Killingsworth’s essay begins by elaborating on the sexual implications of Whitman’s work. Following that, there is a discussion of the lack of language around homosexuality, as well as the lack of a “sociopolitical category of consciousness, no gay ‘lifestyle’” (122).
Katia’s CS for February 16
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,