Walt Whitman, our great gay poet?

This article surveys the critical debates around Walt Whitman's "Calamus" cluster, arguing that a "queer" reading of Whitman--one that does not see him as, for example, a closeted homosexual who censored his work for fear of being "outed"--is both historically accurate and politically efficacious. While previous efforts to reclaim Whitman as "our great gay poet" are understandable--particularly given critical readings of Whitman that denied the homoeroticism of his poems--today, a reading of Whitman as homosexual threatens to simplify our understanding of the history of homosexuality and to blunt the power of Whitman's poetry to continue to "queer" normative understandings of sex and gender identity categories and their relationship to politics.