The GLBTRT has been reviewing books and movies in its newsletter since the early 1990s. Trace the evolution of queer publishing through these historic reviews. This review was originally published in Vol. 4, No. 2, Summer 1992.

Drum Beats: Walt Whitman’s Civil War Boy Lovers. Edited by Charley Shively. Gay Sunshine Press, 1989. Paper. $10.95. (ISBN 0-917342-07-5)

Shively brings together the correspondence between Walt Whitman and the numerous soldiers he met and attended as a volunteer male nurse during the Civil War. He details the environment of the encampments and the hospitals, the many situations in wartime which encouraged homosexual friendships among the soldiers, and the particular attraction that Whitman felt of the soldiers and patients he met. It is safe to say that Whitman approached his nursing with nearly equal amounts of compassion and sexual tension, and that many soldiers responded in kind. Shively includes representative letters from fifty soldiers and lovers, and they form a dramatic portrait of Whitman as caregiver, as confidant, and as lover.

But, Shively undermines this work by throwing in unsupported suppositions, language which is anachronistic and vulgar, and sweeping statements which are at best biased and at worst paranoid. His book is not helped by writing such as, “Whitman had chosen not to fight [in the war] but to become the poet of the Civil War. Those homophobes who attack Whitman for not taking up the rifle attack poetry as well.” Or this particularly ridiculous statement: “Except for a few Whitman scholars, most people accept Whitman’s homosexuality because they think poetry is insignificant and thus appropriate for the sexually disordered.”

Shively further weakens his book by taking a side journey conjecturing the sexual orientation of both John Wilkes Booth and Abraham Lincoln. Although this certainly may bear researching, such speculation is simply not appropriate to the thesis of this work. If that were not enough, Shively manages to set back for several millennia both Gay Studies and United States History by speculating on the length of Lincoln’s penis based on his long fingers and his shoe size!

It is really unfortunate that a book of great promise had to be bogged down by its author’s sloppy scholarship and lurid writing. I would consider this book only for those collections specializing in Whitman. Those persons interested in the Whitman correspondence would do well to skip the first 100 pages of the book. Otherwise forget it.

Reviewed by Jim McPeak
Lepper Public Library
Lisbon,OH