"These days, we understand Thoreau to have been a nonpracticing gay man, whose retreat to his weatherized cabana at Walden was... an anti-heteronormative broadside."
I'm trying to read "Thoreau in Love/The writer had a deep bond with his mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson. But he also had a profound connection with Emerson’s wife" by James Marcus (The New Yorker).
I've taken an ongoing interest in Thoreau ever since I encountered him when I was a high school student in the 1960s, and I've noticed and blogged things about him throughout the 17 years of this blog, and I'm even also interested in the subject of historical figures who might have been gay. How did I miss the development of this understanding that Thoreau was "a nonpracticing gay man"?
If he's nonpracticing, and he didn't talk about it, whence the idea that he was gay? Doesn't that erase asexuality?
Anyway. Let's read:
Thoreau wrote a pair of essays, “Love” and “Chastity & Sensuality”... Thoreau plays two roles at once: the libertine, who argues that sexual matters should be discussed more frankly, and the prude, who is visibly relieved that they are not. There is some blather about abstinence as virtue... But then he gives his stamp of approval to the botanical kingdom, whose “organs of generation” are “exposed to the eyes of all.”
In other words, we should all be like shameless flowers.... It’s a surprising and hilarious reversal, followed by the most honest paragraph in either essay:
The intercourse of the sexes, I have dreamed, is incredibly beautiful, too fair to be remembered. I have had thoughts about it, but they are among the most fleeting and irrecoverable in my experience. It is strange that men will talk of miracles, revelation, inspiration, and the like, as things past, while love remains.
Sex, to Thoreau, was no more than a rumor, a rapidly dissipated dream. Love was something else: the last miraculous thing. He had no idea what to make of it, drawn as he was to both women and (mostly) men, eager to share his feelings and utterly convinced that such disclosure would kill them off for good....
“I fear bodies,” he once wrote, “I tremble to meet them.”
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