Tootfinder

Calamus 27 O love!
Odd little poem. On the surface it's a celebration of reinvention, of metaphorically dying and leaving your corpse behind, "always living". I don't find it particularly compelling but it's a mood.
I can't honestly find a particularly gay reading here. Broadly speaking maybe, "coming out" is a kind of reinvention gay people do, leaving our old closeted persona dead and gone. I wouldn't argue Whitman is talking about that though.
One odd thing is the 1860 poem starts "O love!", but there's no love mentioned in the rest of the text. Whitman removed this line in later versions. So who or what is the love referring to?

Calamus 21 Music always round me
A celebration of life, the metaphor of music all around us if only you can hear it. The last line is what gives me pause, it suggests an interesting nuance of meaning.
I do not think the performers know themselves—But now I think I begin to know them.
I'm a little pressed to find a gay reading of this poem, it doesn't have the usual paeans to manly love. There is a pleasant exuberance and sensuality to it, "shuddering luciously" and all. But it's the beginning lines that really catch me:
Music always round me ... yet long untaught I did not hear,
But now the chorus I hear, and am elated,
It's like there's a secret world of pleasure that Whitman only recently has learned to enjoy himself. A feeling similar to the epiphany of coming out to oneself.

When I was young, in the late 80s / early 90s, pornography was so hard to come by that any image of a naked man seemed exciting. Even Muybridge motion studies.