America’s greatest poet, the gay Walt Whitman, provided us with our core gay identity 150 years ago with his notion of the “great poet,” combining it with a passion to “cheer up slaves and horrify despots” and touting the virtues of democracy in his epochal work, “Leaves of Grass.”The “great poet” was inseparable from the felling of tyrants and the promotion of the disenfranchised through the promotion of mighty institutions of righteousness and democracy. This notion of “gay sensibility” is fully compatible with, indeed, a very spirit of our noble United States of America. Sorry, right wingers, America is, at its core, very gay.
