[показать]We had to read "A Rose for Emily" for today's English assignment, which is a pretty interesting, although somewhat creepy, short story by William Faulkner. In a few words, it is about a woman who had a pretty miserable life and ended up poisoning her lover and leaving him rot in her house for the next ten years. This is an online class, so I have to read responses of all the classmates. Having just looked through most of them, I was surprised to find out that the majority of the class members, for some reason, came to a conclusion that woman's lover was gay.

Because of the wording of one sentence, I can see why some of my classmates could think so, but, in my opinion, their understanding of this only sentence, which presumably implies guy's homosexuality, is wrong. So, since, from what I can tell from their writing, most of the people in my class are pretty dumb :)), I'd like to hear your opinion about it. I understand that it is difficult to judge from the sentence that is taken out of context, but I pinky swear that nothing else in the story is relevant to the discussion. Below is a sentence and then reasoning (as written in response to other student's comment) that led me to conclude that the narrator has never said anything about the character's sexuality.

Then we said, "She will persuade him yet," because Homer himself had remarked -- he liked men, and it was known that he drank with the younger men in the Elks' Club -- that he was not a marrying man.

As we know, rules of punctuation say that dashes let us interrupt a sentence's structure to add information. Consequently, the text surrounded by dashes can be removed from the sentence without affecting its meaning in any serious way. If, in the sentence above, one takes into account only the information outside of dashes, he or she will read:
(1)"...Homer had himself had remarked that he was not a marrying man."

If one rewrites the part within dashes as a separate sentence after thet, he or she will get:
(2)"He liked men, and it was known that he drank with the younger men in the Elks' Club."

There is no evidence whatsoever in the sentence #1 about Homer being gay. As far as the second sentence is concerned, while in context of our time "to like men" would, indeed, hint at the sexual orientation of the individual, it is doubtful that in 1930, when the story was first published, this wording was used in the same way as today. Back then, "to like men" could just as easily mean "to like to hang out with men", which, in my opinion, is much more likely. Thus, I believe that the only thing that the narrator meant to say by adding this extra information is that Homer was a very sociable guy, he liked to spend time with other men, and during such get-togethers he would sometimes mention that he was not a marrying kind.

Does this reasoning make sense to you? If you don't agree, please, elaborate :)...and please remember that nowhere else in the text is even a slightest hint, mentioning, or questioning of Homer's sexual orientation.