an interlude on whitman
the salience of naming (& our tendency to misname)
“I’m not an invert,” says Walt Whitman.
Over the course of the past two weeks, I slowly have been making my way through A Desired Past: A Short History of Same-Sex Love in America—a text that, as you might imagine, offers an abridged yet thorough history of queerness and transness in North America.
Throughout the opening chapter, and the text at large, Rupp reminds readers again and again that our trans & queer ancestors must be taken within their own contexts. That is: she’s a true historian (rather than just a person tweeting) in her commitment not to assign our own contemporary definitions of sexuality & gender onto people who lived before this language was available to them.
Here are a few examples of said reminders:
What does it mean to say a woman was a lesbian? That she identified herself that way? That she “had sex” with another woman? That she was “in love with” a woman? That she saw herself in a conceptual category with other women who loved women?
We can understand an act of same-sex sexuality only in its own very particular context. Take the case of ancient Athenian society, long held up to either praise or scorn for its idealization of sexual relations between older and younger men. Rather than a haven for male same-sex desire, a number of scholars have argued, Athenian society was a place in which sexual relations expressed solely power, the power of older men over younger men, free men over enslaved men, men over women.
Sexuality is not a fixed essence, understood and practiced the same way across history and around the globe.
We need to comprehend the variety of desires and loves and sexual acts that make up our past because the very ways we think about gender and sexuality are a product of this history.
I, like Rupp, have little patience for transhistorical comparisons; I too know full well that, although, of course, gay people have always existed—that is, people of the same gender, and people with genders outside of the binary, have always fucked each other—those in the past came from vastly different historical contexts and, at least in formal & academic circles, their lives should be taken within those contexts.
Which is to say: the next time your professor uses the word "gay" as a shorthand when teaching about Whitman, you might encourage them to go at least a little bit further in their characterization.
Because: yes, it’s true that Whitman fucked—and, on some occasions, fell in love with—men. It’s true that there is evidence that he practiced pederastry, or at least prioritized youthful men.
But he also, like many of us, had a somewhat complex relationship to his sexual desires/orientation. He referred to same-sex sexual relations as “morbid inferences” in an interview, for example, and there’s also this. 1
Questions to consider:
How might contextualizing Whitman beyond just “he was gay” clarify and complicate our readings of his work?
What other canonical writers have had their identities pigeonholed in scholars’ attempts to contextualize them within our current historical moment? How might you combat the human tendency to oversimplify & misname in your own teaching, research, and work?
