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Is Tom Ripley gay?
And it appears even to have flummoxed Ripleys creator, a lesbian with a complicated relationship to queer sexuality.
I dont think Ripley is gay, she said adamantly, in the characterization of her interviewer.
He appreciates good looks in other men, thats true.
But hes married in later books.
Im not saying hes very strong in the sex department.
But he makes it in bed with his wife.
The question isnt a minor one.
Most of his social circle the names he tosses around when introducing himself to Dickie are gay men.
The aunt who raised him, he bitterly recalls, once said of him, Sissy!
Hes a sissy from the ground up.
Just like his father!
Fortunately, Tom has another go-to party trick.
All of his signature characters are, by the way, women.
In the novel, Tom reacts by going pale.
He hotly denies it but not before feeling faint.
Nobody had ever said it outright to him, Highsmith writes, not in this way.
And it seemed to frighten Highsmith herself.
Its delectable daylit noir, but nothing unsettling lingers.
It doesnt end well for either of them.
Zaillian is not especially interested in courting our sympathy.
This changes everything we think we know about the characters from the first moments of episode one.
Hes been at this a very long time, and this is as far as hes gotten.
If he ever had dreams, he probably buried them years earlier.
If he ever had any sexual desire, he seems to have doused it long ago.
I dont think hes normal enough to have any kind of sex life.
Hes just a nothing, which is worse.)
Hes his own thing a universe of one.
Toward the end ofRipley, Tom is asked by a detective to describe the kind of man Dickie was.
He knew he was supremely untalented.
