At the start of “Whitman and the Gay American Ethos”, Killingsworth mentions Whitman’s movement “away from claims of full disclosure (‘to go undisguised and naked’) toward a complex interplay of revealing and concealing a ‘secret’ at the center of identity”
Calamus
And here what I now draw from the water, wading in the pond-side,(O here I last saw him that tenderly loves me, and returns again never to separate from me,And this, O this shall henceforth be the token of comrades,