Pretty sure Nick fucks a dude from that awful party at the beginning of the book. Literally the only way that scene makes sense.
So yes. Nick Carraway is totally queer.
I love readings of this book that reject the white hetero-ness that people think has to be canon.
Nick’s queer reading makes so much sense if you think about how he rejects the majority of West Egg (or whatever egg it is) but still holds Gatsby up on a pedestal. He calls everyone there selfish but thinks Gatsby (who I’ll argue is still rather selfish) represents this amazing sense of hope and perseverance.
Another reading I love the TGG is that Gatsbywas black. Those articles really say it all, so I won’t go into it.
The “Gatsby is Black” reading is so damn good and makes the entire book so much more interesting. Along with Queer!Nick, they make the book a far more enriching read.
Like, the Great Gatsby is a book about classism and the unattainability of the American Dream for the marginalized and the disillusionment of the young in the years just before the great depression.
Reading all the characters as white straight people misses a huge opportunity to explore those themes within a wider and more meaningful context.
"Fashion is one of the very few forms of expression in which women have more freedom than men. And I don’t think it’s an accident that it’s typically seen as shallow, trivial, and vain. It is the height of irony that women are valued for our looks, encouraged to make ourselves beautiful and ornamental… and are then derided as shallow and vain for doing so. And it’s a subtle but definite form of sexism to take one of the few forms of expression where women have more freedom, and treat it as a form of expression that’s inherently superficial and trivial. Like it or not, fashion and style are primarily a women’s art form. And I think it gets treated as trivial because women get treated as trivial."