422 EURAMERICA other. As they walked back and parted on the highway, each felt that life was not wholly unkind, and that happiness was not yet impossible. (2003: 84) And not just in fiction,14 but in real life as well: In nineteenth-century America, same-sex friends of all ages held hands while walking down the streets of cities and towns. Few people regarded it as remarkable when samesex friends kissed each other “full on the lips” in public or private. Fewer still saw anything unusual in the common American practice of same-sex friends sleeping in the same bed, sometimes for years at a time. (Quinn, 1996: 1)15 In comparison, acts of intra-male intimacy as depicted in Leaves, even at their most erotic, were in fact nothing out of the ordinary and therefore cannot be really deemed transgressive in themselves. Whereas this line of argument seems to debunk Whitman’s status as a pioneering “homosexual” poet, I still wish to proclaim the homotextuality of Whitman’s Leaves because there indeed exist textual curiosities in the pivotal “Calamus” cluster that are hard to explain otherwise. In the opening poem, readers are immediately puzzled by the speaker’s resigned attitude to retreat to “paths untrodden,” i.e., away from the “the life that exhibits itself, / From all the standards hitherto published . . . / Which too long I was offering to feed my soul” (1860-1861: 341, C1).16 Once away and 14 For a wide sample as well as analysis of nineteenth-century fiction featuring romantic friendship between men, see Nissen’s anthology Romantic Friendship Reader (2003) and critical study Manly Love (2009). 15 Although Quinn’s monograph focuses on the Mormons, who were idiosyncratic in many respects from a mainstream perspective, their “same-sex dynamics reflected national patterns” (1996: 2). 16 As many citations come from the “Calamus” cluster, it will be abbreviated as C plus the number of the poem in the original 1860-1861 edition (they were titled only afterward); e.g., C1 stands for “Calamus” no. 1 poem. And for easy reference, I also add the poems’ later titles as in the definitive “death-bed” edition of 18911892. As all poems are cited from their original versions, only significant changes in later editions will be noted; for details on the poems’ sometimes rather
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