A Queer History of the United States by Michael Bronski Page B

this period.
    Historian Charley Shively, among others, has documented Whitman’s romantic and sexual relationships with numerous young men, and Whitman’s work is crucial for understanding the centrality of male homoeroticism in nineteenth-century American culture. 2 Whitman’s wartime writings, influenced by his experiences as a nurse on the battlefield and in hospitals, are vibrant examples of how the harm done to the male body shaped narratives of male same-sex desire. His “Hymn of Dead Soldiers” from Leaves of Grass is a prime example:
    Phantoms, welcome, divine and tender!
    Invisible to the rest, henceforth become my companions;
    Follow me ever! desert me not, while I live.
    Sweet are the blooming cheeks of the living! sweet are the musical voices sounding!
    But sweet, ah sweet, are the dead, with their silent eyes.
    Dearest comrades! all now is over;
    But love is not over—and what love, O comrades!
    Perfume from battle-fields rising—up from fœtor arising. 3
    This conflation of desire, death, and love epitomizes the horror of the war as well as new gender roles open to men. The stream of homoerotic sentiment in transcendentalist thought, along with the mandate to take the American concept of equality seriously, confirmed and sustained these feelings. The American man as capable killer was augmented by a new type of citizen who could, as part of his patriotic duty, empathize with and mourn the dead. These sentiments are present in many of Whitman’s notes of his meetings with wounded soldiers and other young men:
    The Army Hospital Feb 21, 1863 There is enough to repel, but one soon becomes powerfully attracted also.
    Janus Mayfield, (bed 59, Ward 6 Camp[bell] Hosp.) About 18 years old, 7th Virginia Vol. Has three brothers also in the Union Army. Illiterate, but cute—can neither read nor write. Has been very sick and low, but now recovering. Have visited him regularly for two weeks, given him money, fruit, candy etc.
    Albion F. Hubbard—Ward C bed 7 Co F 1st Mass Cavalry/ been in the service one year—has had two carbuncles one on arm, one on ankle, healing at present yet great holes left, stuffed with rags—worked on a farm 8 years before enlisting—wrote letter—for him to the man he lived with/ died June 20th ’63 4
    There can be no doubt of Walt Whitman’s intentions when he wrote Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855 and revised in five more editions before Whitman’s death in 1892. Praised by Emerson for its echoes of transcendentalism, it is also overtly homoerotic. Stanza 5 from “Song of Myself” describes an act of oral sex with a personification of his own soul:
    I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you,
    And you must not be abased to the other.
    Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat,
    Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not even the best,
    Only the lull I like, the hum of your valvèd voice.
    I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning,
    How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn’d over upon me,
    And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart,
    And reach’d till you felt my beard, and reach’d till you held my feet. 5
    The eroticism of Leaves of Grass had far-ranging effects. In 1865 Whitman was fired from his job in the Department of the Interior. Influential anthologist and literary critic Rufus Wilmot Griswold labeled the poet a lover of men when, in an 1855 review, he wrote that Whitman was guilty of Paccatum illud horribile, inter Christianos non nominandum (“that horrible sin not to be mentioned among Christians”).
    Despite the criticisms—even Emerson found the “Children of Adam” poems too overtly sexual—Whitman’s popularity and reputation grew with each new edition of Leaves, contributing to a social climate that made other expressions of same-sex male desire permissible. Theodore Winthrop, who died in battle in