When Nick Carraway and Jordan Baker hear “The Sheik of Araby,” F. Scott Fitzgerald constructs a substantial identification between Rudolph Valentino’s feminized male eroticism and Jay Gatsby’s exoticness as a modern dandy in The Great Gatsby. The song was composed about a movie The Sheik (1921) where Valentino performed a young head of an Arabian clan. In constructing Gatsby’s ethnicity and sexuality in the novel, Fitzgerald alludes to the Italian-born actor Valentino who gained success through the erotic commodification of his unmarked transvestism and hyper-manhood, which laid him open to xenophobic attack in the early-twentieth-century U.S. culture. The implicit presence of Valentino, whose commodified ethnicity agitated the sense of class security of mainstream white aristocracy, shapes Tom’s xenophobia against Gatsby’s ethnicity in The Great Gatsby. The prototypal construction of Valentino places the novel in the historical era when a profitable but unassimilable commodity in an industry built on ethnic success infiltrated into the market-driven culture. In this cultural milieu, Gatsby’s willingness to commodify himself opens up new ways to penetrate the class barrier not through traditional class struggle but through self-reinvention.