Ernest Hemingway, the False Macho

Abstract

Certainly, when people think of Ernest Hemingway what comes to mind for most is the idea that he was a ''man's man,'' a true macho who loved in equal parts drinking, hunting, war, and womanizing. He is associated with Pamplona and the running of the bulls, corrida, deep-sea fishing for marlin in the Caribbean, and the shooting of lions and water buffalo in East Africa. He was a man of action, the Lord Byron of his age, seriously wounded in Italy in the First World War, the survivor of two airplane crashes and, of course, as a writer someone who won both the Pulitzer and the Nobel Prize for literature. Yet, while all of the above is true, this traditional image of my grandfather was problematic for me as I was growing up. Being a part of the family I couldn't, like most of my grandfather's many admirers, look at the man and just see the legendary writer and world traveler. This was because my father, Ernest's youngest son Gregory, seemed to be as different as you could be from the author of The Old Man and the Sea. From his early teenage years, Gregory cross-dressed and eventually underwent a series of operations at the age of sixty-four to change his sex. Needless to say, there were many times when I'd ask myself, just what connection could there possibly be between this cross-dressing, transsexual Doctor of Medicine (MD), and America's macho icon? While there didn't seem to be any on the surface, even as a boy I knew that there was a strong link between the two men. Yet, knowing that there was this connection didn't necessarily mean that I was eager to explore their possible similarities. As a young man, I thought that if Ernest was anything at all like my father, then what did this say about me? Was I like them? Perhaps, destined to