And that book didn’t go anywhere, but I was still in love with the idea. And that wasn’t great, but it was like getting that first sketch out of your system.
I initially wrote Gatsby as a young adult prose novel. It was so jarring to me that… I completely shifted gears. And I read it, and I was actually really surprised with how relevant it still felt.ġ7 LGBTQ+ books we can’t wait to add to our shelves in 2023Įxciting debuts, fascinating memoirs, and plenty of eagerly-awaited releases from beloved queer writers are headed your way in the next year. And Gatsby was one of those books that I’d never read, and it was just on my list. And as soon as I started changing that, the narratives became more interesting and the discussions, and the character development, and the story arcs became more interesting…Īnd in that time, I was also trying to read as much as I was writing. So I was working on all these other projects, and I was looking at the work I had been doing, and I was surprised that all of them were just white characters. My goal was to provide better representation since I’m in this unique position …that I’m allowed to create characters that look more like me.Īnd it was also happened with the year that I came out as non-binary. I decided that I wanted to write stories that were more authentic to myself. So in 2017, I decided I was done with that. Having been raised by white parents and having not explored my own identity as an Asian person really put me in these trappings that I wasn’t aware of. And I was writing these stories because I felt that a caucasian protagonist was my narrative. For the longest time in my career, I’ve spent probably more than two-thirds of it writing these white male savior stories. I’m a Korean adoptee, and a non-binary person. Tell us about the process of looking at this classic, The Great Gatsby, through a queer lens.
We caught up with Jeremy to talk all about Gatsby, and what it means to reimagine a beloved classic. On their first reading, they immediately fell in love with its flawed characters, and began to wonder what this story could look like in a new context, from the perspective of teenagers in the 2020s, 100 years later.Īs a nonbinary Korean American, Holt pulled from their own experiences to spotlight queer communities, multicultural narratives, and authentic representation set against the familiar backdrop of Long Island, NY, in their new graphic novel, Gatsby, a “multicultural thriller for the internet age,” which hits shelves in comic book stores May 10, and all other bookstores May 30.
Like many of us who finally got around to reading those dusty paperbacks on our shelves during the pandemic, writer Jeremy Holt finally picked up The Great Gatsby during the COVID lockdown. One such favorite novel to many, The Great Gatsby, is almost 100 years old, and is often examined with queer themes in mind, especially when it comes to its narrator, Nick Carraway. It’s long been said that your favorite books, films, and other media are as queer as you want them to be.Ī close read of the right passages, through the right lens, can reveal themes that resonate across generations, identities, and experiences. ‘Gatsby’ art by Felipe Cunha | Image Credit: AWA Studios
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