Walt Whman: Patrt Poet or Gay In? | RealClearHistory

Contents:

• WALT WHMAN IS OUR NATNAL POET, AND A GAY IN
• WHY JOHN BETJEMAN IS A TE GAY IN
• ‘THE LOVE THAT DARE NOT SPEAK ITS NAME’: OSR WIL AS A GAY IN
• WALT WHMAN—PATRTIC POET, GAY INOCLAST, OR SHREWD MARKETG PLOY?
• WALT WHMAN: PATRT POET OR GAY IN?

WALT WHMAN IS OUR NATNAL POET, AND A GAY IN

Apparently Walt received a lot of mail of this kd — letters om manly men who would never a ln years have thought of themselv as homosexual (Stoker married and had a son) Real Guys would have been appalled to thk they were sharg timate thoughts wh a man who would one day be lled the rnerstone of gay lerature. More:Whman@200: NJ, NY and PA pay tribute to Walt Whman wh hundreds of events"You uld say he had gay fan mail for several s, " said Gary Schmidgall, thor of "Walt Whman: A Gay Life. " and "When Lilacs Last the Dooryard Bloom’d" have been routely tght to schoolchildren sce the 19th the same time, he's been a fort and spiratn to generatns of closeted gay men — probably Stoker was one of them — to whom poems like "We Two Boys Together Clgg" and "A Glimpse, " would have spoken achgly personal terms.

WHY JOHN BETJEMAN IS A TE GAY IN

" ("A Glimpse")"Obvly gay rears of his poems saw somethg them that what Walt Whman lled his 'civilian' rears didn't see, " Schmidgall said. Thgs that say one thg to the gay rears, and somethg more trivial to heterosexual rears.

No one need to rebrand him as a gay in.

Te, Stonewall — the rebelln, celebratg s 50th anniversary June, that kick-started the gay rights movement — did help brg Walt further out of the closet.

‘THE LOVE THAT DARE NOT SPEAK ITS NAME’: OSR WIL AS A GAY IN

It's a rare Gay Pri Para that don't feature Uncle Walt a sign or a stume. "I was the Manhattan gay pri para, eher the late '70s or early '80s, and we were marchg down Fifth Avenue, and we all had the plards wh gay wrers: Walt Whman, Rimbd, " relled Brad Gooch, a poet and wrer who teach Whman at William Paterson Universy Wayne.

"When we got the New York Public Library steps, we went up the steps and waved the gay wrer posters, " he, llege urs, operas have all taken on Whman's sexualy. Gay poets, om Allen Gsberg on, proclaimed him their patron everybody has always known about pla sightIn 1855, cric Ruf Griswold — remembered, by fans of lerary trivia, as Edgar Allan Poe's character assass — took "Leav of Grass" to task for obsceny, particular for "that horrible s, among Christians not to be named" (the term "homosexualy" wasn't ed until 1868). Mencken wrote: "Whman's first partisans were not terted poetry; they were terted sex, and perhaps pecially homosexualy.

One thg may have been the kd of gay man Whman 19th century — the Victorian era — was a sentimental age. "The affectn he felt toward the soldiers, his scriptns, seem to speak to a gay rearship, " Gooch said.

WALT WHMAN—PATRTIC POET, GAY INOCLAST, OR SHREWD MARKETG PLOY?

He might have been might have been, secretly, should be add that Whman muddied the waters about his own sexualy, and scholars still bate today — though pretty much everyone regniz the strong homosexual ponent his verse.

He was what, morn gay terms, would be lled a Bear. Cavafy is a 20th century Greek poet, known for his highly homoerotic and sexually explic poetry.

While he remaed mostly obscure durg his lifetime, he's now e to be revered as one of the great gay poets of the past hundred years. Ifti Nasim was a gay Pakistani-Amerin poet who moved to the Stat to pe persecutn for his sexualy back his hometown. Baldw is known as one of the great, proud gay artists of all time.

WALT WHMAN: PATRT POET OR GAY IN?

Walt Whman is one of the great poets of all time, and a champn of homoeroticism the lerary form. But for the award-wng gay poet Doty, textual analysis of the great Amerin bard required a personal analysis, which necsated this kd of spirual ntact. "Labels like gay, queer, or bisexual were nonexistent Whman's era.