Do you think the most important people from literature and history were fully respectable, dull people? Then you were fooled.
Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker and Walt Whitman were tangled in a love-triangle. Lord Byron is responsible for Twilight and his...
Your curator is back on their bullshit, with some new queer stories! Horay! Giys, I am bursting with ideas, I hope I can upload all of them soon!
This time, after our last chapter brought us to America, let's skip forward to the 1920's.
I know that some of you have read the book "The Great Gatsby" and definitely saw the queer subtext (Though, honestly - what SUBtext? Fitzgerald literally compares Gatsby to one of the most famous gay icons of his time, but that is another story).
That, of course, raises one question: What about the author? I mean, this is a book with obvious gay subtext from the 1920's, the gayest decade of the last century! There must be something, right? Right?
Of course.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, the chronicler of the Golden Twenties, was not only an alcoholic and a notorious cheater, but also a theatre kid and, most likely, a very repressed bisexual.
Here he is in his younger years. I spare you the pictures from his later years, when he alcohol and drugs had already ruined him.
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Fitzgerald was born in 1896 to a middle-class family. He entered Princeton University in 1913, and already started writing, dating women and becoming alcoholic. As one does.
One of his first lovers was Miss Ginevra King, who would become the inspiration for many of his characters, for example Daisy Buchanan in the Great Gatsby. They didn't marry - her father reportedly warned him that 'poor boys shouldn't marry rich girls'. A warning that Fitzgerald should have respected.
He later claimed that she would always remain his first love, and that he would always love her. That lasted until they met again in 1938, King asked him, which of his characters were based on her. Fitzgerald threw his glass to the ground and snarled "Which bitch do you think you are?". True love. Good that they didn't marry.
But back to the college years, because now the fun part comes: While Fitzgerald was in college, he wrote multiple texts and short stories and published them in newspapers. For his group of friends and his college group, he also wrote little musicals, for example titled "The Evil Eye", "The Girl from Lazy J" or "The Captured Shadow". They were performed by the Princeton Triangle Club, a theatre troupe in St. Pauls, and quite often, Fitzgerald would act in his own plays. He even composed the music all by himself, this little nerd.
And in one of the plays, The Evil Eye, Fitzgerald was banned from performing - no one knows why, but it is a shame, since Fitzgerald wrote the script and really, really wanted to star in the leading role. His friends must have been a little confused. "Scott. The leading role is a girl."
"Yeah", Fitzgerald answers. "So what? Get me a dress, you cowards."
They didn't, but that didn't stop Fitzgerald. He got himself a dress and posed for the New York Times to advertise for the musical. As one does.
