Reply #31: You raise a good point here. [View All]

[QC]

It's one that I often have to bring up for my students when we read 19th century lit. There was an ideal of "passionate friendship" at the time that lead to some remarkable letters. One must always be careful about viewing the past through modern eyes.

Still, though, this argument was used for nearly a century to deny what is perfectly clear about Whitman. While it is true that homosexuality did not exist as a concept during Whitman's day, and while it is true that friends were more physically affectionate in his time than in our own, it is still very hard to deny that Whitman's romantic interests were directed (apparently exclusively) to members of his own sex. Still, though, generations of critics have tried to "in" Whitman by arguing that everything was different back then so our man Walt was certainly no homo.

And some early letters don't seem to be just expressions of passionate friendship, like the exchange between James H. Hammond and Thomas Withers in which Withers asks Hammond whether he has “recently had ‘the extravagant delight of poking and punching a writhing Bedfellow with long fleshen pole--the exquisite touches of which I have often had the honor of feeling?’” Sounds like a bit more than "passionate friendship" to me.