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I recently read a complete-Hemingway-short-stories book.

(Spoilers here for a few Hemingway short stories.)

There’s a story fairly early on in it, “The End of Something” (1925), in which Hemingway’s semiautobiographical character Nick Adams goes fishing with his girlfriend Marjorie. Then they go sit on the beach and make a campfire, and Nick breaks up with Marjorie, for no clearly stated reason. Marjorie leaves… and then Nick’s friend Bill suddenly shows up. “Bill didn’t touch him either,” the narration says. And Bill knows that Nick has broken up with Marjorie. And I was amused to think that without changing a word of this story up to the final few paragraphs, this could have been the story of Nick and Bill getting together.

(…In my experience, posting this kind of thing results in people commenting to tell me how ridiculous it is that I think that that Nick and Hemingway are gay. So, to be clear: no, I’m not saying that Nick is gay nor that Hemingway was gay. I would be very surprised if Hemingway intended this story to be read as queer. In the above paragraph, all I’m doing is engaging in a hobby of mine: amusing myself by overlaying a queer reading on a text that probably wasn’t intended to be queer.)

Anyway, so that story put me in the right frame of mind to enjoyably read some other Hemingway stories, or at least sentences, through a queer lens. Like in “The Battler,” where the Nick’s-POV narration says “They would never suck him in that way again.” And: “The little man’s wrist was thick and the muscles bulged above the bone. Nick felt the slow pumping under his fingers.” And: “I like to be with him.” Or in “Soldier’s Home”: “Besides he did not really need a girl. The army had taught him that.” and “I know the temptations you must have been exposed to. I know how weak men are.”

(I expect that some commenter is now going to waste their time explaining to me what those sentences really mean. Please don’t.)

So I was happily continuing along—reading about, for example, Nick and another guy having “slapped the snow off each other’s trousers,” and how “fond” various male characters are of each other—and musing about how Manly Man straight fiction can have a lot in common with fiction about gay men. But I continued to assume that of course Hemingway never wrote any actual gay characters.

And then I got to “A Simple Enquiry” (1927), and was amused at my imposed queer lens on that, too—until I realized that in fact, the military officer in that story is gay.

And he’s reasonably sympathetically portrayed. The story is more or less from his point of view. He does proposition a subordinate (not good), but at least he easily takes no for an answer.

I was startled, and delighted. An overtly gay character? In a Hemingway story? I had no idea such a thing existed!

So I kept reading, now with the understanding that a queer lens was justified for at least one story. And I reached “The Light of the World” (1933), in which there were a couple of lines that seemed to suggest that the cook might be gay, though I wasn’t sure whether I was reading too much into that or not. At the end, Nick’s traveling companion Tom says something that I interpreted as a homophobic rejection of a quasi-advance from the cook; but Nick himself, from whose POV the story is told, doesn’t say anything homophobic.

And that led me to another thought about all this: Hemingway’s stories are full of racial slurs. Lots of them. They’re sometimes used in a sort of affectionate-between-buddies way, sometimes not, but they appear frequently in his stories. But not once did I see him use a homophobic slur in these stories.

…And then a couple of stories later, I came to one that really raised my eyebrows: “The Sea Change” (1931). In which a young couple, a man and a woman, are arguing in a café, about a “jam” the woman has gotten into. The woman says she loves the man, but he continues to be upset, and he says “If it was a man——,” and it gradually becomes clear that the woman has fallen for another woman, and wants to go off and be with her, and possibly also wants to come back to the man afterward, only he doesn’t want her back.

I was really not expecting that in a Hemingway story.

There ended up being only one other story in the book featuring an overtly queer character: “The Mother of a Queen” (1933). I mentioned the lack of slurs earlier, so I should note that in this story, he does refer to a gay male boxer as a “queen,” twice. But I’m not sure whether to consider that term as a slur in this context; the word has had different connotations in different communities at different times. (And it’s been suggested by at least one reader that the narrator of that story is himself gay.) And although the boxer in this story is not a good guy in various ways, his bad behavior doesn’t seem to me to be directly linked to his queerness—that is, I don’t feel like the narrator is saying that the boxer is bad because he’s gay.

That was the last of the overt queerness in these short stories, at least as far as I noticed. But while I’m on the topic, I feel like it’s worth mentioning one other thing:

In Hemingway’s posthumously published novel The Garden of Eden, which I haven’t read, the female lead, Catherine, gets her hair cut “as short as a boy’s,” and tells her husband David, “I’m a girl. But now I’m a boy too.” And then when they have sex, she tells David to call her Peter, and she tells him that he’s Catherine now.

…I’m sure that lots has been written about Hemingway and queerness, but so far I haven’t gone very far in looking for such writing. If any of you happen to have recommendations of works that discuss queerness in Hemingway’s fiction, let me know. (No need to do searches for me, nor to provide exhaustive bibliographies; just if you have specific works on this topic that you recommend.)