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poisoncorncob-and-thefrogs-blog · 7 years ago

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Our Dear Old Queer Uncle Walt

Audrey Salmons

Walt Whitman holds a place in my heart as a sort of patron saint of queer poets. He’s influenced generations of queer literary icons. Langston Hughes, who was closeted but wrote about queer subjects (see “Cafe: 3am” and “Blessed Assurance”), responded to Whitman’s claim to be America’s voice in his poem “I, too, sing America.” Oscar Wilde, who had grown up reading Whitman, met with him while on the lecture circuit in America in 1882, and later wrote to a friend, “the kiss of Walt Whitman is still on my lips.” Allen Ginsberg’s poem “A Supermarket in California” describes a bizarre dream of seeing Whitman at a supermarket, a “childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.” Ginsberg’s irreverent portrayal of the old poet looking rather lost in the landscape of commercialism and family values, surrounded by “[w]hole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!” makes the grand, flowing, omnisexual poet of “Song of Myself” seem far gone. Rather, Ginsberg’s Whitman reminds me of Whitman’s more cautious and ambivalent “Calamus” poems, which focus on the experience of same-sex love. In slowing down and focusing on a specific and nuanced set of experiences, Whitman contributes to the foundations of what we think of as modern queer identity.

A discussion of the history of queer identity would be incomplete without referencing Foucault’s History of Sexuality, which details the genesis of the homosexual and homosexuality. Until the late 1800s, homosexual acts were generally recognized insofar as they were criminalized as sodomy, but there was no concept of a homosexual identity. Foucault credits Carl Westphal with the creation of the modern homosexual in his 1870 article on “contrary sexual sensations.” From then on, Foucault writes, “[t]he nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology.” When discussing the identities of queer historical figures, it may be tempting to ask, for example, was this person gay or bisexual? However, that person may not have lived with the same language of sexual taxonomy we use today. If we accept that such labels are socially constructed and not essential, then trying to determine which label best suits someone who lived outside those specific constructs is not particularly useful in understanding their personal sense of identity. A similar issue arises when discussing texts such as “Calamus” that describe queerness without specific familiar labels.

So, the shift in language, medicine, and morality from describing homosexual behavior to defining homosexual identity takes place takes place as Whitman is exploring identity and sexuality in “Leaves of Grass.” The focus of the “Calamus” poems on same-sex male attraction and relationships reflects an increasing awareness of a homosexual identity distinct from the androgynous omnisexuality of “Song of Myself,” marked not only by a refocusing of content but a shift in tone. The speaker here does not identify himself so readily with what he observes in the natural world. He describes an oak tree growing “[w]ithout any companion… uttering joyous leaves of dark green,” which at first “made me think of myself, / But I wonder’d how it could utter joyous leaves standing alone there without its friends near, for I knew I could not.” This sense of anxious loneliness is woven throughout “Calamus.” He mourns in “To a Stranger,” “I am not to speak to you, I am to think of you when I sit alone or wake at night alone.” In “Calamus 9,” found in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass but eventually cut out, Whitman mourns: “Sullen and suffering hours! (I am ashamed--but it is useless--I am what I am;) / Hours of my torment--I wonder if other men ever have the like, out of the like feelings? / Is there even one other like me--distracted--his friend, his lover, lost to him?” This sense that one’s loneliness and longing are a dreadfully unique burden may be linked to the fact that increasing cultural awareness of homosexuality as an identity necessitates a new type of “closet”: homosexuals must now hide not only acts, but identities. They must present a false front to the world, which Whitman expresses anxiously in “Are You the New Person Drawn Toward Me?”: “Do you see no further than this façade, this smooth and tolerant manner of me? / Do you suppose yourself advancing on real ground toward a real heroic man? / Have you no thought O dreamer that it may be all maya, illusion?” Another struggle in “Calamus,” then, is to create a sort of code by which homosexuals may subtly identify one another, which now may signal not only sexual or romantic intentions, but also solidarity in a shared identity. In “Among the Multitude,” Whitman describes “one picking me out by secret and divine signs, / Acknowledging none else, not parent, wife, husband… Some are baffled, but that one is not— that one knows me.” Whitman addresses “this one” (who is, interestingly, not explicitly gendered in the poem) as a “lover and perfect equal” whom Whitman intends to “discover me so by faint indirections, / And I when I meet you mean to discover you by the like in you.” I find myself imagining Ginsberg (or possibly imagining Ginsberg imagining himself) as the one addressed in this poem, picking up on Whitman’s “indirections” from across the supermarket. I’d like to think that I, too, would be one to recognize Whitman’s queerness— for despite over a century of evolving language and politics, I recognize elements of my own experience as a queer person reflected in "Calamus.”

This article gave me some great insights about “Calamus” and queer identity.

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