ly 1870's, nearly two decades after the first publication of Leaves of Grass. The word “Homosexualitat” first appeared in 1869 in a German magazine and was diagnosed a year later by Karl Westfal as an isolable medical condition. In response to this diagnosis, the historian Michael Foucault wrote, “the sodomite had been a temporary aberration. The homosexual was now a species”(Reynolds, 396). This does not mean however that male-male sex had never existed throughout history. There are in fact many noted examples of homosexual love throughout the course of time. What this does mean, however, is that same-sex love in Whitman’s America was viewed in an entirely different light and on completely different grounds. A man could sit on another man’s lap, whisper to him words of love and even share the same bed and not be considered deviant or “homosexual.” In Moby Dick, Queequeg and Ishmael share a bed and cuddle. David S. Reynold's “Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography discusses many other instances of male-male physical relationships in Whitman’s time. Albert Dodd, a Connecticut College student wrote of his relationship with fellow student Anthony Halsey: “Often too he shared my pillow--or I his...and then how sweet to sleep with him, to hold his beloved form in my embrace, to have his arms around my neck, to imprint upon his face with sweet kisses”(qtd in Reynolds, 393). Even contact, in the more explicit sexual sense, amidst friends did occur. In an exchange of letters between James H. Hammond and Thomas Withers, Withers asks Hammond whether he has “had recently had ‘the extravagant delight of poking and punching a writhing Bedfellow with [his] long fleshen pole--the exquisite touches of which I have often had the honor of feeling?’”(qtd in Reynolds, 394) This physical and sensual “comraderie” was app...
