Walt Whitman

Chris Stevens

Episode 1.02, "Brains, Know-How, and Native Intelligence"

It was a day not unlike any other day in the summer of 1976. I, a boy of fifteen, and my oldest and dearest friend, Dickie Heath, having just stolen a car from the parking lot of a Shop-Easy and finding ourselves with nothing much to do, entered a house on Foxhill Lane. While Dickie rifled the upstairs for valuables, I entered the sitting room where, while pocketing a gold-leafed pen and a silver humidor, came across the book that completely changed my life.

So this morning Chris-in-the-Morning is going to dispense with the weather and traffic report, and the local news, and get down with The Complete Works of Walt Whitman.

When lilacs last in the door-yard bloom'd,
And the great star early droop'd in the western sky in the night,
I mourn'd--and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.
O ever-returning spring! trinity sure to me you bring;
Lilac blooming perennial, and drooping star in the west,
And thought of him I love.

Months later, as I sat in a juvenile detention home, re-reading those poems that had opened up the artist in me, I was blindsided by the raging fist of my incarcerator, who informed me that Walt Whitman's homoerotic, unnatural, pornographic sentiments were unacceptable and would not be allowed in an institution dedicated to reforming the ill-formed. That Whitman, that great bear of a man, enjoyed the pleasures of other men, came as a surprise to me and it made me reconsider the queers that I had previously kicked around.

[Buy the Library of America's Walt Whitman: Poetry and Prose]