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WAS NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE GAY
Melville fell love wh the dashgly handsome olr thor the first time they met, and his forbidn passn drove him to create the symbol of impossible longg that now reprents Amerin lerature to the rt of the world: the whe has never before been nsired a work of romantic longg, but here are five reasons to believe that Melville’s masterpiece is a profound statement of love The SymbolThe ia that Moby-Dick exprs Melville’s impossible love for Hawthorne explas many otherwise perplexg featur of the ntas sr of homoerotic imag and scen, cludg the weddg of Ishmael and Queequeg the Chapter lled “A Bosom Friend. ” Same-sex relatnships were illegal at the time the Uned Stat — punishable by exile, jail, or even ath — and same-sex marriage was lerally unthkable to mastream Amerin society, so the marriage of Ishmael and Queequeg and the bawdy homoerotic puns throughoutMoby-Dick would have been cur thgs to wre, ed, for a heterosexual married all of the terpretatns of the whe whale that crics have offered the past, no one has ever really asked what might have meant, personally, to the man who created : what impossible thg might Melville have longed for, which he might have wished to exprs openly but uld not? Was Hawthorne gay?
His homoerotic imag leave so ltle to our ntemporary sexual imagary that they’re almost elegant.
Though 1850, some men did pursue the kds of social and erotic liv that historilly anticipated the on we now ll “gay, ” neher Melville nor Hawthorne was among them — both were married to women and lived what seem like “straight” liv. To choose a few exampl: sexologist Havelock Ellis (creded wh the first English e of the word homosexual) rrpond wh Melville the last years of the latter’s life; the edns of Melville’s early novels Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847) that his widow brought back to prt 1893 were passed om hand to hand some of New York’s nascent homosexual muni; Hart Crane penned “At Melville’s Tomb” 1926, a plex tribute to a queer lerary precsor (even the most attentive Melville scholars would not take his poetry serly until s later); Benjam Brten and E. Forster llaborated on a 1951 opera based on Melville’s most exquisely homoerotic tale, Billy Budd (c.