Re: hemingway

Camille Scaysbrook (verona_beach@geocities.com)
Tue, 08 Jun 1999 17:05:08 +1000 

As usual I rashly quoted off the top of my head, just like the notorious
Dostoevsky as Paedophile postings ( a) I just read a biography of Lewis
Carroll in which Dostoevsky's views on child prostitution seemed very much
at odds with that idea but b) I still swear I read that, I just wasn't sure
where) 

I had assumed that Hemingway's rumoured homosexuality was pretty much a
known thing. I'm just trying to think of where I read it - I'm fairly sure
it was in one or another biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald (it might have
been one called `Invented Lives' - I'm not 100% sure though). I remember
though that I was quite incredulous about it and I asked my Dad - `was
Hemingway gay???' and his response was something like `Well, yeah, that's
what they're thinking now.' I thought it explained a lot of things - the
way that Hemingway's machoism seemed almost a drag act in reverse. It was
very much a behaviour I had noticed in friends of mine who I had known for
years and whom had later come out. It was a strange sort of appropriation
of masculinity; they would say things like `wow hasn't she got great tits'
or whatever, a sort of TV-manhood. 

Anyway, I will diligently attempt to find out where I heard this (I will
ask my Dad how *he* heard it, too!)

Camille
verona_beach@geocities.com
@ THE ARTS HOLE http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Theater/6442
@ THE INVERTED FOREST http://www.angelfire.com/pa/invertedforest

> > Hey! I'm still getting over the news that he was gay! What a painful
way to
> > live your life - as a phony all the way.
> 
> Camille, where did you come across this news?  I'm curious, because I've
> read nearly every Hemingway biography that has been published in the
> last 20 years, and have never seen this documented.  There has been
> plenty of speculating about why he wanted to seem so Masculine.  (One
> amusing note is that when he was a child, his mother-from-hell used to
> dress Ernest and his sister in identical dresses; many people have
> speculated that this led him to assert in later life that he was a
> capital-m Man.)
> 
> But I've never read anything that asserted he was gay.  I'd like to see
> that documented.  
> 
> --tim