SOURCE: "Words Unsaid," in Masculine Landscapes: Walt Whitman and the Homoerotic Text, Southern Illinois University Press, 1992, pp. 10-19.

In the following essay, Fone offers an overview of how the homoeroticism in Whitman's work has been interpreted by critics over time. Fone maintains that when Whitman criticism has been centered on the subject of homosexuality, the homophobia inherent in much of the criticism has hampered both textual and biographical study.

 It is without name … it is a word unsaid….
—"Song of Myself," 1855 

Among the multitude of identities Walt Whitman claimed to contain, one, his "homosexual identity," has been the continued subject of a vexed questioning raised during his lifetime and pursued ever since. Presumptions were made: that he was homosexual, that he was heterosexual, that he was not sexual at all, that he transcended sexuality entirely, that he was bisexual. Of course, when he wrote Leaves of Grass (1855) and...