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FLKNER'S GAY HOMER, ONCE MORE
And many of the same stunts nclu, strangely, that Homer Barron, Ey Grierson's suor Flkner's "A Rose for Ey, "is gay. Homer Barron, a bluff man wh a "big voice"who "cs[] the niggers"and spoils Southern womanhood, gay?
When the stunts are asked why they believe or spect that Homer is gay, they variably ce the followg le: "Homer himself had remarked-he liked men, and was known that he drank wh the younger men the Elks' Club-that he was not a marryg man"(126) For the sake of argument, and out of ference to the ncln of many of our stunts, if not to the current trends lerary theory, let suppose that Homer Barron is, or might be, homosexual-that he really lik men. Posg that Homer Barron is gay not only rais a new set of qutns but transforms "A Rose for Ey, "or at least our perspective of , important ways. A homosexual "day laborer" the turn-of-the-century South is almost as remarkable and nfoundg as a hcty, love-starved necrophiliac.
Given the narrative amework of the story, we n only image-we are not privy to-the lonels and longg that Ey mt have felt to have killed a man and slept bi his yg rpse; yet we mt unrtake perhaps an equivalent imagative flight to prehend the nfn and tratn endured by Homer Barron, a gay man an age when homosexualy was virtually tantamount to necrophilia. As Flkner no doubt knew, yellow was associated the 1890s-approximately the perd which the supposed urtship tak place-wh the Yellow Book, atheticism, and, directly, homosexualy. Ultimately, however, those who sist upon matag that Homer Barron is gay mt hang virtually their entire se upon the narrator's claim that Homer "lik men"and that he is not "a marryg man.
FLKNER'S GAY HOMER, ONCE MORE
If our nventn-bound narrator spected that Homer were gay, he would certaly have had more to say about the matter-his attentn would have shifted om Ey to Homer. "Ttg out a hunch is exactly what I'm dog by takg serly the possibily, posed or assumed by untls stunts, that Homer Barron is gay. If the classroom rembl a mocracy, at least when to exegetil matters, then the other si-those who do not accept as plsible the proposn that Homer Barron is gay-serv equal time.
Lastly, I will attempt to duce what our stunts' reads to assume that Homer is gay n tell about their acculturatn and their habs as rears, matters difficult to separate. "Jt as our stunts know that the e of the word "nigger" is not only a dig but actnable-and even those rare stanc where society perms s e, mt be set off wh quotatn marks-so they also know, whether they like or not, that stutns of power, pecially the media and ame, are now dog everythg their power to -stigmatize and normalize homosexualy.
In this era of "g out"and "gay pri, " is no wonr that our stunts, particularly given their leralist approach to readg lerature, nclu on very snty evince that a sendary character a story by Flkner is or might be homosexual. In the popular culture nsumed by our stunts- movi, televisn shows, and bt-sellg novels-homosexualy is portrayed as prevalent and random; one of the lsons, addn to the tth that gays are as fully human as anybody else, seems to be that all kds of people whom you would least spect, bee they fy simplistic stereotyp, are fact homosexuals. Here is yet another se where the age-old signifiers-the "markers"thought to intify homosexualy-are shown to be unreliable and arbrary.