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Pen Points
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Walt Whitman and the Dear Love of Comrades
From my college days I remember a meeting at the Parker Hotel in Boston in late 1960 or early 1961, sponsored by the Boston Mattachine, at which an English professor very thoroughly and wittily outed Whitman as gay. (He spoke under a pseudonym, as people did in those days, so I don't know who he was.) Since that occasion I have read and re-read the Calamus poems many times. It seems to me that on one level Whitman is writing for all men, but that on another, he is writing for those who have been initiated into male love. Schmidgall offers, as explanation for Whitman's naming his gay poem cycle "Calamus", the phallic attributes of the plant, calamus aromaticus. This may be true, at least in part, but to me it is more plausible that Whitman chose Calamus from a gay Greek myth. The following account is from Hans Licht (pseudonym of Paul Brandt), Sexual Life in Ancient Greece, translated from the German by J.H. Freese, first published in England in 1932: "Calamus (Kalamos), a son of the river-god Maeander, was united in tenderest love with Carpus (Karpos), the son of Zephyrus and one of the Horae, a youth of surpassing beauty. When both were bathing in the Maeander and swimming for a wager, Carpus was drowned. In his grief Calamus is changed into a reed, and when it rustled in the wind the ancients heard in the sound a song of lamentation; but Carpus becomes the produce of the fields, which returns every year." (From the section on Nonnus.)
Aside from the poems themselves, my two favorite Whitman
books were written by Charley Shively: Calamus Lovers: Walt
Whitman's Working Class Camerados (1987) and Drum Beats: Walt
Whitman's Civil War Boy Lovers (1989). Both books are still in
print.In Calamus Lovers we encounter the young men whom Whitman loved, and who returned his love, beginning with Fred Vaughan, who inspired the Calamus poems. Shively has collected and edited letters to and from Whitman and his young, working class lovers, and has provided his own introduction and commentary. Some of the letters are very moving, especially those from Fred Vaughan, in which he describes his life, married and with family, after leaving Whitman. An excerpt: "With WmsBgh and Brooklyn -- with the ferries and the vessels with the Lumber piles and the docks. From among all out of all. Connected with all and yet distinct from all arrises thee Dear Walt. Walt -- my life has turned out a poor miserable failure. I am not a drunkard nor a teetotaler -- I am neither honest or dishonest. I have my family in Brooklyn and am supporting them. -- I never stole, robbed, cheated, nor defrauded any person out of anything, and yet I feels that I have not been honest to myself -- my family nor my friends." (From Fred Vaughan to Walt Whitman, probably written before 1872)
Calamus Lovers ends with "Bathing My Songs In Sex", Shively's own selection of Whitman's gayest poems. His guiding principles: "Out of all the versions of a poem, I have opted for the most erotic reading; otherwise I've incorporated the version which reads best." The approach works well. We get Whitman's poems as he really intended them -- not suppressed or emasculated, either by editors or Whitman himself.
Material on Abraham Lincoln provides a startling excursus. Lincoln's younger friend, Joshua Speed describes how he persuaded the impoverished Lincoln to share a double bed with him, which they did for four years. From the full-page portrait of the beautiful young Speed, and from Lincoln's profound despair after Speed left him, it is plain that the most beloved American president was gay (Mary Todd notwithstanding).
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Walt Whitman 
In Shively's second book, Drum Beats, we get to know,
through letters and Shively's pungent commentary, the soldiers
Whitman met as a volunteer nurse during the Civil War. It is
amazing, the love that Whitman inspired in these simple, often
barely literate young men.
© 1997-2002 BEI