It was about the first great American literary movement, roughly 1840-1860, when the great books that everyone still reads sprang up out of nowhere: Moby-Dick, Walden, The Scarlet Letter, Leaves of Grass, The House of the Seven Gables. There were five main writers.
1. Ralph Waldo Emerson. Dr. Ames: "He kept ignoring his wife to go on speaking tours." During his junior year at Harvard, Emerson fell in love with a man named Martin Gay, and spent the rest of his life writing him homoerotic poetry.
2. Henry David Thoreau. Dr. Ames: "He was sexually repressed, too shy to talk to women." And he filled his journals with reflections on the strong, noble love between men.
3. Herman Melville. Dr Ames: "He was a little light in the loafers. Check out the scene where the two guys are in bed together, and Ishmael grabs Queequeg's tomahawk!"
Moby-Dick is invariably heterosexualized on screen (such as the version starring Henry Thomas, left), but Billy Budd is too homoerotic to "straighten out."
4. Nathaniel Hawthorne. Dr. Ames: "He was friends with Melville, but then things got a little weird, and they split up." Nevertheless, Hawthorne wrote about strong same-sex coupling in The Blythedale Romance, and "Young Goodman Brown," about a man discovering that all of his friends and neighbors are Satan-worshippers, can be read as a parable for a homophobe discovering the gay underground.
The Scarlet Letter gets many movie adaptions, including Easy A (2010), with Penn Badgley (top photo) and Dan Byrd as a gay high schooler.
5. Walt Whitman. Dr. Ames: "He scattered illegitimate children up and down the Eastern seaboard, but he also had a bit of the fruit in him." Actually, Whitman filled his journals with detailed accounts of his nightly cruising for men.
Dr. Ames didn't mention Edgar Allan Poe at all.
S
One can only imagine all of them together in a gay bar- well I know they had gay brothels in New York I wonder is they ever visited one?
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