“Whitman demonstrates part of his Americanness by placing cocksucking at the center of Leaves of Grass.” Gay liberationist Charles Shively—not one to mince words—wrote this in Calamus Lovers: Walt Whitman’s Working Class Camerados (1987), his revelatory, if sometimes risible, account of the poet’s queer egalitarianism. Whether cocksucking is central to Whitman’s book, or even uniquely American, is debatable; more pertinent is the implied connection between Whitman’s homosexuality and his patriotic fervor.
That connection has been a bitter pill for some readers. Whitman’s contemporaries condemned what they saw as the unwholesome carnality of his work. Reviewing the original 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, a critic at the New York Herald objected to Whitman’s “disgusting Priapism.” A review that same year in the New York Criterion rebuked the book as “a mass of stupid filth.” More colorfully, a New York Times critic accused Whitman of rooting “like a pig among a rotten garbage of licentious thoughts.” Even Emily Dickinson—herself no stranger to radical self-expression—weighed in, confiding in an 1862 letter to Thomas Higginson that she hadn’t read Leaves of Grass but had heard Whitman was “disgraceful.” Decades later, Willa Cather referred to Whitman as “that dirty old man.”
Likewise, several Whitman biographers have downplayed or censored the poet’s sexuality. Paul Zweig argued that “few poets have written as erotically as Whitman, while having so little to say about sex.” Jerome Loving suggested that Whitman was a “latent homosexual” who didn’t act on his desires. David Reynolds dismissed gay readings of Whitman and even floated the idea that the poet’s obsessively phallocentric verse reads like that of a womanizer. John Hollander omitted Whitman’s queerness—aside from a mannered reference to the poetry’s “homoerotic realm”—from his introduction to the Library of America’s 1992 edition of Leaves of Grass. Gary Schmidgall’s Walt Whitman: A Gay Life (1997), from which the aforementioned inventory is taken, stands as a lonely but monumental rebuttal to decades of neutered criticism.
For much of the twentieth century, there was a scholarly tradition of sidelining or airbrushing Whitman’s queerness, of treating it as trivia, or as a predilection secondary to his panoramic songs of democracy and the body at large. This was partly the result of scholars and biographers hesitant to label Whitman without hard evidence; when it comes to his sex life, Whitman’s poems and letters necessarily traffic in innuendo and allusion. But the reluctance was also skittishness around the idea of the country’s greatest poet—“the American bard,” as Harold Bloom calls him—being gay. And not only gay, but gay in the most physical, promiscuous, and subversive sense.