Whitman’s Homotextuality, Homopolitics, and Homonationalism 421 intimacy, these two seemingly different possibilities are, in effect, two sides of the same coin, i.e., American society at that time did not take offense to intra-male intimate sentiments and behaviors as delineated in Leaves just because they were not as yet read as what was later to be identified as homosexual.11 Now we know that the explicit and emotional scenes of intramale intimacy—looking/cruising, holding hands, kissing on the mouth, sleeping together, and so on—that abound in Leaves (from the very first edition) but are articulated most clearly in the (lateradded) “Calamus” cluster were actually commonplaces in public behaviors as well as literary descriptions in nineteenth-century America—they were understood as “romantic friendship.”12 To give just one telling example that appeared as late as 1870 (when traditional intimacy of male friendship reportedly had begun to be shunned), there are passages in Joseph and His Friend—a novel authored by Bayard Taylor (an eminent gentleman writer who also acted as diplomat to several countries for the US government) that was first serialized in the respectable Atlantic Monthly13—describing the eponymous friendship thus: They took each other’s hands. The day was fading, the landscape was silent, and only the twitter of nesting birds was heard in the boughs above them. Each gave way to the impulse of his manly love, rarer, alas! But as tender and true as the love of woman, and they drew nearer and kissed each 11 These are not really new findings as quite a few Whitman critics have long acknowledged them, just without the full support now provided by our understanding of the friendship tradition; see, e.g., Killingsworth (1989: 97-111), Reynolds (1995: 391-403). 12 There are voluminous studies on the topic. For a more polemical study that metacritically examines people’s usages of and controversies surrounding the concept, see Oulton (2007). 13 Taylor himself, after reading Leaves of Grass, wrote to Whitman in late 1866 lamenting that “tender and noble love of man for man which once certainly existed, but now seems to have gone out of the experience of the race” (as cited in Martin, 1990: 171). See also Messent (2009: 21) for a similar periodization in terms of the relationship between Mark Twain and his circle of friends.
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