Whitman’s Homotextuality, Homopolitics, and Homonationalism 449 as to the ideological ambiguities of his poetry” (1994: 212). Indeed, the two are so intertwined in Whitman’s case that sometimes we cannot tell which is the real cause for the paradoxical co-existence of antipodal views on a single topic. Yet no matter on the textual or contextual level, what we need in dealing with the situation is not a better judgement on how to choose the right interpretation, but a reading strategy capable of accommodating the contradictions, incongruities, and incompatibilities of different readings, just like the historical parallel reading proposed here. For these critical oppositionalities in Whitman studies often reflect not only textual ambiguities but historical faultlines engendered between the past and the present as they intermesh with each other. Though eventually hinging on the open vs. coded levels of textual signification, the trouble with the homotextuality of Whitman’s oeuvre is in effect mainly caused by the transitional disjunctions between the old male friendship tradition and the emergent sexual regimes within which he was caught. Similarly, his homopolitics, as close as can be managed to approximate here, is also found to be strained somewhere in between the new stranger cruising mode and the ancient Greek one. Finally, the move from his position of internationalist promotion of democratic comradeship to that of homonationalist subscription to the US imperial hegemony reflects our own changing understandings of American democracy and its global ambitions. Whitman is no doubt an extremely complicated author, both in terms of his oeuvre/person and the different contexts that have incited people’s readings whereof, and all this requires a fair degree of metacritical sophistication to do him justice.
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