^* The “homosocial” text evident in Whitman’s verse has attracted much commentary, explicitly sanctioning the supposition of the poet’s homosexuality. But the preoccupation with rendering Whitman gay begins to sound as prudentially fixated on its own terms as the former tendency to claim him as a heterosexual hero. The axis of distinction deserves to be differently drawn, possibly even in the terms advanced by his friends, who distinguished the sexual dimension of Leaves of Grass from “‘the anonymous lascivious trash spawned in holes and sold in corners’”—a dimension Whitman pioneered in order “‘to rescue from the keeping of blackguards and debauchees, to which it has been abandoned … the great element of amativeness or sexuality, with all its acts and organs’” (Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America, 206).