420 EURAMERICA still being erased, denied, or explained away,9 his status now as a pioneering homosexual writer has been so well established that it seems readily supported not only by biographical details but by passages from Leaves of Grass that passionately espouse “comradeship” between men as well as movingly portray scenes of intra-male intimacy. Although recent queer scholarship has largely withdrawn from this simplistic position, most of the withdrawal has been done based on Whitman’s textual wavering rather than contextual reconfigurations that, coming as results of the latest developments of friendship studies (for the most representative work of which see Bray [2003]), should have a more important say on the matter. First of all, since Whitman’s poetic expressions of intra-male intimacy were readily identifiable and outright explicit in Leaves, the fact that they were published at that time without arousing difficulties from the reading public nor the authorities indicates,10 however counterintuitively, that either the nineteenthcentury American society was not as averse to those behaviors and expressions (now seen as homosexual), or those behaviors and expressions did not signify to the public at that time what they later would and still do today (i.e., homosexual). Actually, given recent understandings of the pre-homosexual condition of same-sex 9 See Erkkila (2005: 132-133) for an example that took place in Long Island’s Whitman Birthplace Museum as late as in 1997. As this and some other paragraphs are deleted from the chapter’s latest version in The Whitman Revolution, her most recent collection of essays focused on Whitman (2020), I have cited the piece from its original version. 10 The poems that Ralph Waldo Emerson famously persuaded Whitman to delete, when walking together in Boston Common, from the 1860-1861 edition to no avail were not what today’s readers tend to presume (i.e., the “Calamus” poems) but those heterosexually explicit ones gathered mostly in the “Enfans d’Adam” (later “Children of Adam”) cluster (Loving, 1982: 105-107). Those poems, once published, indeed incited a heated exchange of attacks and defenses, only—once again counterintuitively—it were mostly male critics on the attack and feminists on the defense (Ceniza, 1998: 190-212; see also Murison, 2020). As late as 1882, these poems still got Whitman into trouble, this time with the Boston district attorney, who demanded excisions before publication of the 1881-1882 edition; for a revealing list of the “problematic” poems, see Loving (1999: 252, 414-415).
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