A Comprehensive List of Things That Exhaust Me:

1. This book

2. Other stuff

I hate Hemingway and I’m so done with romanticized masculinity as celebrated by straight men. Remember that time that the narrator of this book casually mentioned wanting to commit a homophobic hate crime? Because I do. It actually comes pretty early in the book and if you don’t have your “I care about the wellbeing and safety of queer individuals and hate messages that normalize violence against them” goggles on, you might miss it.

On page 28, Jake thinks, “I was very angry. Somehow they always made me angry. I know they are supposed to be amusing, and you should be tolerant, but I wanted to swing on one, any one, anything to shatter that superior, simpering composure.”

And by they, he is referring to the men who just spoke effeminately, using “dear” as a term of endearment. The same men who then proceed to dance “big-hippily” with the prostitute and whose “simpering composure” he hates. The same men who Jake has just described as appearance-oriented. Short of describing house music blaring in the background, Hemingway does a pretty good job painting a picture of their sexuality through stereotypical camp descriptions. And then he does a pretty good job vilifying and shaming it. After all, wouldn’t you want to physically beat those men, too? Jeez. The audacity of wanting to be out in public with both limp wrists AND a penis! Horrible.

Oh, and then of course there’s the use of the word faggot on page 128. And it’s invoked as an abject identity to reinforce norms of male-to-male affection. Cool.

Here’s a decent article that elaborates more on the way that homosexuality and masculinity interact in the book. It’s annoying in its reductive repetition of the whole “male impotence=homosexuality in literature” thing, as though queerness were ONLY viewed and depicted as a sexual lacking and not also a perversion/predatory threat. Oh, and I think it’s argument about furnishings as a metaphor for an impotent penis is silly. Still an okay read, though.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/2928031?seq=15