Melville's Queer Hauntology: Selections from the Erotic Journals of Marine Drummer Philip C. Van Buskirk

To read the erotic journals of marine drummer Philip C. Van Buskirk is to be textually immersed in a first-hand representation of the taxonomy of intimate life that sailors in the mid-nineteenth century experienced at sea. Yet his account is unlike any other sailor narrative in its graphic depiction of homoerotic sexual behavior, which he attributes to sailors as a group. To what degree is his witness reliable and generalizable? I argue that this alternative sexual world appears less incredible when read beside other sex-segregated, working-class representations. Before turning to selections from the journals, I summarize some key contributions that Van Buskirk offers to Melville studies. The selections that follow are far from exhaustive, yet representative of the sociosexual world Van Buskirk documents. I hope this exposure to the archive will provoke scholars to revisit a central assumption in Melville studies: that we cannot know whether the homoerotic symbolism in Melville's sea narratives reflects historical structures of intimacy. This assumption's impact is often to "box in" and obstruct or delimit eye-opening queer hauntings and potentialities, a heterosexist (and occasionally homonormative) mode of historicizing that Van Buskirk impeaches.