Whitman East and West: New Contexts for Reading Walt Whitman

Whitman’s En Masse Aesthetics

Whitman’s En Masse Aesthetics sherry ceniza
It all started this past summer when I read, once again, Leaves of Grass. Shortly afterward, I read Jay Grossman’s essay “Epilogue” inBreaking Bounds: Whitman and American Cultural Studies. Grossman’s angry tone is understandable , when toward the end of his essay he recounts gays’ “being asked to submit to the fundamentally anti-intellectual regime of ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’” and notes the fact that “almost two-thirds of the U.S. Senate voted to deny funds to school districts that attempt to acknowledge the presence of their young gay and lesbian students through curricular or extracurricular activities.”1 He mentions gay teenage suicide and deaths from AIDS. But, finally, Grossman’s overall tone in the essay works against him, at least it did forme.Towardtheendof“Epilogue,”Grossmancommentsonthe“current visibility of homosexuality in the public sphere,” saying that it is “everywhere appearing since the 1980s as the very public, sometimes shouting, and increasingly angry proclamations of a queer love that had previously, even recently, dared not speak” (258). As Whitman scholars, we cannot ignore the fact of homophobia, but we can choose how to address it. Grossman’s own tone in “Epilogue” “sometimes [shouts]” and contains “angry proclamations.” Well and good, his choice of tone is his call. I went to Grossman’s essay for ideas of ways to respond to the question students frequently ask where I teach: “Was Whitman gay?” This question comes with assumptions on the asker’s part. Certainly in the United States, the question is not innocent, for gays and lesbians can be, have been, and are killed for their sexual orientation. I did not, however, come away from reading Grossman’s “Epilogue” with ideas I could use. But I have come up with my own approach, which is to respond to my students’ question with the question, “What does being gay mean?” I pose my question because the assumption behind the question “Was Whitman gay?” all too often assumes gays as a homogenous group based on the group’s homogenous differing from the so-called homogenous norm. In the book Gays/Justice: A Study of Ethics, Society, and Law, Richard D. Mohr writes: “The most effective way of changing nongays’ views about gays is for nongays to interact personally with some openly gay people.”2 Whitman said that democracy and his poetry were inextricable. In our present climate, the discussion of democracy might get short shrift, but not the question of sexual orientation. And that’s the problem: a discussion of sexual orientation and of the concept of democracy do not belong in two different categories. Surely, living under a democracy and a person’s living openly, without threat, his or her own sexual orientation are not oxymoronic. Mohr speaks of the trap of reductiveness when he argues that the collective noun “gay” does not voice a monolithic view. An individual’s stance cannot unproblematically be lumped into a group stance; to do so, Mohr says, “naively assumes that gays uniformly have the same interests and espouse the same views on any given gay issue, so that one simply needs to know one sociological fact — the percent of gays in the general population — to know the extent to which some publicly espoused gay interest is held” (171). Whether a person is straight or gay or bisexual or asexual does not in itself tell us about that person’s stance toward any issue, not just those dealing with sexual orientation. Sexual orientation does not denote a person’s essence. Creating camps labeled “straights” and “gays” does not break down boundaries; it creates them. I cannot tell how my ankles bend, nor whence the cause of my faintest wish, Nor the cause of the friendship I emit, nor the cause of the friendship I take again. That I walk up my stoop, I pause to consider if it really be, A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books. (LGV 1:34) As to metaphysics: talking with Whitman on a Sunday in April 1889, Horace Traubel told him about his walk the night before when he joined the Saturday crowds busying themselves shopping. Whitman asked Traubel to tell him all about the people, the crowds, saying, “I am an outdoors man serving an indoor sentence.” Then, in a clipped, three-sentence ad106 Sherry Ceniza dendum, Whitman says, “Tell...