To support this contention, Blythe and many students cite as a key piece of evidence the narrator's explanation of why Homer did not marry Emily:

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. (126)

The comment is not, of course, Faulkner's, nor is it entirely a paraphrase of Homer's original comment, as Blythe suggests it is. The statement is the narrator's, and that part of the sentence most indicting--the part between the dashes--is spoken suggestively, with a sly wink and a nudge of the elbow, in an attempt to disparage Homer's character. To believe that the narrator here reveals something true about Homer is to become exactly like the narrator and hi

The reader must wonder how the narrator knows all this, unless he is one of the aldermen, talking about himself in the third person to hide his complicity. But if he is an alderman, how does he know so precisely what took place in the druggist's shop or in Judge Stevens's office? The narrator may be any one of these people, but he cannot be all of them. He knows so much (if indeed he hasn't fabricated everything) because the details of Emily Grierson's life have been passed to him along a sloppy bucket-brigade of gossip, making him all the more unreliable and all the more suspect as he passes along to us the observations and suspicions of his fellow townspeople. Homer's visit occurred forty years before the narrator writes. Surely memory and imagination have helped to embellish the stories swept forward by curiosity and "affection." Because everything this narrator says is suspect, we are denied the luxury of knowing that Homer Barron is or was anything.

[W]hen they sat down, a faint dust rose sluggishly about their thighs, spinning with slow motes in the single sun-ray.... Then they could hear the invisible watch ticking at the end of the gold chain. (120-121)

In fact, if Homer is gay and if the narrator knows it, why does he (the narrator) bother to hint around rather than simpl

Some topics in this essay:
Elks' Club--that, Miss Emily's, Homer Barron, Barron Homer, Rose Emily, Emily Grierson's, Homer Barron's, Homer Tobe, Judge Stevens's, , homer barron, homer's sexual, marrying 126, miss emily's, sexual preference, rose emily, homer's sexual preference, persuade homer, homer gay,