Opening The Closets: Queer Reading of ‘The Great Gatsby’

         “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald was written and published in 1925. It was an era where same-sex relationships were marked as “not appropriate” and basically, illegal. Homosexuality was not in line with mainstream society and the rising LGBTQIA members faced severe and hideous restrictions.       In an online platform Quora , a user raised a question “Were gay people in the closet in every state in the 1920's-1970s?” James Finn , a former LGBT activist responded that indeed in most regions especially in places where evangelical Christians are in a majority, huge numbers of lesbians and gay men remain closeted to avoid persecution and social ostracization. In the context of New York (the setting of the novel), sexual relations between persons of the same gender (variously described as "sodomy", "buggery" or "sins of carnal nature") was illegal for most of history from its days as a Dutch colony through its colonization ...