Whitman’s Homotextuality, Homopolitics, and Homonationalism 419 concretely the contents of this politics—though they still fail to distinguish between open and hidden levels of signification in Whitman’s text as argued here, and are therefore subject to certain anachronistic misreadings. Although it may never be possible to arrive at the “real” message presumably hidden therein, it is hoped that the reading strategy undertaken here will manage to approximate it as more than ever before. Finally, a constitutive dimension of Whitman’s (homo)politics that is nowadays often played down, or simply overlooked— obviously due to its unpopularity with the predominantly progressive attentions to Whitman—lies in his nationalist subscription to the US nation and its global ambitions. This will also be foregrounded for critical examination before being submitted to the same historicist parallel reading, though in slightly different ways and to somewhat different ends. For Whitman has also been well-known for his democratic internationalism and multiculturalist championship of immigration, and hence widely admired around the globe, even by racial minorities within the US. While these glaringly contrary reputations have troubled critics considerably, I will argue that they actually reflect self-contradictions endemic to American national ideology, thus in turn guaranteeing Whitman’s canonization and the transmission of his project of (transgressive) intra-male intimacy. This causality, if admitted, would no doubt lead to a homonationalist critique of Whitman. However, paradoxically he used to have a great number of devoted admirers around the globe due to ignorance of or despite a certain knowledge of the matter. This, of course, shows how the changing understandings and contrary judgements of Whitman are also results of having been caught between the intermeshing of past and present. I. Transgressive Homotextuality: From Misrecognition to Relocation While not too long ago Whitman’s “dubious” sexuality was
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