Join us for a discussion led by Don James Brown on "Comrades in Camden: Harry Stafford, Herbert Gilchrist, and Walt Whitman’s Erotics of Disability." Brown is Assistant Professor of Nineteenth-Century American Literature at the University of Tulsa and holds a PhD in English from the University of Pennsylvania.

In the 1870s, following his first stroke and move to Camden, New Jersey, Walt Whitman began writing a manuscript called Idle Days and Nights of a Half-Paralytic. Brown will suggest that this manuscript had a strong erotic component, which merged the love of comrades advocated in his earlier "Calamus" cluster of Leaves of Grass with a new disability aesthetics. Whitman forged this new philosophy of comradely love at Timber Creek in dialogue with two younger men--Harry Stafford and Herbert Gilchrist--whom scholars have suggested were Whitman's lovers during these same years.

 All welcome! Questions: archives@waygay.org