Tootfinder

Sometimes Gay Pride means working 8am Saturday to take down the Pride flags, then put them back up again 8am Sunday. (Saturday is flag day, so we fly the US flag for one day in June.)
Sometimes Gay Pride also means swapping flags while random locals yell nasty things out their pickup truck windows. I always call them neighbor and wish them a good day.

Full protest drag. Amazing crowd in Grass Valley, twice as big as April.

Video to give a little of the scale of the NYC protests https://tech.lgbt/@somebody/114684533599756657

Calamus 33 No labor-saving machine
Another poem in a style I don't care for. A series of negations, Whitman declaiming all the things he is not doing. On a theme I also don't care for, Whitman talking about his own legacy.
The nice part is what he does imagine his legacy to be:
these carols, vibrating through the air, I leave,
For comrades and lovers.
I love that phrase "vibrating through the air", delicious poetry. And once again Whitman's declares his passion for comrades and lovers, a return to the central gay theme of Calamus.

When was the last time you heard a dial tone?
Yesterday / today
Last week
Last month
What's a dial tone, grandpa?

Calamus 34 I dreamed in a dream
On the surface this short poem is a sort of City on a Hill vision. But I'm going to go with a more radical reading.
This poem reads to me as a fantasy of a gay society. A city of men, lovers, set apart from the rest of the world.
a city invincible to the attacks of the whole of the rest of the earth ...
the quality of robust love ...
the actions of the men of that city
And in all their looks and words.
I can't plausibly argue Whitman conceived of a city set apart in the way I imagine. Although all of Calamus is him constructing the idea of a society of lovers, comrades, brothers, robust love. That to me is very gay.
Intriguingly, in the unpublished Live Oak draft of this poem it is even more explicitly gay:
I saw them tenderly love each other ...
Nothing was greater there than manly love
It seems to me he dreamed a very gay city.

Just got my first fancy OLED HDR television. And it is a glory. Things that are black are actually black!

New #Pixelfed post:
https://pixelfed.social/p/midtsveen/850490280576035720

There are no working quantum computers capable of factoring a 3-digit number. Last I heard, the record was the number 21.

That means there is no “production” environment capable of testing the critical feature. Beyond that, PQC deployment in the wild is new/small enough that we don’t even have a lot of assurance that the implementations live up to theory.

Das gesehen:
https://tech.lgbt/@Natasha_Jay/114839133106866339
Und dann das gefunden:
https://www.youtube.com/watc…

This is a very clever sign.

From a German lagerstätte, which means "hold my beer". https://tech.lgbt/@DelilahTech/114617249507331663

Calamus 32 What think you...
A funny gotcha of a poem: Whitman starts by suggesting he is going to write about battleships, or cities, or "splendors". But then he switches gears:
two simple men I saw to-day ... parting the parting of dear friends
And then goes into fully romantic
The one to remain hung on the other's neck, and passionately kissed him,
While the one to depart, tightly prest the one to remain in his arms.
Hot, right? A passionate kiss, a tight embrace, never wanting to let go.
Again I am astonished that a poem this gay would be published in 1860. Or that generations of bloodless scholars would sputter and say "they were just pals".

Just had my first summer tomatoes.

@…
https://tech.lgbt/@scarlett7447/114636116113194078

ScarlettPPC (@scarlett7447@tech.lgbt)
Attached: 1 image

Everyone comes to the Freak Show
But nobody laughs when they leave

This is yet another reason why @… and I prefer Signal.
https://bark.lgbt/@morgann/114573458516732593

a few days ago i had the absolutely horrific idea of writing a #MegaDrive emulator
anyways turns out a decade of hacking on that silly machine are good for something
still much to be done (VDP is missing scrolling, window plane and sprites; there's no controller input; no YM2612; the frontend doesn't support sound output nor free-running at system's FPS) but this is kind of fun :D

Another nice day at the Yuba River. Water's still a bit fast for swimming but we're getting there: 300 CFS is nice and calm.

Calamus 31 What ship, puzzled at sea
Just when I'm beginning to think I have some facility reading Whitman I meet a head-scratcher like this. Taken literally this is a poem about Whitman offering to guide a boat at sea, or to offer military troops to a besieged city.
But presumably it's a metaphor. Whitman offering to guide and help those in need. It's a little strange?
Hard-pressed for a gay reading here but I'll focus on this:
Here, sailor! Here, ship! take aboard the most perfect pilot.
Here Whitman is offering himself to a sailor, naming himself the most perfect pilot. I could imagine that being a metaphor of sexual mentorship. But honestly that's a stretch.

Listening to Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan

Calamus 30 A promise and gift to California
Well they can't all be winners. A tedious poem of Western fantasy. Appropriately aspirational for 1860 but not a particularly interesting nor unique sentiment. Also an unkept promise: Whitman never reached the west coast.
Looking for my gay reading, all I have is this:
I and robust love belong among you
I do like Whitman's lustiness, in this case his "robust love". We know a thing or two about that in California.

Gosford Park: what if Robert Altman did Downton Abbey?

Calamus 29 One flitting glimpse
What a sweet poem of quiet love. One of my favorites so far.
The setup is voyeuristic: we're spying on a bar full of men. And we see Whitman in a corner, and then
a youth who loves me, and whom I love, silently approaching, and seating himself near, that he may hold me by the hand
It astonishes me that these poems of clear homosexual love were published in 1860!
What's particularly nice is the contrast between the rowdy bar scene
drinking and oath and smutty jest
and the quiet intimacy of Whitman and his lover
we two, content, happy in being together, speaking little, perhaps not a word.
The expression of love here is universal. But it is a man writing about a man, in the company of men. And thus it is particularly mine.

Calamus 28 When I peruse the conquered fame of heroes
My surface reading is this is a celebration of the common man, perhaps soldiers, over the more famous generals and presidents. But this commentary encourages me to dig deeper.
First, to highlight the gay text...
the brotherhood of lovers ... Through youth, and through middle and old age, how unfaltering, how affectionate and faithful they were
Very homoromantic language! Male lovers who stay together through their whole lives, affectionate.
The last fillip here is Whitman's own stance: "pensive... filled with the bitterest envy". Whitman admires these lovers and envies them. That's a striking feeling to disclose!

On the other hand, the robot is better at navigating San Francisco's disastrous traffic than any Uber driver.

I see Waymo has joined Uber and Doordash in lying about service times. "We can pick you up in 4 minutes!" So you press the button and commit, then are told "we will pick you up in 12 minutes!"

The dedication from the first edition of The Joy of Gay Sex, by Charles Silverstein and Edmund White. Love the contrast here: Charles dedicates it to his partner, White "to all my tricks"

This is the Rock House on the Obey River at Camp Country Lad in Tennessee. I learned some courage there as a boy, getting up the nerve to jump off the Big Rock on the left.

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 26 We two boys together clinging
This is one of the gayest of the Calamus poems, a fantasy of two men against the world, full of life and ardor. I should be all over this in my gay reading!
Instead I see a darker form of Americanism here. "Power enjoying ... Armed and fearless ... No law less than ourselves". It's classic American individualism fantasy, a repudiation of community and law. Armed, at that.
On top of that I trip over the "North and South" part every time I read this. In 1860 when this was published we were just steps away from a Civil War after 10 years of enormous tension. I don't blame Whitman for wanting unity, his whole program in Leaves of Grass is American unity. All I can think is how there's no moral equivalence between the North and South. But Whitman wasn't an abolitionist and this poem reflects that.
Sorry for not reveling in the gay, maybe it's the ICE and California National Guard news affecting my reading today.

George Miller is a goddamn anchor in Death Stranding 2. Here is the man who made Babe: Pig in the City and Happy Feet and here he is reading these batshit lines about tar currents and resurrection on the beach.

Riding the rails

Plex asked me again tonight

Calamus 25 The prairie-grass dividing
Whitman's celebration of simple men, of men from "inland America", of those who are unimpressed by Presidents and Governors. It's a romantic sentiment but in 2025 also feels a little naïve or condescending.
But as always I'm here for the gay stuff. Which starts explicitly enough
[I] Demand the most copious and close companionship of men
Well OK then! Me too. Maybe you could read that in a non-sexual way but then Whitman gets lusty
[I demand] Those with a never-quell'd audacity—those with sweet and lusty flesh, clear of taint, choice and chary of its love-power
My goodness, is that hot! At least to start, it's a shame he tames it seeking out men "chary of love-power". At least he recognizes their love power! I'll take the taint, thank you.

I've really been moved by Edward White's death and the tributes to him being written. His books have meant a lot to me as a gay man. I wrote a blog post with more links, many also shared on @…

You cannot buy apps on Google Play using your Google Pay setup.

A particular feature of the Google Play Store for Android apps is how when you search for an app by name they show you an ad for some other app, trying to trick you into installing that instead.

Went down to our small town Fourth of July parade in Grass Valley, CA. It was kinda nice. I'm feeling very ambiguous about patriotism right now but I am American and I love many things about my country.

Board of Officers of Cave No. 1, Curly Bears, in full regalia circa 1900

Bah, no river swimming today. We want the flow to be more like 200 CFS. Not sure why Piggy turned it back up to 300 CFS just in time for people to drown July 4.

Plex has tried to trick me twice in the last month into agreeing to the abusive data sharing agreement that I first refused in March.

Calamus 24 I hear it is charged against me
This poem feels just so typically Whitman, but lesser somehow. Not one of my favorites.
He says he is "charged that I seek to destroy institutions". Charged by whom, one wonders, is he really so important? He sort of denies this, or is ambivalent to it, and then gets to the queer part:
I will establish ... the institution of the dear love of comrades
And here we are again at the central queer question: just what does he mean by "dear love of comrades"? As I read these poems I'm increasingly thinking it's both things. Sure, it's brotherly love, adhesiveness, a sort of robust fraternity. But so much of his writing and life is homoerotic it has to also have that charge. It can be both.
I feel like I've heard that phrase "the institution of the dear love of comrades" repeated often.

so much depends
upon
an ethernet
cable
with its delicate
threads
and fragile
connectors

Feeling wistful for an old lover, someone I didn't appreciate enough how good he was for me.

Calamus 23 This moment as I sit alone
A promise of global unity, Whitman sharing his adulation for men in other countries.
I guess this is an antidote to Whitman's nationalism? His celebrations of America seem sweet and sincere but they are very American-centric. Here he's explicitly saying men of other lands can be just as wise, beautiful, or benevolent as American men. It seems unusual that he feels he has to say it explicitly.
As for the queer reading, his conclusion is
I know we should be brethren and lovers
There's that word, "lovers". It's so brash it's hard to understand. It seems uncharacteristically direct even understanding Whitman as a gay poet. Maybe this is some 19th century romantic language, mixing what feels very gay in with a more general celebration of brotherhood? Or maybe it is literally what it says, Whitman eroticizing international men.

This spam email has a fake "click to unsubscribe". It looks like a link but its destination is set to a no-op in the email source code. I want to support "The Blue Resistance" but they are making it very difficult.

In my front yard, a doe with two fawns.

RIP Edmund White. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/04/arts/edmund-white-dead.html

Speaking of "Adhesiveness" in 1960 David Hockney made a painting titled Adhesiveness. Which arguably depicts Walt Whitman fucking David Hockney, the labels 23 23 and 4 8 being a basic numeric code. Along with We Two Boys Together Clinging these two early works are Hockney referencing Whitman and being explicit about being gay. More info in this article and this one.

Current status: taking a screenshot of a Javascript popup, then using AI to convert the image to text. All so I can copy a number out of a web page that some terrible UX designer decided to not present just as simple text on the page.

I'm getting a lot of mileage out of ChatGPT but it's very hard to trust it when it so confidently gets the most basic arithmetic wrong. I asked it to find an integer N such that N choose 2 = 90. It says 15. But 15 choose 2 = 105, not 90. It showed me a convincing looking equation but it's literally just wrong math.

Props to E*TRADE, they have a very simple no-bullshit online account closure. I had to open one to buy the $RDDT IPO. I donated the profits I made flipping the stock.

@… how do you know an agent's code works? I'm trying to do more Claude Code and I just don't trust the output. Are you creating elaborate automated testing? Reading the code? Just visually inspecting the output?

Last night I learned that California has fireflies. Microphotus angustus glows steadily and is more of a worm than a fly, at least how I saw it.

"Be sure to get a Google Pixel phone", they said, "that way you'll know it's a reliable version of Android".

Happy Pride Moth!
https://woof.group/@bootblackcub/114608347685405782

Related: modal dialogs confirming destructive operations are a sign your UI is not good. Operations should be reversible so that the user can simply undo mistakes, not be interrupted in a failing effort to prevent them.

Also it has a second modal dialog demanding you confirm deletion, even though it's easily reversible if you made a mistake. ("Delete" here just means "Move to Trash folder".)

Google Photos has a shortcut key for "delete the photo I am looking at". It's not backspace, or delete, or even D. It's #. Yes, Shift-3. Good job, UX experts!

I coined a new phrase!
Basilisk puppet (n). A person who relentlessly shills for artificial intelligence. Makes strong claims that general AI is happening any day now or that existing AIs can make everyone more efficient and happier. See also Roko's Basilisk.

Calamus 20 I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing
What a heartaching poem of loneliness and the need for the love of another! Just wonderful. I understand now why this poem is so popular, particularly as a gay poem. It is full of meaning and is quite clear about it.
I wondered how it could utter joyous leaves, standing alone there, without its friend, its lover near—for I knew I could not
There's a more cerebral interpretation of this work, particularly if you understand "leaves" to mean "pages in my poetry book Leaves of Grass". Whitman talking about his own poetic inspiration from lovers.
Which well enough. But I'm more interested in Whitman's expressed need for "manly love". Which is clearly on his mind constantly:
my own dear friends ... I believe lately I think of little else than of them
Also Whitman's own eroticization of nature and himself. Here speaking of the tree,
its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself

The Death Stranding games are all about connecting people together through delivery services. So how come every time you meet someone new you don't meet them, you meet a hologram of them instead? It's like the whole world is nothing but Zoom calls.

Went down this morning to the Nevada County board of supervisors meeting to support our first county Pride Month proclamation.

A quick visualization of the Yuba River at highway 49: temperature and flow. Local wisdom is July 4 is when it's safe to swim and that seems about right on the graphs.
I knocked this together with an AI so I'm not 100% sure the visualization is correct. More notes here.

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.

Calamus 19 Mind you the timid models of the rest, the majority?
A declaration of intellectual independence and a celebration of brotherly love. Honestly this poem feels a little clumsy to me, I can see why Whitman struck the awkward introducing lines in later editions.
As always, looking for the gay content:
Yet comes one, a Manhattanese, and ever at parting, kisses me lightly on the lips with robust love.
And I, in the public room, or on the crossing of the street, or on the ship's deck, kiss him in return
We observe that salute of American comrades
But I can't in all honestly read this use of "kissing" as erotic. Here the public kissing and the "salute of comrades" makes me think it's more of a fraternal kiss.
Which doesn't exclude a romantic kiss as well, or an erotic one. What's so vital about Calamus is how Whitman blends masculine sexual love with the love of comrades. I think both meanings are latent in every poem.

This Facebook spam I got today knows what's up.

Yes sir daddy sir

Maybe I'm just being horny but it just occurred to me this gentleman and this book are remarkable fetish potential.

Calamus 18 City of my walks and joys!
A celebration of Manhattan. I love Whitman's embrace of cities as being just as vital as nature unspoiled. It reflects the humanist aspect of his joy in the world, not a Thoreau-like rejection of civilization.
I also love that Whitman is writing about cruising the streets, making eye contact with potential lovers, celebrating offerings of love.
as I pass, O Manhattan! your frequent and swift flash of eyes offering me love
Offering me the response of my own—these repay me,
Lovers, continual lovers, only repay me.
Whitman punched up the first line in later editions, escalating to "City of orgies, walks and joys!"

Khruangbin?
twee
brill
¿por qué no los dos?

Calamus 17 Of him I love day and night
A disturbing poem about death, the death of a lover, the death of a city, the death of the poet. And Whitman's own dismissal of death, or at least of memorializing it.
Reading this as someone who grew up in the 80s, I can only read this in reflection on the AIDS crisis. Of my own community's deaths.
And I found that every place was a burial-place,
The houses full of life were equally full of death
The poem doesn't offer any solace in this reading. It is just a marker of death and being exposed to so much death that we are inured to it.

Facebook has now learned I'm gay and is showing me the tackiest fucking ads.

This year is the 35th anniversary of Queers Read This. A key piece of LGBT activism, arguing for pride and direct action. It had a huge influence on my life.
An army of lovers cannot lose.

Calamus 16 Who is now reading this?
A funny little poem, omitted in later editions. On the surface it's a challenge to the reader and a chance for Whitman to establish himself as self-aware. Claiming his own flaws.
But the text drips with some latent queer meaning
as if I do not secretly love strangers!
(O tenderly, a long time, and never avow it ;)
A secret love that you can never avow? Hello! At least it's tenderly and a long time.
This seems as good a time as any to link Whitman's Boys, a good recent piece considering Whitman as a queer man and what that means to us in current times. It's a nice overview of some queer theory and is even-handed.

Another promising salad ruined by having the dressing in a cup on the side. This is never acceptable in a restaurant.

Realizing one reason I'm finding ChatGPT useful right now is it's (so far) relatively unsullied by ads. It makes all sorts of terrible mistakes but at least there's not a human adversary trying to trick me into buying things I don't want.

Calamus 15 O drops of me!
It's a remarkably morbid poem for Whitman, literally about blood dropping from wounds, corrupting his poetry.
stain every song I sing, every word I say, bloody drops
But he turns this blood into a sort of virtue that infuses his poem, starting with an inversion. It's not "saturate yourself with the drops". Instead it's saturate them with yourself.
Saturate them with yourself, all ashamed and wet,
Glow upon all I have written or shall write, bleeding drops,
Let it all be seen in your light, blushing drops.
I can make a case for a queer reading of recognizing gay shame and overcoming it. To take the stigma of homosexuality and turn it into a virtue, "let it all be seen in your light".
But I think I may be out on a limb with that interpretation. Whitman's not typically a writer about shame. And I think "gay shame" doesn't apply well as a concept in the 1850s, that's a malady that comes with a backlash against modern gay identity.

Every once in awhile I drag a file over the wrong pixel in Windows Explorer, over a broken network share. And the entire operating system UI comes to a frozen halt for 30 seconds while it times out. It's 2025.

A friend of mine last night told me about how his lover died of AIDS in 1994. And before he died, he had a port installed to more easily administer medication directly to his heart. Another friend also had a port installed in 1994 for AIDS treatment. That friend survived another year until the antiretrovirals became available and he is still alive today. My friend's partner died.

One thing that's great in the Death Stranding games is the asynchronous multiplayer. It's great fun to leave signs and useful structures around for other players and to see theirs. Social, but not demanding. Elden Ring does this well too.

Calamus 45 Full of life, sweet-blooded, compact, visible
A remarkably effective poem for the end of the cluster. Whitman talking directly to us, the reader, about the import of his poems. And with some ambition: "To one a century hence, or any number of centuries hence".
But even better, he's horny for us:
Now it is you ... seeking me,
Fancying how happy you were, if I could be with you, and become your lover
The poet is imagining us, his future readers, thinking about how we will want to be his lover. What a lusty man! Whitman is not modest.
I love it. And it's a fitting end to this series. I've greatly enjoyed reading them. Over the past 45 days I've learned better how to read Whitman, to understand his poems. And to relate to them in at least one simple way, teasing out the gayest and sexiest parts of these poems. Making them fun for myself.
I'm not quite done yet. I hope to identify my favorites of the group. I may also try my hand at reading one or two aloud.

The album cover for Rod McKuen's 1977 album "Slide... Easy In"

Calamus 14 Not heat flames up and consumes
A declaration of love, eroticism mixed with nature imagery. Something of a theme in Calamus! It didn't really grab me though, I think because so many of the lines start with negations and it distances me from the meaning.
The sexy line here:
the flames of me, consuming, burning for his love whom I love!
I also like the imagery of seeds wafted in the wind, then heading to "my Soul is borne through the open air".
This musical performance by the Erato Ensemble is a nice interpretation.

Death Stranding 2 is out! A will trip over rocks and carry heavy boxes on my back for Léa Seydoux again.

Wanted: a separate display device to sit under my TV and do nothing but show subtitles.
I guess this isn't easy. The subtitle data isn't in the HDMI output from your streaming device. That's too bad, it'd be relatively straightforward if it was. Could still hack something up but it'd involve customizing the streaming source.

Google's grammar checker does not speak Gay. I guess the AI never got laid.

Calamus 44 Here my last words
In which the poet outs himself through talking about his poetry.
It's a short piece of Whitman talking about his own writing. But he's so twisted up!
Here I shade down and hide my thoughts—I do not expose them,
And yet they expose me more than all my other poems.
I read this as him talking about Calamus, the cluster of gay poems. And directly telling us that he's censored and hidden what he really wants to say. And yet still these poems still expose his true self. It makes me feel sad for Whitman, imagine his writing if he felt less fettered.
Still, he published some of the most clear gay poems of the 19th century. And got famous and mainstream doing it.

Fun new summer music video, is out, Kesha’s Boy Crazy. It’s a basic pop/hiphop bop, featuring various images of Kesha surrounded by her boy toys. Only some of her boy toys are well over the age of 60.

Calamus 13 "Calamus taste"
A celebration of nature in March, an entreaty to enjoy and nurture growth. Both botanical and metaphorical, our personal growth. Some lovely turns of phrase:
Gushes from the throats of birds
Frost-mellowed berries
But I'm here for the gay reading. The erotic is latent in all this burgeoning spring. But it's also more explicit. That first line "Calamus taste" sure is promising if we understand Calamus as a phallic symbol. Then there's the "pinks of love", the "young persons wandering out in the fields", the "love-buds".
It's not porny or anything but it's a little horny. The physical exuberance of springtime.
This poem got edited heavily down in later versions, and perhaps it needed it. But he eliminated one of my favorite lines, "I must change the strain". Gonna drop that in conversation next time I need to change the topic.

This short paper gets deep in the weeds of a particular kind of physics, he is sharing a rare example where we were able to both reduce a system and then construct the aggregate behavior. But the broad systems conclusion is what's interesting.
The arrogance of the particle physicist and his intensive research may be behind us (the discoverer of the positron said "the rest is chemistry"), but we have yet to recover from that of some molecular biologists, who seem determined to try to reduce everything about the human organism to "only" chemistry, from the common cold and ailmental disease to the religious instinct. Surely there are more levels of organization between human ethology and DNA than there are between DNA and quantum electrodynamics, and each level can require a whole new conceptual structure.

Thinking about LLMs in the context of Philip Anderson's classic paper More is Different
the reductionist hypothesis does not by any means imply a "constructionist" one: The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe.

Calamus 43 O you whom I often
A short and sweet love poem, Whitman at his most writerly. The spare and simple words have a light musicality that's often missing from his more didactic blank verse.
The literal meaning is Whitman telling someone how his very presence inspires feelings of love. It's so short and precise I'm just going to quote the whole poem.
O you whom I often and silently come where you are, that I may be with you,
As I walk by your side, or sit near, or remain in the same room with you,
Little you know the subtle electric fire that for your sake is playing within me.
I love the lack of action. Whitman simply wants to sit in the same room as his beloved, a quiet devotion I appreciate. And that phrase "subtle electric fire". Electric had a different meaning in pre-Edison America but it works both ways.
Mostly this poem is just a lovely mood.
(The linked video and commentary are more than usually good.)

Calamus 42 To the young man
A short poem but very hot, dripping with latent queer meaning. Or pederasty, if I'm being honest.
The poem is literally Whitman offering to teach a young man. "To absorb, to engraft, to develop". And "to help him become élève", a fancy French word for student, and the choice there certainly raises an eyebrow.
But then what qualifications does this student require? Here, in the negation:
If he be not silently selected by lovers, and do not silently select lovers
That's not the usual test scores and sports achievements! Instead Whitman seems to have a specific extracurricular activity in mind. (And note the "select" directly echoes the "picking me out" in the previous poem.)
This poem becomes particularly bold when understanding it as Whitman speaking directly to the reader. Perhaps a young man that Whitman can take under his wing.
I'm being a bit silly but this kind of mentorship has a long, sexy gay history.

Calamus 41 Among the men and women, the multitude
A sweet poem about having a conceptual soulmate. What's interesting to me is how clandestine the connection is
one picking me out by secret and divine signs...
I meant that you should discover me so, by my faint indirections
This feels very gaydar / cruisy to me.

Calamus 40 That shadow, my likeness
An odd little poem to find in Calamus. I like it, I connect to the existential doubt.
How often I question and doubt whether that is really me
The self Whitman is unsure of is the quotidian self, the one that works and talks and shops. What does he embrace as the real him?
among my lovers, and carolling my songs, I never doubt whether that is really me.
There's our lusty Whitman, finding his true self in his lovers and his poetry.
PS: this poem introduced me to the lovely word chaffer.