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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.