The Great Mirror of Same-Sex Love - Prose - 14. Unknown "One of the men Hemingway loved"

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One of the Men Hemingway Loved

In 1968 I returned to Paris and my French lover. […]

Also aboard was James Jones, who wrote From Here to Eternity, and we used to sit at the bar and discuss literature, etc. night after night. I finally brought up the subject of Gay authors. I said that, of course, everyone knew about Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, and Tennessee Williams, but I asked Mr. Jones – who knew Hemingway (Hemingway resented the younger Jones’s success, by the way) – if Hemingway had a [self-repression] problem, and I told him what I wrote you, that Hemingway had fallen in love with this red-headed bullfighter. Jones flatly stated, “Of course, it’s true. Hemingway did have [this] ‘problem,’ which he fought all his life. No doubt about it.” I then said to Jones, “But you are not Gay, are you?” And he said he had had some [same-sex] experiences, but that it wasn’t really his bag.

—Unknown, [i]

1968