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AQueer(Theory)Postscript The publisher has asked me to add some Queer Theory reflections to my Whitman book. When it was still a proposal for publication, virtually everyone who reviewed my manuscript made the point that it was lacking in Queer Theory. For the benefit of the author, who might be unaware of the intricacies of such a field, some of the reviewers summarized in their reports the main tenets of Queer Theory. The publisher felt that uneasiness over the lack of Queer Theory in my book, a book that deals with the question of Walt Whitman’s (homo)sexuality, might come up again among readers. Rather than turning my book into a (queer) exercise in Queer Theory (since that is not what my book was intended to be in the first place), I suggested dealing with it in a separate appendix. Not that in my work I had violated the fundamental postulates of Queer Theory. With the exception of certain contexts where it is customary to use the term “homosexuality ,” such as when referring to homosexuality in ancient Greece, I had, indeed, been careful not to apply that word, or the word “gay” for that matter, to Whitman or any of his contemporaries, at least not in a substantive manner. My concern was not rooted in a solid conviction that it is wholly anachronistic and wrong to use those words with reference to individuals who lived at a time when such terms had not even been coined or had not yet penetrated their cultural milieu. Rather, my careful wording was done mostly out of fear, an obscure fear of Queer Theorists and Queer Theory–conscious readers pointing their finger at my presumed ignorance. Queer Theory, in its most radical version, has assumed such a prominent role in the field of gay and lesbian studies that any attempt to ignore its postulates in a work that deals with homosexuality and history is automatically assumed to be the result of pitiful incompetence on the part of its author, while an open critique of those dogmas will automatically bring about the accusation of essentialism. This is not at all to deny the usefulness that a Queer Theory perspective has for my work on Whitman. Such a perspective is indeed implicit in my thesis and conclusions: Whitman did not identify himself as part of a stigmatized minority, as a homosexual, and when the question was posed to him whether he was one, he angrily denied it. Thus, it would be wrong to categorize him as such, since he never assumed that label or even the idea it stands for. Having said this, and because my thesis is stated in unambiguous terms—i.e., that Whitman resisted the emergence of a self-identified homosexual 156 Walt Whitman’s Mystical Ethics of Comradeship minority—I still felt legitimized to apply the term “homosexual” in certain contexts for the sake of expediency, and with the basic meaning of “someone who feels same-sex attraction.” That occasional use of the word in my book is also justified by the fact that the meaning of the word “homosexual” has evolved from being a medical label for mentally diseased people (who, having been informed that they were sick, became anguished and behaved like sick persons, and sought treatment) to today´s homosexual, a far cry from the homosexual of the past. In other words, the very existence of the word “homosexual ” in a multiplicity of historical and cultural contexts is no guarantee that we are facing the same reality in each case. By the same token, the careful application of that term to historical contexts where it was not yet in use does not necessarily imply anachronism or misunderstanding. Even Byrne R. S. Fone, a most orthodox Queer Theorist, feels himself compelled to make the same concession. In his Introduction to Masculine Landscapes (1992), after acknowledging that “[w]hat homosexual has come to represent for us [ . . . ] may well not be at all what ‘manly love’ meant for Whitman,” he still refers to Whitman as “a homosexual man” because “homosexual is the most available word we have,” and so, like Havelock Ellis, whom he quotes as saying that such a dislikable word is simply “convenient,” Fone concludes that it is “for convenience” also that he uses it “despite its heavy historical freight.” I suspect many, if not all, of those accused of essentialism would happily subscribe to Fone’s argument. In any case, by the end of Whitman’s life...

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