Walt Whitman and the Homoerotic Tradition

When my colleague Kimn Carlton-Smith first suggested to me that I might want to write for Gay Awareness Week on the subject of "Walt Whitman and the Homoerotic Tradition," I was intrigued and excited. I began by imagining just what the phrase "Homoerotic Tradition" might imply, and more generally, I wondered how one might get at the idea of tradition formation. I had lots of ideas and before we get onto the paper that expands on the best of these, let me just give you an idea of the papers you almost got, but didn't.

Well, it occurred to me in the first place to put Whitman at the head of the American homoerotic tradition: to write a paper looking at how gay and bisexual poets posited Whitman as a founding father, a seminal figure, to coin one of the poet's own favored images, and saw him as an originator of the homoerotic tradition. I thought that it would be interesting to look at Whitman as a founder: to gauge his impact on such writers as Oscar Wilde, John Addington Symonds, Hart Crane and Alan Ginsburg, both as a source of vital imagery, and as a figure of authority and legitimation. This story has been told several times before, most influentially by Robert K. Martin in his 1979 study, The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry, and for this reason among others, I decided to leave the tale of modern canon formation to other, worthier scholars.

My next thought seemed a little more bold. Rather than tell the story of how gay poets had claimed Whitman as their own, I thought that I would look at how the largely heterosexual critical establishment had sought to keep Whitman on the syllabus while at the same time keeping him well and truly in the closet. How did Whitman's earliest reviewers respond to him ? How did his first biographers deal with his life ? And how have subsequent scholars come to terms with his clearly gay poems? Answering these questions is an example of what literary critics call "Reader-Response Criticism," and I thought that it would be enlightening to trace a century's worth of attempts to either explain away or suppress the glaringly obvious homoeroticism of Leaves of Grass, and especially the so-called Calamus poems.

This paper would have been of the "first the bad news and then the good news" variety. The bad news, of course, is that the history of Whitman scholarship is essentially the history of an institution's successful attempts to suppress and distort the manifestly homoerotic dimension of the author's poetry. The good news is, that after years of euphemistic hand-wringing and critical ignorance, Whitman's poetry is finally getting its due from scholars of gay art and culture like Michael Moon, whose Disseminating Whitman breaks new ground in exploring the psycho-sexual dynamics of the entire Whitman corpus, and like David Leverenz, whose Manhood and the American Renaissance offers a startlingly original and personal meditation on the sexual persona of Leaves of Grass. But here again, I decided that while this would make for a great paper, it would also be one that required more time than I had to lavish on it, and while I might yet get around to writing such a study, you are for the moment spared the experience of sitting through it.

Well, my third thought was the opposite of my first. Rather than placing Whitman at the head of a tradition of homoerotic verse, I thought that I would place him at the tail. Surely, I told myself, there had been homosexual poets in America prior to Whitman, and surely the story of how they appeared to Whitman would be an interesting tale to relate. Sad to tell, I was unable to find a single published author in America prior to Whitman who penned even a single line of gay verse. Undoubtedly there were homosexual poets prior to Whitman. I learned from David Shields, of the Citadel, that there were at least three poets prior to Whitman--Nicholas Noyes, Henry Brooke, and Charles Cole--who were homosexual, but homoerotic themes scarcely appear in any of their works, nor were they considered at all strange or deviant by their peers.

David reminded me that the word "homosexual" was not even coined until the 1870s, almost two decades after Whitman's Leaves of Grass was first published. In fact the word "homosexualitat" first appeared in a German magazine article in 1869, courtesy of Karoly Benkert, and was first described as an identifiable medical condition a year later by another German, Karl Westfal. This was clearly a decisive, if somewhat dubious, event. Referring to Westfal's diagnosis, the historian Michel Foucault writes: "The sodomite had been a temporary aberration. The homosexual was now a species."

Does this mean that there were no gays prior to Walt Whitman, or prior to Westfal's famous article? By no means. Same-sex love and same-sex physical intimacy have existed throughout all history. What it does mean, however, is that the language we have used to describe and define these phenomena has changed from country to country and from era to era. In Whitman's America, two men could, and very often did, share a bed together, and it was not considered "homosexual." Two women could declare undying love for one another, and it was not considered "lesbian." A man could sit on another's lap, kiss and hug and fondle him, call him names of endearment and pine with loneliness when separated, and it was not considered "deviant" or "pathological" or even "strange." All the things that we consider to be aspects of the gay lifestyle were present in America, but none of them were called "gay" or "homosexual" or deviant. The language that people used to describe such affections did not make them stand out from love between the sexes. Same acts . . . different words.

Well, I have to confess that all of this got me to thinking. If the word homosexual was alien to Whitman and those of his age, then what language did these folks use to describe same-sex love? And more to the point, how did the language that people used to define this phenomenon shape their understanding of it? After a little humming and hawing, I decided that I would make this question the topic of my paper, and so after sitting here very patiently for the last five or ten minutes, you finally know what I am going to be talking about.

When I talk about the homoerotic tradition, I mean the body of ideas and terms that were available for people in the nineteenth-century, when they wanted to talk about or express love between members of the same sex. For those of you who are really impatient and like to get the conclusion at the start of a talk, I'll let you know what my two discoveries have been. Well, (1) In the nineteenth-century, same-sex love was openly acknowledged and talked about and was not stigmatized as it has been since the early twentieth-century; and (2) the way in which people characterized same-sex love was either in terms of what we can call Christian Fraternalism or it was discussed in the language of phrenology. For the rest of my presentation I am going to be looking at these two ways of looking at same-sex love, and a few others along the way, and I am then going to show how each was used by Whitman in his Leaves of Grass sequence of poems.

Now since I have tried your patience with some fairly abstract speculation on the history of discourse and the historiography of literature, I thought that maybe I would just root things a little more concretely in history by looking at some examples of same-sex love as they appeared in Whitman's age. And this is where we get to play the I-never-knew-he-was-gay game. Consider, for a moment, the following brief exercise in literary out-ing.

When he was a young man at Harvard College in the 1820s, Ralph Waldo Emerson fell head over heels in love with a fellow collegian, appropriately named Martin Gay. Emerson wrote several love poems to Gay, whom he referred to, perhaps out of embarrassment, as Malcomb. Here is a fragment of just one of them:

Malcomb, I love thee more than woman
And pure and warm and equal is the feeling
Which binds as one our destinies forever

Likewise, we note the experiences of Henry Ward Beecher, the brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, a novelist in his own right, and a leading evangelical minister. In the 1850s, Beecher met and fell in love with Theodore Tilton, who was then married. Tilton and Beecher kissed whenever they met and parted, and wrote one another passionate letters. When Beecher traveled to England, Tilton wrote him and described his letters as "so many kisses. . . . Send some more! . . . I toss you a bushel of flowers and a mouthful of kisses." One day, Tilton's wife Elizabeth came home to find Beecher sitting on her husband's lap, discussing the Sermon on the Mount. When he saw her, Beecher rose, kissed her, and then returned to sitting on Theodore.

In Moby Dick, Herman Melville describes Ishmael and Queequeg sharing a bed and cuddling. How realistic a scenario was this ? Evidently it was quite so. Yale students Albert Dodd and Anthony Halsey did this often in the 1830s. "Often too he shared my pillow--or I his," wrote Dodd in his journal, "and then how sweet to sleep with him, to hold his beloved form in my embrace, to have his arms around my neck, to imprint upon his face sweet kisses." Whitman himself describes sharing a bed with men he loved: "For the one I love most lay sleeping by me under the same cover in the cool night," he wrote in Calamus, "And his arm lay lightly around my breast--and that night I was happy." Same sex-love manifested itself not only in kissing, cuddling, and the sharing of beds, but also in words passionate and intense. After visiting the abolitionist Theodore Dwight Weld in 1828, Charles Stuart wrote: "Adieu, my Theodore, dearer than any ties of blood could make you. . . . My soul pants once more to embrace you." Thomas J. Mumford wrote to Samuel J. May on Valentine's Day, 1860, and called his epistle "my love letter." Southern novelist William Gilmore Simms signed his letters to his closest friend "yours lovingly." Nor was this phenomenon confined to love between men.

As Carroll Smith-Rosenberg has shown, love between women could be as emotionally intense and as physically powerful as that between the sexes. Sarah Butler Wistar and Jeannie Field Musgrove kept up a passionate love correspondence throughout the mid-nineteenth century. "Dear darling Sarah!" runs one letter after the couple have visited one another, "How I love you & how happy I have been! You are the joy of my life. . . . I cannot tell you how much happiness you gave me, nor how constantly it is all in my thoughts . . . My darling how I long for the time when I shall see you . . . ."

Another collection of letters described by Smith-Rosenberg charts a five year passionate relationship between two women, Molly Hallock Foote and Helena DeKay Wistar, that concluded only when Helena decided to get married. Writing to the husband-to-be, the aggrieved Molly says: "Do you know sir, that until you came along I believe that [Helena] loved me almost as girls love their lovers. I know I loved her so. Don't you wonder that I can stand the sight of you?"

Finally we have evidence of same-sex relationships that were consummated by genital contact and penetration, ranging from the joyously irreverent, as is described by Martin Duberman in his essay "Writhing Bedfellows in South Carolina" to the downright pornographic as analyzed by David Reynolds in his pathbreaking study Beneath the American Renaissance.

There is no question that were these sentiments to be expressed today, they would be regarded as prima facie evidence of a flourishing and overt gay culture. Yet to reiterate the basic contention of my paper, there existed no word for "homosexuality" in the nineteenth century, nor was it possible to articulate the idea of a homo- as opposed to a hetero-sexual relationship. People just didn't think in these dichotomous terms. And it is perhaps for this reason that same-sex love was not regarded as deviant or unwholesome. It is true that actual anal sex was regarded by many as illicit and sinful, but short of this, physical and emotional intimacy between members of the same sex was both acceptable and commendable. It was precisely for this reason that Whitman felt confident that in publishing the Calamus sequence of poems, celebrating male-male love, that he was not overstepping the bounds of decency or morality.

So the question arises, if homosexuality was not a meaningful category in the nineteenth century, and if antebellum Americans did not make a rigid moral distinction between love within a sex and between the sexes, then how did they frame these feelings and actions.

Well, according to Donald Yacovone and others, the major discourse of same-sex love in America was the Christian language of "brotherly love" or agape. Very briefly, Christian brotherly love modeled itself on the idea that men should love each other as Christ and the earliest Christians had loved one another. By showing intense bonds of loyalty and affection, lovers were united not only with each other, but also with Christ. As Yacovone says: "when [men] professed their undying love for one another, kissed, shed tears, or clasped hands, they reenacted a ritual as old as Christianity."

The model of agape was seen not only in the relationship of Christ and the Disciples; it was most perfectly exemplified in the Old Testament relationship of David and Jonathan, which was invoked over and over by homosexual lovers in the nineteenth century. As you might recall, David had greeted news of the death of Jonathan by noting that his love had "passed the love of women." Quaker abolitionist, Isaac T. Hopper stated that he had loved his friend Joseph Whitehall since childhood: "I think it will not be extravagent if I say that my soul was knit with his soul, as Jonathan's was to David's."

The almost inseparable William Lloyd Garrison and Nathaniel P. Rogers went so far as to greet one another as "Jonathan and David" upon meeting. So far from seeming to be an unseemly or unwholesome activity, then, the expression, even the passionate expression, of same-sex love was placed with a frame of primitive Christian religiosity that charged it with a sanctity and value that surpassed even the love of women. Men who loved one another became, quite literally, "brothers or friends in Christ."

However, the language of same-sex love was rooted not only in spiritual and volitional terms, but was also seen as having a basis in physiology. We have become accustomed to regarding Pre-Freudian Europe as being wholly devoid of psychological insight, but mid-nineteenth century America was rife with theories of the mind that were both influential and popular. Perhaps the most complete of these, and the one which had the greatest bearing on the articulation of same-sex love, was phrenology. Founded in Vienna in the 1790s, phrenology was an attempt to trace the various springs of human behavior to distinct portions of the brain.

Indeed, many phrenologists believed that the brain was not one organ, but a cluster of many small organs, each of which determined one sphere of activity. One popular version of phrenology discovered forty-two faculties, including Parental Love, Combativeness, Imitation, Mirthfulness, Ideality, Cautiousness, Esteem, Firmness, and so on. The more developed the faculty, the more pronounced was that aspect of one's personality.

By far the most important of these faculties, from our point of view, was that known as "Adhesiveness." According to the phrenologists, Adhesiveness was the propensity to form intense friendships. Adhesiveness was different from the faculty for love, which the phrenologists called Amativeness, and it was different again from the desire to procreate and have children, which was had the wonderful name of Philoprogenitiveness.

When describing or defining Adhesiveness, phrenologists almost always turned to same-sex relationships for their illustrations. Indeed, they too drew on the love of Jonathan and David and claimed that this was a prime example of excessive Adhesiveness. Thus, it seemed that there might indeed be a physiological grounding for the brotherly love that we now know as homosexuality.

Certainly Walt Whitman thought so. (Remember Whitman? This is a paper about Walt Whitman). Whitman was deeply familiar with the Christian brotherly love tradition, and even more with the science of phrenology, for the first publishers of Leaves of Grass were ardent phrenologists themselves, and drew Whitman into writing for their phrenological journal. Whitman's poetry is exemplary in its homoerotic themes precisely because the author was so completely fluent in the two dominant discourses of same-sex attraction. And also, of course, because he was a consummately fine poet, who was able to take these bodies of imagery and forge them into searing and passionate lines. By drawing on two accepted languages, Whitman was able to talk about the most intimate elements of same-sex love in a context that made them both conventional and acceptable.

Sometimes, for example, we see the language of Christian brotherly love, the language of agape, shine through in Whitman's poetry when he is attempting to capture the sense of closeness he feels to a man he loves. "[T]he soul of the man I speak for rejoices in comrades," announces Whitman in the first of his Calamus poems, and we note that Whitman is nothing if not close to those with whom he dallies. Thus he describes the casual yet intensely powerful affection two men can show one another:

[one man] even at parting kisses me lightly on lips with robust love
We observe that salute of American comrades land and sea
We are two natural nonchalant persons.

Such actions and sentiments would not have been out of place among many of those whom I have described to you above: the abolitionists and ministers who preached and practiced notions of brotherly love. Sometimes, especially during the tense years before the civil war, Whitman suggests that gay love has a power to heal that is not accessible to heterosexuals. In his poem, "For You O Democracy," he makes an appeal not only for love between men, but also for this love to be taken as a model for relationships between sections and regions and states:

Come, [he says], I will make the continent indissoluble,
I will make the most splendid race the sun has ever shone upon,
I will make divine magnetic lands,
With the love of comrades,
With the love of life-long comrades.

I will plant companionship thick as trees along all the rivers of America,
and along the shores of all the great lakes, and all over the prairies,
I will make inseparable cities with their arms about each other's necks,
By the love of comrades,
By the manly love of comrades.

At other times, Whitman quite explicitly draws on the language of phrenology to sanction and give respectability to love of men. "Here is adhesiveness," announces Whitman in Song of the Open Road, "it is not previously fashioned; it is apropos." In talking of adhesiveness Whitman was alluding to what would today call gay love, gay sex, gay culture. In the next poem we see adhesion _a scientific metaphor_taken by Whitman at face value, in the image of two lovers quite literally stuck together.

We two boys together clinging, One the other never leaving, Up and down the roads going, North and South excursions making,
Power enjoying, elbows stretching, fingers clutching,
Arm'd and fearless, eating, drinking, sleeping, loving,
No law less than ourselves owning, sailing, soldiering, thieving, threatening,
Misers, menials, priests alarming, air breathing, water drinking, on the turf or the sea-beach dancing,
Cities wrenching, ease scorning, statutes mocking, feebleness chasing,
Fulfilling our foray.

Whitman's presentation of same-sex love as a powerful healing agent, as a moral imperative, and as a radically refreshing and honest way of life all derive from the languages that were available to him in the mid-nineteenth century.

They were not the only languages that were available, to be sure; we know, for example, that several varieties of pornography depicted same-sex love in strikingly different tones, as did the lawyers who prosecuted approximately 30 cases of sodomy in New York City between 1796 and 1893; yet the languages that Whitman and others had at their disposal certainly seemed to be the healthiest from the perspective of the twentieth century. Homosexuality, as an isolable and prosecutable aberration from the norm, did not exist, and would not until the very final years of the nineteenth century. Hostility between straight and gay individuals was a scarcity, and indeed the whole notion of dichotomy was alien.

It was perhaps with a sense of posterity, then, that Whitman penned the following lines, with which I shall conclude my story. They make, I think, a fine commentary on the subsequent narrative of gay literary history. The poem is called "I Hear It was Charged against Me":

I hear it was charged against me that I sought to destroy institutions,
But really I am neither for or against institutions,
(What indeed have I in common with them ? Or with that destruction of them?)
Only I will establish in the Manhatta and in every city of these States inland and seaboard,
And in the fields and woods, and above every keel little or large that dents the water,
Without edifices or rules or trustees or any argument,
The institution of the dear love of comrades.

Diversity Counts! is a periodic publication of the College of Arts and Sciences.

Current Editor: Genevieve West, Department of Languages and Literature.
Production:      Sandra J. Balkema, Department of Languages and Literature.