However, Were It Gay? The brand new Puzzle of Same-Sex Like on the 19th 100 years
In August 1890, Walt Whitman open an awkward piece of fan mail. “On the conception from Comradeship,” had written Uk literary critic John Addington Symonds, “do you contemplate the new it is possible to intrusion of them semi-sexual ideas and you can actions hence surely manage exist anywhere between people?”
It’s a concern modern critics possess questioned also — and some has actually very definitively replied they. “Walt Whitman and you may Homosexual Liberation are almost synonymous for me,” wrote cultural historian Rictor Norton in the an excellent 1999 article. Norton things to Whitman’s 1860 “Calamus” poems as the sort of future-away page, filled up with outlines such as these:
I knew I treasured you, nevertheless have gone a more impressive gap than simply We actually ever understood you occupied
After training such as verses, Symonds (which afterwards penned on the their own intimate event having people) need been troubled of the Whitman’s react. “That the calamus region keeps even allow’d the potential for such as for example design since the mention’d try dreadful,” Whitman responded, insisting one to Symonds are to make “morbid inferences — wh’ was disavow’d from the me seem damnable.”