@nelson@tech.lgbtCalamus 39 Sometimes with one I love
A short and sweet honoring of unrequited love. Whitman expressing his rage at it, but then also recognizing that even the experience of unreturned love contributes to his life and poetry.
I think it's a universal sentiment. But then Whitman gays it up a bit:
if I had not freely given myself to comrades, to love
There's that word, "comrades", which to me reads as very male/male coded. He removed it in later versions.
@degrowthuk@mstdn.socialDegrowth as an Essential Part of an Eco-Socialist Transition
by Anna Gregoletto* In the series Prospects for Degrowth Many thanks to Mark Burton for encouraging me to write this article and offering so many helpful suggestions. Thank you also to my comrades at Climate Vanguard. Without their teachings I’d have never been able to articulate the ideas in this article. Do check out Climate Vanguard’s incredible work.
@denmanrooke@social.coopAny of my Godot comrades here know if there's a way to get the "Animation Key and Pose Options" into the 3D scene and not just the 2D? I mainly just want that auto keying feature for my 3D scene.
#Godot
@nelson@tech.lgbtCalamus 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.
@degrowthuk@mstdn.socialStories of expanded solidarity: the personal and the political in the degrowth perspective from the European periphery
by Mladen Domazet1 When Mark asked me to contribute to this series, there was an instruction to try to point to any good prospects for degrowth in this conjuncture, and a lingering implication to use my semiperipheral voice to inform the by-now-desperate comrades in the metropole. Combine that with a professional deformation to write essays when given…
@nelson@tech.lgbtCalamus 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.
@nelson@tech.lgbtCalamus 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.
@degrowthuk@mstdn.socialDegrowth as an Essential Part of an Eco-Socialist Transition
by Anna Gregoletto, on DegrowthUK
https://degrowthuk.org/2025/06/12/degrowth-as-an-essential-part-of-an-eco-socialist-transition/
Also
Degrowth: …
@degrowthuk@mstdn.socialNew article,
Degrowth as an Essential Part of an Eco-Socialist Transition
by Anna Gregoletto, on DegrowthUK
https://degrowthuk.org/2025/06/12/degrowth-as-an-essential-part-of-an-eco-socialist-transition/
@nelson@tech.lgbtCalamus 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.
