The Queerness of Ulysses
June is a big month for me.
Not only is it Pride, but it is also the celebration of Bloomsday on June 16th, the day that James Joyce’s novel Ulysses takes place.
Every year I try to make Bloomsday a thing. The marketer inside of me tried to push it as “St. Patrick’s Day…in June!” but once I get around to explaining it’s actually a celebration of an 800-page Irish book of modernist fiction, I have lost anyone who showed a modicum of interest.
This year, I’m doing it big, though. My husband (who is a tremendous sport about this) is journeying to Dublin with me on June 16th to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the publication of the novel. I am very excited to see people in early 20th-century dress drinking beer and talking about Molly Bloom’s soliloquy. MY TRIBE! MY PEOPLE!
It’s going to be very lit, as the youths may say.
As I prepared this post, I was trying to figure out how to do something Pride-related but also include Ulysses. The result was a creative explosion in my head: I actually realized the reason I love the book so much is because it is extremely queer.
My Meet-Cute with Ulysses
When I discovered Ulysses in my senior year of college, I was very closeted at my Catholic university. My friend and I, who considered ourselves pretentious, writerly folks, saw a Ulysses course was being offered in the spring semester and had to take it. How else can you get credits for something AND gain superior modernist literature knowledge to lord over others at cocktail parties? None! This class was made for us.
While I was dedicated to the cause of the future, pretentious cocktail party, I was also a lazy college student. I bought the book from the bookstore and did not crack the thing open until the first day of class.
That was when I fell in love.
Expecting paragraphs and blocks of texts, I was met with… weirdness! To understand my confusion, you have to know that Ulysses is comprised of chapters written:
- In the form of newspaper headlines and small articles
- Like a 200-page play
- In an 8-sentence, 50-page monologue with nary a paragraph break
- As a catechism with questions and responses
The book itself is a puzzle box. As I flipped through the pages, I thought “What? What…what is this? Why?”
Confusion soon gave way to joy. This wasn’t an 800-page stuffy book. This was some sort of kid’s activity book (a really, really long one).
I looked around the room to see if other people had the same thing wrong with their books.
“Did you all get the one with the weird play in the middle?”
After years in college studying books with normal block paragraphs and many pages, this odd text provided an experience akin to leaping out of water and taking a deep breath of oxygen.
After years in creative writing courses feeling that I had to write like Hemingway, Faulkner, or Wallace, this was like having someone smash me out of a glass cage.
After years of being a closeted gay kid, the queerness of these pages screamed loudly: Different is fun. Different is literature. Different is free.
The General Queerness of Ulysses
As I got further into the book, though, it wasn’t just the text that was different; everything about it was a little queer.
To give context, Ulysses was banned in the United States for 11 years after its initial publication. The book was, at the time, so morally questionable that no one would publish it at all in 1922. Joyce, its author, was a victim of the OG cancel culture. While people thought it was brilliant in its serialized version, publishers weren’t willing to take the chance on creating controversy by binding it all together and shipping it into the world.
It took a brave, kind lesbian (yes!), Sylvia Beach, to do the publication. She took pity on her buddy James and agreed to put it together and send it out.
So, already we have the queer visual presentation of the book’s contents and a lesbian fairy godmother getting it published.
But, wait, there’s even more gay!
- Ulysses shows all aspects of life. The book is TOUGH to get through. Passages will fly by and you’ll say to yourself, “What did I even just read?” But there are anchors, moments that pull the reader back into the fold. One of the first is Leopold Bloom taking a poo at the end of a chapter. Despite all its highfaluting language, the book is really a celebration of all aspects of life: the good, the bad, the weird, and the ugly. To have your main character defecate joyfully in 1922 was wild. But, on a micro-scale, it shows that Joyce was dedicated to showing life as it truly is. No hiding poos, no closets, no concealment. People are what they are and it’s a glorious mess.
- The protagonist is an outsider. The book actually has two protagonists, a down-and-out writer and a Jewish man. Leopold Bloom is the Jewish man. Surrounded by white Catholics, he experiences life as a constant outsider. People comment on his difference. He feels excluded and ostracized at points in the novel. The whole time he is out and about in Dublin his wife is cheating on him. Not only is he socially an outsider, but he is an outcast in his own house. As a gay, protestant at a Catholic university, you can bet I connected closely with good ol’ Leopold. We watched, we observed, we tried to fit in. And we both found friends. The novel shows Stephen (the writer) and Leopold connecting at the end of the book; despite their age and cultural differences, the day brings them closer together.
- The book is extremely sex-positive. The reason it was banned in the U.S. was due to a scene when Leopold pleasures himself while watching a young woman. (As I said, Joyce shows ALL aspects of life.) That’s not even to mention the 200-page brothel scene… People transform into dogs, change genders, and commit acts that I really don’t feel comfortable describing in a public forum. It’s all there. Joyce himself had a famous fart fetish (warning: his letters to his wife can get graphic). Let’s just say, I think he’d be an ally for LGBTQIA2+ folks today.
- A woman gets the last word. Sometimes when I need inspiration, I read the last page of Ulysses. I couldn’t tell you a single thing about the other 50+ pages of the soliloquy, but that last page… Wow. After 799 pages of describing the ordinary, weird, joyful, chaotic nature of life, Joyce ends with an incredible celebration of love and existence. Told from the perspective of Leopold’s wife, Molly, it recounts a day she and Leopold spent while they were madly in love: the rhythm, the words, the sentiment. It’s gorgeous. It’s also wonderful that in a book about a day full of men with male protagonists, we see a woman get to tell her side of the story. In 1922, having a brash, opinionated, bold woman get a full soliloquy talking about her life and sexual desires, was… well, also bold. Joyce gave the microphone to a marginalized person for the final word on what life is really about. By today’s standards, not revolutionary, but at the time, it was a thoughtful, inclusive end to a story about living.
It may not be on my must-read gay book lists, but I think Ulysses is worth a gander for queer folks. Even a flip through its (many, many pages) can feel like a queer odyssey compared to other novels you may come across.
It’s weird. It’s wonderful. It’s bold. It doesn’t hide from what life is: To me, there’s nothing more jubilant or queer than that.
Happy Pride and Happy Bloomsday!
Tedd Hawks is a writer, trainer, and book coach from Chicago. You can follow his Instagram and humor blog. If you’re interested in book coaching services check out his offerings here.
