Several years ago, Ph.D. in hand, I went looking for a job as an English professor. Usually, hundreds of candidates apply for a job, ten are given initial interviews, and then three are invited to campus. On campus, you give a talk based on your research to the rest of the department or, at schools where teaching matters more than research, you teach a class while a few members of the department look on. For a job at a public university in the South, I was asked to teach a class on Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” What luck, I thought. But after walking students through the ins and outs of the opening sections of the poem—how Whitman joins all the things (body and soul, life and death, north and south, slave and slave master) his culture did its best to keep apart—I paused to ask if anyone had any questions. A young woman boldly raised her hand and asked, “Was Whitman gay?”
From her tone, I guessed that she liked Whitman, but if the answer to her question was yes, she might have to reconsider. In retrospect, I should have just answered yes and been done with it. But instead I told her the truth, which is that a lot of circumstantial evidence suggests that yes, Whitman was gay, but he did not think of himself as such. To add to the confusion, the question itself may not make sense. In the nineteenth century, as I explain below, no one was, strictly speaking, gay.
It did not come up that day, but how we answer this question matters because Whitman thinks about democracy in startlingly personal terms, and if you think that his poems about manly love, comrades, and democracy are really just poems about his homosexuality, then the political dimensions of the poems, which I explore in the next chapter, will mean far less than their sexual ones—and that would be a shame, I think, because we desperately need to hear what Whitman has to say about politics.
On the surface, the poems Whitman wrote for the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass, which he grouped under the heading “Calamus,” would seem to settle the question of whether he was gay or not. In the very first poem of the sequence, Whitman resolves “to tell the secret of [his] nights and days” and “to sing no songs to-day but those of manly attachment,” and throughout the forty-five poems that make up the sequence, he keeps his word.1 The poems, as one critic notes, have “come to be celebrated as a homosexual manifesto.”2
The calamus plant, with flowering spike
Indeed, the title of the sequence itself might put a stop to further inquiry. The flowering spike that grows from the calamus plant looks—there is no other way to put it—like an erect penis.
In addition to their suggestive title, the poems seem straightforwardly gay. The sequence includes stunning love poems like this one:
When I heard at the close of the day how my name had been received with plaudits in the capitol, still it was not a happy night for me that followed;
And else, when I caroused, or when my plans were accomplished, still I was not happy;
But the day when I rose at dawn from the bed of perfect health, refreshed, singing, inhaling the ripe breath of autumn,
When I saw the full moon in the west grow pale and disappear in the morning light,
When I wandered alone over the beach, and, undressing, bathed, laughing with the cool waters, and saw the sun rise,
And when I thought how my dear friend, my lover, was on his way coming, O then I was happy;
O then each breath tasted sweeter—and all that day my food nourished me more—And the beautiful day passed well,
And the next came with equal joy—And with the next, at evening, came my friend;
And that night, while all was still, I heard the waters roll slowly continually up the shores,
I heard the hissing rustle of the liquid and sands, as directed to me, whispering, to congratulate me,
For the one I love most lay sleeping by me under the same cover in the cool night,
In the stillness, in the autumn moonbeams, his face was inclined toward me,
And his arm lay lightly around my breast—And that night I was happy.3
Notice how the clauses pile up only to end in short, declarative statements: “O then I was happy,” or later, “And that night I was happy.” It is a masterpiece. Whitman turns a theme already exhausted in his own day—only the love of another truly satisfies—into a moving, quiet, and above all tender poem.
In addition to love poems, “Calamus” also includes forsaken-love poems like this one:
Hours continuing long, sore and heavy-hearted,
Hours of the dusk, when I withdraw to a lonesome and unfrequented spot, seating myself, leaning my face in my hands;
Hours sleepless, deep in the night, when I go forth, speeding swiftly the country roads, or through the city streets, or pacing miles and miles, stifling plaintive cries;
Hours discouraged, distracted—for the one I cannot content myself without, soon I saw him content himself without me;
Hours when I am forgotten (O weeks and months are passing, but I believe I am never to forget!)
Sullen and suffering hours! (I am ashamed—but it is useless—I am what I am);
Hours of my torment—I wonder if other men ever have the l like, out of like feelings?
Is there even one other like me—distracted—his friend, his lover, lost to him?
Is he too as I am now? Does he still rise in the morning, dejected, thinking who is lost to him? and at night, awaking, think who is lost?
Does he too harbor his friendship silent and endless? harbor his anguish and passion?
Does some stray reminder, or the casual mention of a name, bring the fit back upon him, taciturn and deprest?
Does he see himself reflected in me? In these hours, does he see the face of his hours reflected?4
Unlike “When I Heard at the Close of Day,” this poem is a moving testament to loneliness and the various forms it takes. There is the loneliness that comes from being forgotten by a lover, and then the loneliness of wondering whether other men react so passionately to being forgotten by their lovers. In his shifting misery, all the speaker wants is company.
The wonderful thing about both poems, I believe, is that Whitman does not assume that love for another man is something he must defend or treat as a peculiarity. Instead, he takes such relationships as a given and then explores the emotions that result: anticipation, joy, despair, loneliness. In other words, there is nothing the least bit unnatural about these relationships. As in the first poem, nature itself—the beach and the sea—seem to congratulate Whitman on finally uniting with his lover.
At the same time, as the second of these two poems suggests, Whitman occasionally hints that he has something to feel ashamed of, something to hide, which, to those reading today, looks like the torment of someone neither fully in nor fully out of the closet. “I am ashamed,” he tells us in “Hours Continuing Long,” and in another poem Whitman writes:
Who is now reading this?
. . . may-be one who is puzzled at me.
As if I were not puzzled at myself.
Or as if I never deride myself! (O conscience-struck! O self-convicted!)
Or as if I do not secretly love strangers! (O tenderly, a long time, and never avow it);
Or as if I did not see, perfectly well, interior in myself, the stuff of wrong-doing,
Or as if it could cease transpiring from me until it must cease.5
On the one hand, the speaker recognizes “the stuff of wrong-doing” in him. On the other hand, he understands that he can do nothing about it. It has a life of its own. “I am what I am,” he declares with a mixture of pride and resignation in “Hours Continuing Long.”6
Not for nothing, then, have readers wanted to claim Whitman as gay. He gives voice not only to the ordinariness of extraordinary love for another person of the same sex, including its potential disappointment, but also to the sense of shame, despair, and fear that has often accompanied such love.
For all of that, though, perhaps the best evidence for Whitman’s anxious homosexuality comes in the poems he changed or cut for different editions of his book. When Whitman published another edition of Leaves of Grass in 1867, for example, he deleted two of the poems from the 1860 edition that I quote above (“Hours Continuing Long” and “Who Is Now Reading This?”). Both poems would seem to have revealed more than Whitman felt comfortable revealing.
Moreover, in the 1920s, one of Whitman’s first biographers, Emory Halloway, discovered that one of the poems, “Once I Passed Through a Populous City,” written for the “Children of Adam” sequence of poems, which, if you’ll remember from chapter 3, celebrates the love between men and women, had in the original manuscript described Whitman’s love for a man and not a woman. Whitman simply changed the pronouns. The discovery seems to have undone its discoverer, Holloway. Afterward, he set out to prove Whitman’s heterosexuality by tracking down one of the six children Whitman claimed—falsely—to have fathered. (More on these invented children below.)7
Similarly, in the 1950s, another Whitman scholar, Fredson Bowers, discovered that Whitman originally conceived of twelve of the “Calamus” poems as a single cluster of poems, which he titled, after one of the poems, “Live Oak, with Moss.” Reconstructed, the sequence vividly narrates a love affair with a man. (The poem quoted above, “When I Heard at the Close of Day,” was the third poem in the sequence. “Hours Continuing Long,” also quoted above, was the eighth.) Yet when Whitman assembled the “Calamus” poems for the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass, he scrambled the “Live Oak, with Moss” sequence, effectively destroying the narrative, again, critics argue, because it would have revealed too much.8
For many readers, these changes and deletions look like censorship, whether because Whitman felt ashamed of his homosexuality or, more likely, because he understood what the public would and would not tolerate when it came to homosexuality. Even Whitman knew there were some lines you could not cross.
In any case, all of this evidence—plus some that I have not cited, like the homoerotic elements of other poems, Whitman’s habit of attaching himself to young working-class men, and some second- and third-hand testimony—seems to add up to one conclusion: Whitman was gay, and “Calamus,” including its emendations and deletions, tells the story. Moreover, or so the argument sometimes goes, anyone who says otherwise must be in the grips of homosexual panic or want to “save” Whitman from homosexuality.
To tell the truth, I wish the story was that simple. As this book makes clear on virtually each of its pages, I am a died-in-the-wool liberal, in love with tolerance as much as the next liberal, and it would doubtless help the cause of tolerance if someone as saintly as Whitman was definitively gay. If, as numerous scholars have pointed out, the source of homophobia is disgust, it is very hard to be disgusted by Whitman. As the poems quoted above attest, he makes love for another person of the same sex seem deeply human, as sweet and turbulent as any other love. Moreover, think what good it would do young men and women suffering from harassment and self-hatred to read an unapologetically—or mostly so—gay poet like Whitman.
But the truth is that if you tug at them even a little, each of the arguments for Whitman’s homosexuality begins to unravel. That does not mean Whitman was not gay, but it does make it a much more difficult question to answer.
Take the title of the sequence, “Calamus.” Yes, the plant, when it flowers, looks rather obviously phallic, but Whitman seems to have chosen the plant as his title for other reasons. In 1867, the critic William Rossetti planned to bring out the first edition of Whitman’s poems for British readers. On Rossetti’s behalf, Moncure Conway, an American minister and Whitman acquaintance living in London, wrote the poet with several questions, including “What is Calamus?” “I could not tell him [Rossetti], satisfactorily,” Conway wrote, “either the exact thing you meant or its metaphorical meaning to you.”9 In his return letter, Whitman explained:
“Calamus” is a common word here; it is the very large and aromatic grass, or root, spears three feet high—often called “sweet flag”—grows all over the Northern and Middle States—(see Webster’s Large Dictionary—Calamus—definition 2). The récherché or ethereal sense, as used in my book, arises probably from it, Calamus presenting the biggest and hardiest kind of spears of grass, and from its fresh, aromatic, pungent bouquet.10
Although the syntax is confusing, the “it” from which Whitman draws his “récherché or ethereal sense” is that calamus “grows all over the Northern and Middle States.” In other words, Whitman liked the calamus plant for the same reason he liked other species of grass. Namely, it sprouted everywhere, and in doing so it joined people together. As he put it in “Song of Myself,” he guessed that grass
is a uniform hieroglyphic
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same,
I receive them the same.11
“Kanuck” refers to a French Canadian; “Tuckahoe,” in a roundabout way, to Virginians; and “Cuff” was a slang term for African Americans. As these and other passages make clear, grass, including calamus, appealed to Whitman for its democratic qualities. Like Whitman, it did not distinguish between high and low. And as Whitman aspired to, it grew everywhere, among everyone. If calamus had any extra appeal, it was that it grew in out-of-the-way places, “away from the clank of the world,” as he put it in the first poem in the “Calamus” sequence.12 It thus grew in the marginal places where, Whitman believed, “manly attachment”—and what he means by that remains unclear—could also flower, far from the “pleasures, profits, conformities” of everyday life.13 That sense of calamus as a particularly hearty, egalitarian, and conjoining grass does not undo its flowering phallus, of course, and whatever meaning Whitman attached to it, but that part of the plant does not seem to have preoccupied him.
Then there is the matter of Whitman’s revisions and deletions. True, poems like “Hours Continuing Long” and “Who Is Now Reading This?” disappeared from subsequent editions. But poems like “When I Heard at the Close of Day”—including that very poem—very much remained. What’s more, the sequence as a whole still begins with Whitman “resolved to sing no songs to-day but those of manly attachment,” and the sequence still has Whitman “burning for his love whom I love,” still has Whitman permitting “a candidate for my affection” to “put your lips upon mine,” and still has Whitman telling a passing stranger that “you do not know how longingly I look upon you.”14 In other words, if Whitman hoped by scattering the poems to conceal the more explicit statements of his homosexuality, to stuff the more revealing lines (and himself) back in the closet, he did an extraordinarily bad job of it.
But Whitman does not seem to have wielded the editor’s pen with those concerns in mind. Rather, in deciding which poems to cut, he appears to have targeted the gloomier poems. In the first poem in the “Calamus” sequence, Whitman vows to “celebrate the need of comrades.” If so, then Whitman may have realized that poems of despair and self-doubt like “Hours Continuing Long” and “Who Is Now Reading This?” did not fit the mood. After one less than celebratory poem in the sequence, for instance, Whitman vows early in the following poem that “I must change the strain—these are not to be pensive leaves, but leaves of joy.”15 In short, Whitman likely dropped poems not because they revealed too much, but because he did not like what they revealed, namely despair.
As for why Whitman scattered throughout the “Calamus” sequence the highly personal series of poems that made up “Live Oak, with Moss,” we may never know. (In fact, “Live Oak, with Moss” is not as exclusively personal as some critics have suggested.) One thing is clear, though, which is that as the “Calamus” sequence appears in the 1860 and subsequent editions, the “Live Oak, with Moss” sequence, had it appeared intact, would have seemed very much out of place. In the first poem, Whitman confides that he will tell us “the secrets of his nights and days,” but he also says that he will do so in order “to celebrate the need of comrades.” In other words, for Whitman, the purpose of the “Calamus” poems was not (or not principally) to narrate an affair of his personal life but to make the case, poetically, for the need of comrades. All told, Whitman wrote forty-five poems for the “Calamus” sequence. Nearly all of these are what we would call personal poems—they are spoken in the first person, anyway—but many of them also have what we would call a rhetorical, even public purpose. As he writes in one poem, he hopes to “establish . . . in every city of These States . . . the institution of the dear love of comrades.”16 It would thus look strange—and subvert his stated purpose for the poems—to narrate the rise and fall of a single love affair. Whitman is not interested in a love affair, but in propagating—like grass—as many love affairs as possible. For Whitman, the personal is political. The original sequence of poems—and the original affair—may have inspired the “Calamus” poems, and you may prefer “Live Oak, with Moss” over “Calamus” as a sequence of poems. (I go back and forth.) But Whitman had reasons enough besides shame or secrecy to break up the original sequence. And that makes sense when you think about it, because Whitman never seems to have felt ashamed or secretive about anything he had published, including the “Calamus” poems.
Perhaps the oddest part of this whole story, though, is how Whitman’s contemporary readers reacted to the “Calamus” poems. True, some reviewers—and many readers—thought that Whitman was obscene, but he got that reputation not for the “Calamus” poems but for the “Children of Adam” poems, the ones that celebrated the love between men and women. Whitman, a London reviewer wrote of the 1860 edition, is “one of the most indecent writers who ever raked out filth into sentences.” “Do American ladies read Mr. Whitman?” the reviewer asked incredulously.17 And in 1881, when the district attorney of Boston declared the book obscene, it was those poems—specifically, “A Woman Waits for Me” and “Ode to a Common Prostitute”—that offended him.18 By contrast, no one, neither readers nor reviewers nor district attorneys, seems to have batted an eye about the “Calamus” poems.
That should give us pause. If in writing “Calamus” Whitman is supposed to have written a homosexual manifesto, then why weren’t people shocked? He was not exactly subtle. And if no one was shocked, why did he supposedly revise his poems as though they were? For proponents of a gay Whitman, or, more narrowly, “Calamus” as gay poetry, these questions remain the greatest unsolved mysteries.19
But really it is no mystery at all. As many critics have pointed out, Whitman’s poems of manly love fit perfectly well into the nineteenth-century cult of romantic friendship. As historians have now rather fully documented, men (and women) in the nineteenth century often developed passionate—even intimate—friendships with others of the same sex.20 To observers then and now, these friendships looked like a sort of marriage, probably without the sex but decidedly not without the intense affection. To judge from their diaries and letters, young men in these romantic friendships addressed each other in flowery terms of endearment, waxed over their ardent feelings for each other, and often expressed a hope that they might share a life together. They make Whitman’s similar effusions seem downright ordinary.
From our perspective, the strangest thing about these romantic friendships is how much physical affection they allowed. It is not just that friends shared a bed. (In the nineteenth century, sharing a bed with another person of the same gender, whether a sibling, friend, or even stranger—recall Ishmael and Queequeg at the outset of Moby Dick—was part of daily life.) Rather, it was what happened in those shared beds that seems so bizarre. In July of 1851, for example, two young engineers, James Blake and Wyck Vanderhoef, who shared a room (and a bed), departed for their family homes. After their separation, in his diary James Blake described their last night together:
We retired early, but long was the time before our eyes were closed in slumber, for this was the last night we shall be together for the present, and our hearts were full of that true friendship which could not find utterance by words, we laid our heads upon each other’s bosom and wept, it may be unmanly to weep, but I care not, the spirit was touched.21
In the late 1830s, another diarist, Albert Dodd, wrote of his college roommate, Anthony Halsey, “Often too he shared my pillow—or I his, and then how sweet to sleep with him, to hold his beloved form in my embrace, to have his arms about my neck, to imprint upon his face sweet kisses!”22
To our eyes, this intimacy will seem peculiar. However, it seems not to have bothered—far from it—those in bed. As noted by E. Anthony Rotundo, the historian who has looked most closely at these diaries, Dodd “described their erotic encounter without a hint of self-censure or a word of apology.”23 Of Blake’s description of his last night with Vanderhoef, Rotundo observes that “apparently crying violated the norms of manliness more than the exchange of affectionate physical gestures with another man.”24
How could men get away with such intimacy? One theory argues that in the nineteenth century, intimate friends, even those who shared a pillow or imprinted upon each other sweet kisses, did not have to fear being mistaken for homosexuals, and this made affection between men (and women) less fraught. Indeed, as a college student somewhere is no doubt learning this very moment, you could not be a homosexual in the nineteenth century. The term—the concept—did not exist. That does not mean that men did not have sex with each other. (Even Whitman refers to the “he-prostitutes.”) But it does mean that men could kiss each other in bed or in the streets without worrying that their affection would be viewed as a symptom of some ingrained disease like homosexuality. “In the Victorian language of touch,” Rotundo writes, “a kiss or an embrace was a gesture of strong affection at least as much as it was an act of sexual expression.”25
Perhaps here is the place to note, then, that when Whitman speaks of “my dear friend, my lover,” as he does in “When I Heard at the Close of Day,” the terms are synonyms. At the time, lover simply meant someone you loved, not someone you made love to, and as such, men felt far less anxiety about expressing love for their male friends or calling their friends their lovers. In his essay on friendship, for example, Ralph Waldo Emerson writes, “High thanks I owe you, excellent lovers, who carry out the world for me to new and noble depths.”26 It was Emerson, you will recall, who in 1860 tried to talk Whitman out of publishing the “Children of Adam” sequence. He said nothing, apparently, about the “Calamus” poems, perhaps because while at Harvard he too had a strange though intense attraction to another fellow student.27
None of this, of course, means that the young men in these relationships did not have sex. But at the same time nothing suggests they did have sex, either. Rotundo observes, “Intimate friends were not engaging in genital sexuality or they did not feel safe in writing about it”; and the former seems more likely than the latter.28 The curious thing about such professions of romantic friendship (again, only curious from our perspective) is that often enough they existed alongside professions of conventional heterosexual love. At the time James Blake wept over his separation from his friend, for example, his friend was engaged to be married. The diary in which Albert Dodd described his nights with Anthony Halsey also contains rapturous entries—including love poems—about young women named Julia and Elizabeth. Indeed, while sharing a bed, men seemed to talk about women as much as anything else.29
Again, none of this rules out the possibility that men in these relationships had sex with each other. Nothing says you can’t have sex with people of both genders. Yet sex does not seem to have been the characteristic feature of these relationships. More to the point, the cult of romantic friendship make Whitman’s professions of manly love not before their time but very much of it.
Perhaps the most useful context for Whitman’s poems of manly love, however, comes from the pseudoscience of phrenology, which Whitman swallowed hook, line, and sinker. In phrenology, parts of the brain (and their relative size) supposedly corresponded to various character traits. Moreover, since the skull was thought to match the shape of the brain beneath it, your skull was also thought to reveal the contours of your character. Is the base of your skull larger than usual? That means you have an unusually large capacity for sexual and connubial love. Does the back of your skull bone protrude? That means you are especially philoprogenitive. (You love your children.) Do the areas above and to the left and right of it protrude more than usual? Then you are particularly adhesive, which means, as Whitman’s favorite phrenologists, Orson and Lorenzo Fowler, wrote, you love “friends with tenderness” and will “sacrifice almost anything for their sake.”30 Elsewhere, Orson Fowler would explain that those with large adhesiveness “instinctively recognize it in each other; soon become mutually and strongly attached; desire to cling to the objects of their love; take more delight in the exercise of their friendship than in anything else.”31
In the diagram to the right, which the Fowlers included in their 1855 book, The Illustrated Self-Instructor in Phrenology and Physiology, amativeness (sexual and connubial love) is near but distinct from adhesiveness (friendship, sociability). (Adhesiveness is illustrated by two sisters embracing.) As with any other trait one could be more or less amative or adhesive, and the point beyond that is that one could be both amative and adhesive. Amativeness tracked connubial love, while adhesiveness meant friendship, sociability. In 1849, Whitman had his skull examined by Lorenzo Fowler. He scored highly in, among other categories, both amativeness and adhesiveness. He received a 6 out of possible 7 in both categories.32 Indeed, the phrenological chart may illustrate why diarists like James Blake could speak of their love for their friend and their love for their fiancée on virtually the same page. Such loves involved related but distinct traits. In the “Calamus” poems, Whitman also says as much. Here is the thirty-eighth poem:
The phrenological skull
Primeval my love for the woman I love,
O bride! O wife! more resistless, more endearing than I can tell, the thought of you!
Then separate, as disembodied, the purest born,
The ethereal, the last athletic reality, my consolation,
I ascend—I float in the regions of your love, O man,
O sharer of my roving life.33
As the poem suggests, love for women could jauntily exist alongside love of men. Each love met different needs and expressed different capacities. They seem to have occurred on different planes of reality. In any case, one did not cancel out the other, just as the “Children of Adam” sequence could happily exist alongside the “Calamus” sequence in the 1860 edition and subsequent editions of Leaves of Grass.
Throughout his life, Whitman seems to have thought of manly love in phrenological terms. (He seems to have thought of an astonishing number of things in phrenological terms.) In “Proto-Leaf,” the new poem he composed to lead off the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass, he writes:
O to level occupations and the sexes! O to bring all to common ground! O adhesiveness!
O the pensive aching to be together—you know not why, and I know not why.34
In the sixth Calamus poem, he writes, “O adhesiveness! O pulse of my life!” And in the final poem of the 1860 edition, “So long!” he declares:
I announce adhesiveness—I say it shall be limitless, unloosened,
I say you shall yet find the friend you was looking for.35
Perhaps the most revealing statement, however, comes in Democratic Vistas. There, Whitman says in a footnote:
It is to the development, identification, and general prevalence of that fervid comradeship, (the adhesive love, at least rivaling the amative love hitherto possessing imaginative literature, if not going beyond it,) that I look for the counterbalance and offset of our materialistic and vulgar American democracy, and for the spiritualization thereof. Many will say it is a dream, and will not follow my inferences: but I confidently expect a time when there will be seen, running like a half-hid warp through all the myriad audible and visible worldly interests of America, threads of manly friendship, fond and loving, pure and sweet, strong and life-long, carried to degrees hitherto unknown—not only giving tone to individual character, and making it unprecedently emotional, muscular, heroic, and refined, but having the deepest relations to general politics. I say democracy infers such loving comradeship, as its most inevitable twin or counterpart, without which it will be incomplete, in vain, and incapable of perpetuating itself.36
In the next chapter, I take up the political implications of the kind of comradeship Whitman describes here and in “Calamus,” but for now what matters is how he speaks of it. Or rather, the many ways he speaks of it: comradeship, adhesive love, manly friendship, loving comradeship. For Whitman, these are synonyms. Thus when he writes, as he does in the first “Calamus” poem, that he intends to “celebrate the need of comrades,” he seems to have something very specific in mind. It involves many things (emotions, affection, politics), but it does not seem to have involved sex.
In that case, phrenology and the cult of romantic friendship may explain why “Calamus” did not raise eyebrows. Readers knew what Whitman was talking about, and they knew he was not talking about connubial love between men. To all but a few, that sort of love would have been unthinkable. Instead, he was talking about romantic friendships, and these friendships were common enough not to outrage decency but also rare—and private—enough to require public and poetic celebrants. Or so Whitman thought. Hence his aside in the passage above from Democratic Vistas. Thus far, he argues, imaginative literature had focused almost exclusively on amative love, to the neglect of the equally powerful adhesive love. Or, as Whitman wrote in an 1856 open letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson, “As to manly friendship, everywhere observed in The States, there is not the first breath of it to be observed in print.”37 With the “Calamus” sequence, Whitman would change all that.
So was Whitman gay? Or, more narrowly, are the “Calamus” poems gay poems?
The second question is easier to answer than the first. Whitman certainly did not think the poems indicated he was gay, and at the very least we need to hear him out. As we have seen, Whitman thought of “Calamus” in phrenological terms of adhesiveness, and he thought of adhesiveness in its private and political dimensions. In the “Preface” to the 1876 reprint of Leaves of Grass, for example, Whitman discussed “the special meaning of the ‘Calamus’ cluster”:
Important as they are in my purpose as emotional expressions for humanity, the special meaning of the “Calamus” cluster of “Leaves of Grass,” (and more or less running throughout the book, and cropping out in “Drum Taps,”) mainly resides in its political significance. In my opinion, it is by a fervent, accepted development of comradeship, the beautiful and sane affection of man for man, latent in all the young fellows, north and south, east and west—it is by this, I say, and by what goes directly and indirectly along with it, that the United States of the future, (I cannot too often repeat,) are to be most effectually welded together, intercalated, anneal’d into a living union.38
Nor does Whitman seem to have invented this explanation of the special meaning of the “Calamus” cluster in order to distract readers from its (or his) homoeroticism. The political significance existed from the start. How else can we explain the fifth poem in the “Calamus” sequence? “States!” Whitman declares, which is not a promising beginning for a poem about sex:
Were you looking to be held together by the lawyers?
By an agreement on a paper? Or by arms?
I arrive, bringing these, beyond all the forces of courts and arms,
These! to hold you together as firmly as the earth itself is held together.
The “these” Whitman brings refers to the “Calamus” poems, by which, he writes in the conclusion of the poem:
I will make the continent indissoluble,
I will make the most splendid race the sun ever yet shone upon,
I will make divine magnetic lands.
I will plant companionship thick as trees along all the rivers of America, and along the shores of the great lakes, and all over the prairies,
I will make inseparable cities, with their arms about each other’s necks.39
Notice the plant metaphor in the next to last line. On the eve of the Civil War, with the nation, as Lincoln put it, a house divided against itself, Whitman would plant companionship “thick as trees” among the states. He would unite a divided nation. The last line of the poem makes his point. Cities will become like young men with their arms about each other’s necks when real young men, perhaps having read Leaves of Grass, would be inspired to throw their arms around each other’s necks. The nation would come together when its young men came together in loving comradeship.
All of which is to say, whatever we might infer about the sexual dimensions of the poems or the sexuality of the poet, we ought to acknowledge, as Whitman insisted again and again, their political dimensions.
That, anyway, is what Whitman declared in a famous letter that sheds light on both the “Calamus” poems and the question of his sexuality. In 1872, the British poet, literary critic, and biographer John Addington Symonds wrote Whitman an enthusiastic letter asking—begging—for more information about the “Calamus” poems. At the time, Symonds was struggling with how to understand his own attraction to men, and over the course of the next twenty years he would pioneer the study of homosexuality. “I have pored for continuous hours over the pages of Calamus (as I used to pore over the pages of Plato),” Symonds wrote Whitman, “longing to hear you speak, burning for a revelation of your more developed meaning, panting to ask—is this what you would indicate?—are then the free men of your land really so pure and loving and noble and generous and sincere?”40 Somewhat cruelly, Whitman did not answer Symonds’s letter, but that did not stop Symonds from inquiring again and again over the next two decades about the “Calamus” poems, wondering if he and Whitman were talking about the same thing, namely, what Symonds and others would later refer to as “sexual inversion”—that is, homosexuality.
Finally, in 1890, Whitman did respond. He was brutal. “About the questions on ‘Calamus,’ etc.,” Whitman wrote,
they quite daze me. Leaves of Grass is only to be rightly construed by and within its own atmosphere and essential character—all its pages and pieces so coming strictly under. That the “Calamus” part has ever allowed the possibility of such construction as mentioned is terrible. I am fain to hope that the pages themselves are not to be even mentioned for such gratuitous and quite at the time undreamed and unwished possibility of morbid inferences—which are disavowed by me and seem damnable.41
To further buttress his heterosexual credentials, Whitman claimed to have fathered six illegitimate children. The children, of course, did not exist, but even if they did, Whitman seems not to have known that children alone would not save him or his poems from the charge of sexual inversion. Symonds, as critics like to point out, had four children himself.
To many, the letter to Symonds protests entirely too much, especially the part about the six children, and indeed Whitman offered a different response to Horace Traubel, who visited the poet almost daily in the last years of his life and recorded their conversations. In 1888, before Whitman responded in writing to Symonds, he discussed the matter with Traubel:
I often say to myself about Calamus—perhaps it means more or less than what I thought myself—means different: perhaps I don’t know what it all means—perhaps never did know. My first instinct about all that Symonds writes is violently reactionary—is strong and brutal for no, no, no. Then the thought intervenes that I maybe do not know all my own meanings: I say to myself: “You, too, go away, come back, study your own book—an alien or stranger, study your own book, see what it amounts to.” Sometime or other I will have to write him definitively about Calamus—give him my word for it what I meant or mean it to mean.42
Some critics have doubted the sincerity of these comments, too.43 They believe Whitman knows full well the meaning of “Calamus,” but that he pretends otherwise for posterity’s sake. (The same charge, of course, is leveled against his letter to Symonds.) To my ears, though, it sounds quintessentially Whitman and very plausibly true.
Prior to Symonds’s first letter to him and for some time afterward, Whitman conceived of the “Calamus” poems in the language of manly love and adhesiveness. This is what he means when he writes to Symonds that Leaves of Grass is “only to be rightly construed by and within its own atmosphere.” Its own atmosphere was romantic friendship and phrenology. Beginning in the late 1880s, however, beginning with the invention of homosexuality as a diagnosable pathology, the “Calamus” poems suddenly breathed in a new atmosphere. As a result, they read very differently to Symonds (and, for that matter, to us) than they would have to Whitman and his contemporaries. Whitman, to Traubel at least, admitted the possibility that the old poems may have partaken something of the new atmosphere—that is, they may have truly or also been about homosexuality. At least, he did not rule it out. Even so, I believe Whitman when he insists that what he meant or means is not what Symonds means.
As evidence, consider that even in his most private, most revealing moments, Whitman spoke in the atmospheric language of his day, phrenology. In 1865, Whitman met Peter Doyle, a former Confederate soldier, in Washington, D.C., and the two quickly became very close friends. Their letters survive, and nothing suggests that Whitman and Doyle had sex, but they obviously had a meaningful, at times tumultuous relationship. In a 15 July 1870 entry in his journal, Whitman resolved:
TO GIVE UP ABSOLUTELY & for good, from the present hour, this FEVERISH, FLUCTUATING, useless, UNDIGNIFIED PURSUIT of 16.4 [Peter Doyle]—too long, (much too long) persevered in,—so humiliating— —It must come at last & had better come now—(It cannot possibly be a success) LET THERE FROM THIS HOUR BE NO FALTERING, NO GETTING at all henceforth, (NOT ONCE, under any circumstances)—avoid seeing her [originally “him”], or meeting her; or any talk or explanations—or ANY MEETING WHATEVER, FROM THIS HOUR FORTH, FOR LIFE.
Depress the adhesive nature/
It is in excess—making life a torment/
Ah this diseased, feverish, disproportionate adhesiveness/44
On the one hand, little in the entry suggests anything illicit or connubial. Whitman speaks only of his “UNDIGNIFIED PURSUIT,” which, strange as it may seem, is still very much the language of romantic friendship. (Emerson had written something similar about his Harvard dalliance.) On the other hand, the codes (16.4 refers to the 16th and 4th letters of the alphabet—that is, PD for Peter Doyle) suggest that Whitman felt he had something to hide. His changes to the pronouns may reveal even more. Evidently, he felt his feelings toward Doyle resembled—could even be passed off as—feelings toward a woman. In his mind, anyway, the line between disproportionate adhesiveness and amativeness fades away.
For us, what Whitman calls disproportionate adhesiveness looks like homosexuality plain and simple. It may not be—again, we have no evidence that Doyle and Whitman consummated their relationship or even wanted to—but something nevertheless seems to exceed the boundaries of even ardent same-sex friendship. If we want to conclude from this and other evidence that Whitman was gay, probably we can.
Keep in mind, though, that the problem is that whatever Whitman means by “disproportionate adhesiveness,” he is disavowing it. As one Whitman scholar has sensibly written, the language of Whitman’s journal entry “indicates that Whitman felt his attraction was excessive, and if this attraction contained any conscious sexual dimensions, these appear to be clearly disapproved of as pathological. In short, what limited extra-textual references we have to Whitman’s views on homosexuality . . . are expressions of strong disapproval.”45 In other words, if Whitman was gay, he tried very hard not to be.
As such, his anxiety about his undignified pursuit of Doyle may offer the most insight into Whitman’s sexuality. Both in the diary entry and the “Calamus” poems, the language of shame and recrimination seems excessive for something as ordinary and accepted as romantic friendship or everyday adhesiveness. Repeatedly, Whitman apologizes for what he is or does, which does not make sense in a culture that was not especially bothered by manly love. But such confessions make more sense if we grant that Whitman was deeply puzzled about his disproportionate feelings for men. Perhaps adhesiveness and comradeship gave him a way to make sense out of desires that may have otherwise seemed abnormal. As one of his biographers has written, “Whitman had long tried . . . to make his homosexual urges conform as much as possible to permissible same-sex behavior in nineteenth-century America,” which sounds right, though I doubt anyone can say whether Whitman’s urge toward conformity was as conscious or as calculated as the quotation implies.46
Far better, perhaps, is the Freudian language of sublimation, because sublimation is largely a matter of the unconscious. “The sexual life of each one of us,” Freud writes in Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, “extends to a slight degree—now in this direction, now in that—beyond the narrow lines imposed as the standard of normality.”47 These “perversions,” Freud writes, without the judgment such a word implies, are either “suppressed” or, more productively, “diverted to higher, asexual aims” and are therefore “destined to provide the energy for a great number of our cultural achievements.”48 As Freud outlines it, sublimation describes Whitman rather well. He may have suspected that his love for other men exceeded the standard of normality, but he did not suspect it enough to disavow it entirely. Instead, he diverted it—or, to speak the language of the unconscious, it was diverted—into a major cultural achievement, the “Calamus” poems.
That said, we err if we view “Calamus” specifically and comradeship generally as sublimation pure and simple. By that light, the poems and the concept mean little beyond what they reveal—or do not—about Whitman’s sexuality. Approaching the poems as hidden expressions of Whitman’s homosexuality, we would have to read like psychoanalysts, doing our best to unor de-sublimate the poems. But that way of reading ignores—or chucks out as mere sublimation—the “political significance” of the “Calamus” poems, which Whitman held to be their “special meaning.” Or rather, it chucks out any political significance beyond the homophobia that led Whitman to sublimate his disproportionate adhesiveness in the first place.
In other words, the problem with reading Whitman as a repressed and sublimating gay poet—or “Calamus” as a sequence of repressed and sublimated gay poems—is that they become, merely, gay. We translate Whitman into terms we understand. But I am not convinced that is the best way to read Whitman. In doing so, we make him like us, and that quite frankly is the problem, not the solution.
Instead, perhaps we owe it to Whitman not to try to discover who he really was or who he would have been if he had been us, but rather what he made out of who he thought he was. In other words, perhaps we should not pity Whitman for succumbing to homophobia or for lacking a ready-made way to think about what he called his “adhesiveness,” proportionate or disproportionate. Perhaps we should pay even closer attention to what he did say, precisely because he lived before we invented a language to talk about these things and, in the process, closed down other ways we might have thought about these and other things.
To put it another way, what kind of nation would we build if, as Whitman urged us to, we took seriously his sense of loving comradeship? What if we did not see it as merely sublimated homosexuality but as a model for gay and straight alike, as Whitman almost certainly intended it to be? What would “the institution of the dear love of comrades” look like? In his service to sick and wounded soldiers during the Civil War, Whitman shows us, and I think we would do well to pay attention and not assume we know better than Whitman what he really meant.
So was Whitman gay? What should I have said to that young woman who asked? If I had it to do over, I would probably say something like this. If by gay, we mean sexual desire for others of the same sex (my dictionary’s definition of homosexuality), then yes, a lot of circumstantial evidence suggests that Whitman was gay. But it also matters that Whitman appears never to have thought of himself as gay. At times, he seems to have tried very hard not to be gay.
I would then quickly add the following: instead of asking if Whitman was gay, the better question may be was Whitman queer? And if by queer we mean differing from what is usual or ordinary, especially but not only when it comes to sexuality, then the answer to that question is an unequivocal yes. In fact, we may consider Whitman’s queerness his and our blessing. As we shall see in the next chapter, it laid the groundwork for his heroism during the Civil War and his thinking about democracy, and it might yet change how we think about sexual and political life in the United States altogether.
