Most of those friends were gay, and the gay world was a significant part of what they showed him. As was true for many other young men, the friends he made at the Y remained important to him for years and helped him find his way through the city. arrived in New York City in the 1940s, he did what many newcomers did: he took a room at the 63rd Street YMCA. The important thing, to fans like Stoker, to schoolmarms, to the general public, was that Whitman was manly.When Willy W. "Walt has these relationships going on, exchanging rings in one case, but at the same time he has relationships with women, but I don't know if there was any sexual component." At one time he claimed to have six illegitimate children. Critics sometimes use the blanket term "queer writer." Some have theorized that he was bisexual, or that his male relationships were Platonic. It should be added that Whitman muddied the waters about his own sexuality, and scholars still debate it today - though pretty much everyone recognizes the strong homosexual component in his verse. What Stoker might have thought, if he had known about all the rumored men in Whitman's life - one of whom, Harry Stafford, got a ring which he said only death could part from him - is hard to say. "How sweet a thing it is for a strong healthy man with a woman’s eye and a child’s wishes to feel that he can speak to a man who can be if he wishes father, and brother and wife to his soul," Stoker wrote. "I would like to call YOU Comrade and to talk to you as men who are not poets do not often talk," Stoker wrote to Whitman on Feb.
#FAMOUS GAY MEN IN LITERATURE CODE#
That code was picked up - though possibly not decoded - by Stoker. He seemed to be writing in a sort of code." "The affection he felt toward these soldiers, his descriptions, seem to speak to a gay readership," Gooch said. "His poetry reflects a kind of eroticism about the male body, and even the bodies of the wounded in the Civil War, and the hospital and the battlefield," Gooch said. Watch Video: Watch: Camden poet Rocky Wilson shares his passion for Walt Whitman He was, after all, just writing poems about soldiers, workers, the heroic men who fought the Civil War and built the cities, the men everyone in America was proud of. True-blue, manly friendships between bosom buddies were a staple of poetry, and boys' adventure stories.Think of Huck and Jim, Ishmael and Queequeg. It was easy for someone like Whitman to take on protective coloration. And one of the things it waxed sentimental about was manliness. The 19th century - the Victorian era - was a sentimental age. One thing may have been the kind of gay man Whitman was.
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How is it that the prudes - or the police - never stamped him out? Whitman has been hiding in plain sight for 150 years. More: Lowry: Merwin exalted mystery, and allowed us to wallow there More: Frances Lombardi-Grahl reads her poem about Paterson More: In age of fast Twitter fame, these poets work in slow obscurity.
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Mencken wrote: "Whitman's first partisans were not interested in poetry they were interested in sex, and perhaps especially in homosexuality." In 1855, critic Rufus Griswold - remembered, by fans of literary trivia, as Edgar Allan Poe's character assassin - took "Leaves of Grass" to task for obscenity, in particular for "that horrible sin, among Christians not to be named" (the term "homosexuality" wasn't coined until 1868). Whitman, it should be added, was not one of those artists who had to be "reclaimed," post-Stonewall. No one needed to rebrand him as a gay icon. He communicates with members of his own community with special hints and signs." Things that say one thing to the gay readers, and something more trivial to heterosexual readers. "Part of the interest of his poems is that he wrote so many with both audiences in mind.
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"Obviously gay readers of his poems saw something in them that what Walt Whitman called his 'civilian' readers didn't see," Schmidgall said. ".A youth who loves me and whom I love, silently approaching and seating himself near, that he may hold me by the hand." ("A Glimpse") More: Poem in Your Pocket Day: 'Song of Myself' (Verse 52) by Walt Whitman "We two boys together clinging…Arm'd a fearless, eating, drinking, sleeping loving" ("We Two Boys Together Clinging") On the one hand, he's lionized as a founding father of American letters, the poet of Democracy, the pioneer of blank verse, the literary giant whose poems like "O Captain! My Captain!" and "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d" have been routinely taught to schoolchildren since the 19th century.Īt the same time, he's been a comfort and inspiration to generations of closeted gay men - probably Stoker was one of them - to whom poems like "We Two Boys Together Clinging" and "A Glimpse," would have spoken in achingly personal terms. Walt Whitman, celebrating his 200th birthday May 31, is an interesting sort of national hero.