However, Was indeed They Gay? New Mystery off Same-Sex Like regarding nineteenth Century
For the August 1890, Walt Whitman launched an uncomfortable little bit of partner mail. “On your own conception of Comradeship,” had written United kingdom literary critic John Addington Symonds, “is it possible you remember the new you can invasion ones partial-intimate ideas and measures and that without doubt create can be found ranging from males?”
It’s a concern progressive experts enjoys questioned too — and several has very definitively responded it. “Walt Whitman and you can Gay Liberation are nearly associated for me personally,” authored cultural historian Rictor Norton in a good 1999 essay. Norton points to Whitman’s 1860 “Calamus” poems while the a sort of upcoming-aside letter, full of outlines like these:
I knew We appreciated your, however have gone a bigger emptiness than We ever knew you occupied
Once discovering for example verses, Symonds (exactly who later on typed on the their own sexual event having people) need to have become upset by Whitman’s answer. “The calamus region provides even allow’d the possibility of such as for example structure due to the fact mention’d was dreadful,” Whitman answered, insisting you to Symonds is actually and work out “morbid inferences — wh’ was disavow’d by me personally search damnable.”