Tootfinder

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.

Finally watched Luca Guadagnino's Queer but did not like it very much. Tedious. I think Cronenberg did a much better job adapting Burroughs.

Calamus 35 To you of New England
Honestly I find this Whitman entreaty to national unity kind of tedious. It's charming and American but it's just so earnest. And this poem doesn't have much music.
Stretching for a gay reading...
a superb friendship, exalté, previously unknown,
... it waits ... latent in all men.
Once again his calls for unity are partly rooted in relationships between men: "friendship" here, the least sexual of his words. But it's also a sort of hidden connection, unknown, latent, and that's a little queer-coded to me.