a business opportunity nick's not having it i realize now that under different circumstances that conversation might have been one of the crises of my life but because the offer was obviously and tactlessly for a service to be rendered i had no choice except to cut him off there now this is important by rejecting gatsby's offer nick has become exceptional to gatsby nick wants to appear as if he's doing gatsby a favor out of the tenderness of his heart and gatsby realizes this gatsby realizes that nick is a true friend with benefits but this is important gatsby has used his wealth to impress everyone including the so-called love of his life daisy but nick is the exception in the same way that gatsby was the exception for nick they are exceptional to each other their conversation here is a lot subtler than in the movies it's something revealed in nick's narration but in the movies their affection has to be expressed in a different way and of course this means more gay 2013 does the classic gay subtext move and adds some gay looks and music it's a favor jay just a favor yes i'm happy to do it favor yes i don't know why 1974 did this but in this version gatsby brings up this business opportunity earlier in the movie so now they have to reintroduce it so how do they reintroduce the business connection in this scene oh by by making it homoerotic when i first watched this i had to be resuscitated besides the prolonged and adulterated gay staring the way that things are said is just i mean you know there's that other thing the what thing our uh our business relationship any favors that i do for you don't need any payment damn nick you're a bottom aren't you okay so i don't know why gatsby had to step so close and then talk about their business relationship as if it were a thinly veiled euphemism but he did and now here we are so nick and gatsby go ahead with the plan now in the 2013 version nick is like was it right to bring my cousin daisy a married woman together with a man i hardly knew because 2013 is trying to reconcile how nick can be so honest and moral despite helping daisy and gatsby's affair but the point that the book tries to convey is that nick isn't honest and moral as he wants you to believe in the book he doesn't seem very concerned about the whole situation trying to set up gatsby and daisy you know why because he's been trying to get with every married dude in this book all right so the day finally comes everyone's amped up gatsby arrives at nick's house early to exchange manmeet and as gatsby first walks into the door nick describes gatsby as glaring tragically into my eyes so there's some painful eye sex gatsby's worried about daisy and nick is worried about losing the eternal flame to a soul gatsby and for some reason nick points out that he's aware of the loud beating of my own heart now nick doesn't explain why his heart races here's what we know so far gatsby walked in stared at nick a little as bros do and now nick's talking about how much his heart's racing sure he's reuniting two people who haven't seen each other in several years but why is nick so nervous and why is he in this state only after the man he loves stared into his eyes honestly this all feels like a taylor swift moment if you could see that i'm the one who understands you then you're all along so why can't you receive you'll belong with me the first meeting is emotional and awkward you know real middle school dance stuff gatsby uses nick as a clutch when he gets overwhelmed daisy the so-called love of his life is left sitting alone in the other room while nick and gatsby giggle in some corner like lovebirds there's even a point where nick draws the line and tells him bro go go back to your date at some point gatsby wants daisy to see his house and she agrees and for some reason gatsby needs nick so much that he insists nick come with them so before they leave for their adventure daisy needs to get ready so while she's off powdering her elbow or whatever nick and gatsby share a little moment now in the book it's a decent broment they converse a bit gatsby realizes he doesn't need to hide his past from nick and overall you know 6 out of 10 roman in the 1974 movie this conversation is basically the same word for word but the staring it just adds a whole new layer like a bisexual adding a new cardigan look my house shows up well doesn't it it's splendid it took me just three years to earn the money that bought it i thought you said you inherited your money he said look at the house nick he didn't say stare longingly at my face nick nick so they go into gatsby's house and gatsby shows off all you know his stuff now nick realizes something as gatsby shows off all his beautiful possessions to daisy or at least nick begins damage controlling while trying to prove why gatsby isn't daisy's true love so context assume that here green light means gatsby's dreams of being with daisy daisy put her arm through his abruptly but he seemed absorbed in what he had just said possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever in other words as the reality of the situation sets in the fantasy that gatsby had of daisy diminishes in significance in a sense gatsby's own colossal imagination supplanted this fantastical love that gatsby hardbird for daisy all these years as if it were an illusion likewise maybe nick is a little guilty of this himself nick is writing about the great gatsby and to nick this man is just as much of an idea as a person nick also has fantastical ideas about gatsby here's what nick continues to write about that afternoon with daisy and gatsby there must have been moments even that afternoon when daisy tumbled short of streams not through her own fault but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion it had gone beyond her beyond everything oh but nick would never fantasize about a person in that way right he smiled understandingly much more than understanding me it was one of those rare right what does nick think about daisy in that moment well nick thinks that daisy is afraid of another woman taking all her glory nick thinks that daisy is afraid of some authentically radiant girl who with one fresh glance at gatsby one moment of magical encounter would blot out those five years of unwavering devotion oh like like nick i'm guts well after this whole affair gatsby hosts another gay rave and invites daisy and her husband tom somehow gatsby and daisy get away with plotting the straight agenda this whole party without tom ever finding out so as everyone starts leaving gatsby gets a little tired of all this heterosexualism and he asks nick if he could stay until everyone leaves and being the loyal lap dog he is nick agrees would you stay until like 4am waiting for your crush to finish their business seems like a bit much nick you're literally neighbors like just talk to him tomorrow but nick ends up waiting and they have another bromant here's where gatsby says some famous words that i'm sure plenty of my viewers used as an easy thematic quote for their high school essays can't repeat the past he cried incredulously why of course you can uh right so gatsby's pretty out of touch with reality he wants to go back to a past of perceived perfection with daisy where nick didn't prompt gatsby to enter a defcon level 1 sexuality crisis an idealized straight and innocent past nick tries talking him out of the delusion but it's no use nick even calls it gatsby's appalling sentimentality appalling sentimentality okay nick you mean like this he smiled understandingly much more than understandingly yeah okay just because the sentimentality isn't directed at you nick doesn't mean it isn't valid understandably having a conversation with someone you're in love with about the person they're in love with is a difficult scenario nick might be tempted to just let it all out to tell gatsby once and for all of his undying romantic love and it almost seems like nick was really close to that point through all he said even through his appalling sentimentality i was reminded of something an elusive rhythm a fragment of lost words that i heard somewhere a long time ago for a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man's as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air but they made no sound and what i had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever don't tell me that doesn't sound like he's ready to reveal everything so a few days or so pass and nick doesn't see much of gatsby since they're both busy socializing with the heads different adaptations characterize this period differently in the 1974 gatsby nick and gatsby share some moments where they literally just stare at each other but eventually we get to a point where gatsby daisy nick tom and jordan decide to have lunch together which is an excellent idea clearly this all goes wrong tom figures out daisy and gatsby are having an affair jordan and nick are gay and everything just seems to happen all at once after this big drama gatsby and daisy leave together solemnly since daisy found out that gatsby is involved in shady business she no longer wanted to be his beard although nick realizes something about the day he says something quite interesting it turns out it's nick's birthday he's turning 30 and like many people turning 30 he doesn't like that 30 the promise of a decade of loneliness a thinning list of single men to know a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm thinning hair okay first of all calm down nick second of all gay let's think about this thinning list of single men to know in the straight interpretation this means oh i'm old and all my bros are getting married and if you read it that way i'm really proud of you old sport but notice how he says to no as in he doesn't know these men yet so he's mourning the single men aka potential lovers soon to be lost to heterosexual marriage let's try to salvage the last shred of heterosexuality that nick carries maybe he means that he's sad he won't be able to meet as many single male friends sure that makes sense but it's interesting that the loss of single males is his primary concern what about the single women that will also slowly disappear from nick's life shouldn't a supposedly straight man worry about all the single women getting married and leaving him behind why single out single men it's interesting that nick's priorities are so clearly skewed in one direction gatsby's alright so after the lunch scene some crazy happens basically gatsby and daisy are on the way home and they accidentally hit a woman named myrtle with gatsby's car consequently everyone believes that gatsby was the driver and therefore the murderer but in reality nick is super gay okay i'm sorry so gatsby wasn't driving the car that hit myrnal daisy was the one driving the car but everyone in the story thinks it's gatsby right so tom and nick and jordan follow behind gatsby and daisy and find the crime scene on their way home it's upsetting and when they arrive to the eggs nick rage quits however as nick leaves tom and daisy's house gaspi magically appears from the bushes like a stalker nick and gasps we have a talk and during their talk gatsby accidentally reveals that daisy was actually the one driving the car our poor nick can finally go back to kissing the ground that gatsby walks the way that 1974 handles the scene is a little strange before gatsby says anything about who drove the car they just like start smoking cigarettes so nick just chooses to hang out with this dude he thinks he's a murderer but i guess it's okay because he's hot okay will graham back to the book so nick tries to sleep it off but he has some gay nightmares and ends up going back to gatsby's late into the night nick worries that myrtle's husband will try to track gatsby and wrongfully take revenge well at least that's what i assume nick's reasoning is to be because this is the exact quote i felt that i had something to tell him something to warn him about and mourning would be too late fitzgerald intentionally leaves it ambiguous again nick has something to say and he doesn't tell the reader exactly what it is but it could very well be a love confession how many almost loved confessions must this man go through the 2013 movie doesn't have nick waking up in cold sweats from homoerotic dreams but it's still pretty gay in this one gatsby asks nick to have a slumber party with him while he waits for daisy to call how many long sweaty nights does nick have to surrender in order to prove his love to gatsby back to the book during their slumber party nick insists that gatsby should run away with him okay maybe not with him although i'm sure that prospect burns in his soul but he does insist that gatsby flee the situation in case something bad happens to him and gatsby is not having it and nick just submits he was clutching at some last hope and i couldn't bear to shake him free nick loved gatsby so much he couldn't bear to see his unending hope crushed he just wants his homosexual to be happy the hubris of it there does come a point where nick has to leave to go to his cringe nine to five but nick can't do it i didn't want to leave gatsby i missed that train and then another before i could get myself away wow nick really is just neglecting all of his responsibilities for gatsby isn't he this is honestly unhealthy nick one man is not worth it it's not entirely clear what happened during these early morning hours we do know that gatsby revealed his entire life story to nick which is something that gatsby only reveals to intimate friends and lovers but who knows maybe gatsby told nick all this in bed finally nick sums up the courage to leave but he departs by giving gatsby a compliment they're a rotten crowd they're worth the whole damn bunch put together again gatsby is exceptional to nick but nick adds something in a narration that you wouldn't expect it was the only compliment i ever gave him because i disapproved of him from beginning to end really nick you you disapprove of him okay dude uh what was that thing about his smile again he smiled understandingly let's see uh how many sentences can nick go without talking about gatsby smile let's count oh it's literally one one sentence later his face broke into that radiant and understanding smile as if we'd been in ecstatic cahoots on that fact all the time you know nick the only thing that i'm starting the sense that you disapprove of is the fact that gatsby's not with you now something very tragic happens a spoiler alert for this almost 100 year old book but gatsby dies as nick suspected myrtle's husband believes gatsby is the killer and comes back to kill gatsby it's sad nick cries this is pretty much expected but there's something ironic about what happens as you all remember gatsby was an incredibly rich and charismatic man he held these grand and extravagant parties with hundreds of people yet no one cared about his death sure there were reporters and gossip but no one called or looked after gatsby's final affairs only a morning gay lover then as he lay in his house and didn't move or breathe or speak hour upon hour it grew upon me that i was responsible because no one else was interested i mean with that intense personal interest to which everyone has some big right at the end does everyone have a right to intense personal interest in everyone's death nick or do you mean the personal interest that all lovers have a right to when another lover dies i mean that's the only way what nick says makes sense and yes nick does act like a morning spouse he was the only one who cared the only one who made arrangements he was the only one who loved gatsby nick goes into detail about how he feels again i wanted to get somebody for him i wanted to go into the room where he lay and reassure him i'll get somebody for you gatsby don't worry just trust me and i'll get somebody for you gatsby doesn't have anyone even daisy didn't care to call him nick has to be there for him it really feels like nick is the widow here please tell me that this is self-evident and if it weren't enough well nick basically repeats one of the greatest romance tropes ever i began to have a feeling of defiance of scornful solidarity between gatsby and me against them all nick and gatsby against the world that's how nick sees everything just him and his lover against everyone else yeah gay i'm sorry that's really gay when gatsby's father comes back for the funeral nick has to lie about them being butt buddies he says they were close friends you know the uh my lover is dead now so i'm pretending i was just his neighbor because it's the 1920s sort of thing it's sad because a lot of reporters and hooligans come to see gatsby but didn't actually care deeply about the man only nick had that much of a profound bond with him nick spends days and nights trying to get people to show up to the funeral he becomes depressed and his perception of new york becomes twisted at the end of the novel after the funeral and nick's pining he visits jordan again he says something interesting about his age to her i'm 30. i'm 5 years too old to lie to myself and call it honor and it's odd it's like he's aware of how toxic masculinity can cause one to construct these lies about oneself in order to maintain a sense of dignity in such a heteronormative world but is nick still lying to himself about his true romantic feelings to gatsby like i said in the beginning of this nick is pretty creative about how he reveals his sexuality in the book like those deviously gay ellipses in the scene with mckee and i think this quote shows a new maturity from nick he's aware of heteronormativity and the damages that it can do the damages that it did to gatsby he and jordan say goodbye and nick interestingly describes himself as angry and half in love with her now i don't know what that's supposed to mean like where's the other half bro is it some special reserve you savor gatsby i don't know maybe he is half in love and that he deeply cares for her but can't really fully express himself romantically due to his latent homosexuality i don't know your guess is as good as mine nick later runs into tom and although tom is a terrible person he says something quite telling that fellow had it coming to him he threw dust in your eyes just like he did daisies but he was a tough one oh so so tom knows he's comparing nick to daisy a woman who was canonically in love with gatsby what is this dust exactly it can't be romantic love can it but that would make it gay so yeah this is really important tom brings up a direct comparison that makes this entire thing romantic both nick and daisy were swayed by gatsby's charm just like daisy nick fell victim to the dust of gatsby's influence nick ends the book thinking of gatsby and gatsby's hope for the world nick gives a proper send-off for the love of his life by speaking to the ideals he most embodied in the 2013 movie nick talks about gatsby reaching out for the green light you know the representation of people's dreams or whatever and what i find interesting about this scene is and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it but he did not know that it was already behind him gatsby believed in the green light oh so his dream was nick his dreams were already behind um nick claims and guess who's standing directly behind gatsby and gives gatsby a gay look it's nick so nick was gatsby's true dream eh i mean that's the implication here right like this this is just 2k i'm sorry so what was the point of all that who cares if nick is gay right well i care in school i was forced to care about the color of a green light and oh did i write so many words about a green light and yet queerness was brushed aside in my school the scene with mckee went by unnoticed aside from some conversations i had with friends and what's more it's not like these queer scenes were incidental as we saw before there are legitimate literary scholars tackling the question talking about how there's a good chance fitzgerald added queer undertones for the sake of driving home a malicious point about the immorality of queerness and the thing is if we let fitzgerald just make his point and have it go by unnoticed if we let him say that queerness and immorality are linked without acknowledging the real subtle work that fitzgerald's text is doing we can run into danger we can't just let those intentions reverberate in the subtext while queer people picking up on fitzgerald's words are mocked it's doing a double disservice to let the question of queer immorality stand on its own while ignoring or even mocking the queer voices reclaiming nick is one of their own because every time that i brought up the queerness of this book in multiple classrooms as a student it would be seen as a joke and yeah maybe it is funny that nick is a pining homosexual but maybe we should re-examine why something that was intentionally placed in the story is totally off limits in school discussion even when there's decent evidence in several published scholarly works on the queerness of gatsby sure maybe nick and gatsby aren't gonna run off into the sunset together but to say that the subtext isn't there to ignore what academics have said about fitzgerald and his intentions to ignore all the queer teens who are insecure about themselves and to call their interpretations jokes while their analysis is completely valid it's wrong and wouldn't it have been fun to be exposed to queer theory in high school it would have been interesting to talk about an alternative perspective especially in such a beloved classic yet here we are still going on and on about a green light we get it the green light represents the disillusionment of the lost generation in the wake of the empty promises of american exceptionalism conditioned by post-1920s declining economic and social stability that's all well and good but queer people fit into that story somewhere right so english teachers of the world next time you teach the great gatsby maybe don't ignore the legitimate claims of young queer people and young queer people your interpretation is just as valid as the next and hey young queers gatsby is public domain now go wild in conclusion when will the world finally let jordan get a goth girlfriend will nick ever shut up about gatsby's stupid smile how will the nation prepare for the ensuing army of gays ready to queerify public domain gatsby are nick and gatsby gay bi pan trans ace or something else entirely you decide hey you should subscribe and like this video also check out www.itsault.gay and then check out my twitter and then my instagram and then my patreon if you really like this video and want to support this channel and now my super and supreme gays mali drew g maria whitney welts marie zetotron paulina rakitzka megalomaniac 64. alexina charlotte del elliott ryro the foster 24 feeler afk bard cucumber the kimchi witch caroline doan cooper abby nakulen juicebox08 cody miller alexander bell maddie reyes k marie oowoo adrianne jackson sydney violet fabiana jamie doyle margarita carmelita ochoatzen corvus blair cct roy rod sales owl seven sean o'neal evan p gary k amari rome akari dango nesocat shiro chigo e-e-e alexa night tripping fairy jessica carmona etienne anna tchaikovska ennard james sledge steffy colin byrne kabu sydney smith jay patrick al wilson marie gene boyer amara

Channel: Alexander Avila

Views: 268,637

Keywords: gatsby, gay, lgbt, ship, nick, carraway, jay, jordan, literature, book, booktube, video essay, fitzgerald, 1920s, jazz, tumblr, are they gay, alex, aretheygay, english, teacher, education

Id: b9zuQebC7wA

Length: 70min 29sec (4229 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 31 2021