Walt Whitman Is the Reason I Want to Fuck My Dad
In other words, I’m predictable. Allen Ginsberg famously imagines falling in love with the gay founding father of American poetry in a California supermarket. Where are we going? he asks on their odyssey through refrigerated meats, Whitman’s gray beard the compass for their aisle-two romance. Touching Leaves of Grass, Ginsberg simultaneously strokes Whitman’s paunch and wrinkled thighs, opening a transtemporal door to the cottage that houses their chickenhawk life.
This poem was written in 1955: Ginsberg a fresh 29, my dad a couple of years out from enlisting as an airman. Like Ginsberg, my dad was a twink in his youth. Neither was a full-blooded man yet, both chasing the specter of maleness through role models whose sole accomplishment was making it past 40. I relish my dad and Ginsberg as twinks. In this suspended time frame, I can love one and stomach the other. Here, I glimpse a reflection of myself: prey, always on the run, refusing to stop.
But them? My dad became a predator the day he impregnated a Filipina girl, his first of three wives, outside Luzon’s Clark Air Base; Ginsberg, when he realized he could pursue boys under the age of 18, joining NAMBLA. The two became men.
*
Psychologists and social workers say it’s normal for children to develop crushes on their parents. Mommy, I want to marry you, a 4- or 5-year-old boy declares. He pouts when Mommy tells him Daddy is already married to her. He demands that only Mommy tuck him into bed. He envies Daddy—wishes he would disappear—so that he, alone, can cuddle with Mommy.
Adorable, some might call this behavior. Part of growing up, others might say. Friends, too, have shared such rites of passage with me, assurance that I’m simply another collection of organs with a human face.
What I don’t tell them is that I yearned to kiss my dad at 12, not 4. I fantasized about his shirtless torso at 13, not 5. We shared a bed together every night through middle school, Ma in a separate room, my nose millimeters away from the salty tapestry of his back. We didn’t have sex, but I wondered.
At 24, I found Whitman’s infamous nude photo series. Almost scientific in their presentation, the images capture a decaying Whitman from various angles, ventral to dorsal. I traced the curvature of his extended left leg with my middle finger. I analyzed the shape of his pelvis. I imagined his conical beard tickling my neck. I was aroused.
I thought of Dad and choked on my spit. Twice the age of my preteen self, but I hadn’t changed. Four years after his death, but I still wanted him.
*
During the mid-1800s, it was common for American men to hug, kiss, and sleep in the same bed. This behavior was associated with friendship, that strong platonic bond which inevitably developed between two men. Because sexuality wasn’t categorized—the term homosexual wouldn’t be used until the late nineteenth century—these acts avoided controversy and institutional repression.
Whitman, however, sought to create a literary world encoded with homoerotic romance and pleasure, entire topographies budding with male–male companionship. He interpellated his lovers as comrades, men who could unite under the aegis of his newly formed queer democracy. Within this community, there would be more than brotherly pats on the back and pecks on the cheek.
In “Song of Myself,” for example, Whitman depicts an orgy of 28 comrades bathing in a river. An onlooker, presenting as a woman, joins the bacchanal, his/her hand sensuously gliding along their wet chests. Through the speaker’s embodiment of this onlooker, shifting from male god to womanly specter, he/she can enjoy fingering these men’s bodies, glittering with spray, while avoiding detection from the heteronormative gaze.
Eighty years before my dad was born, he entered the universe as this orgiastic ghost—he must have. Rummaging through my dad’s estate, I found a picture of a shirtless blond man at the beach with a disarming smile. Splattered with homoerotic dust, the image was tucked between photos of Dad’s wives and children. I thumbed the man’s face and thought comradeship.
Having little information, I fabulated his and my dad’s history: 1961, Luzon. The airmen’s favorite haunt. A glance down the bar. A coughed-out hello. Fingers brushing for half a second. An invitation for a nightcap. Laughing over spilled beer. A glance across the couch. Fingers brushing for a second and a half. A coughed-out Richard, I don’t know. The gap closing. A kiss, tentative. A kiss, oceanic.
When I came out, my dad mentioned this man, the one he loved before doubling down on heterosexuality. I got over it, he said to dissuade me from my gay reality. I don’t believe him. If I could dismantle time, I’d relocate Dad’s birth to the nineties or early aughts. He’d be happy, and I wouldn’t exist.
*
I’m proof of Derridean illogic, a meaning lost in a loop of pederastic signification. If I deconstruct my pedigree, homoeroticism shakes out of every orifice. My lifelong attraction to mature men was never a glitch but an eventuality. Whitman has always been inside me.
During junior high, I often pictured my male teachers, 20 to 30 years older, in nothing but swim trunks. I fixated on the chest hair that escaped from the tops of their shirts; what was underneath? Mere curiosity, I deflected to friends when letting my fantasies slip.
During high school, I crushed on my calculus teacher, a forty-something bald man with the pinkest pouty lip. I aced my AP exam because I enjoyed looking at him. On my ACT’s writing section, I excavated his tan body, calling him a glittery performer; the scorers assigned that portion of the test a 33 for my imagination.
When I see male celebrities age, only growing more attractive, I recall Whitman’s “Calamus” cluster of poems. I start to mentally outline his ribbed breast, each scar and wrinkle its own constellation. I swear I feel his scented herbage brush the tip of my tongue. Like wine, I’m told.
When I navigate to the Daddy section of gay porn sites, Whitman’s visage appears to me through my webcam and silently whispers Dad’s name. I cope via postcoital dysphoria, by which I mean I scrub myself clean and sit alone in the dark after masturbation and sex. In this feral state I’ll bite if touched.
Today, I look in the mirror and encounter a blur, a palimpsest of other men’s history. I try to mourn my sexuality, but I don’t know how to miss what was never mine. I’m an animal licking an invisible wound.
Is this what Whitman meant when he wrote, I am large, I contain multitudes?
*
One of the first memories I have of my dad is him slamming Ma’s head into the gravel of our driveway. He took her to the hospital, said it was an accident, then ferried her back home, bandage-clad. Dad brought me to her room to say hello, but I wanted to go outside and play with him instead.
In other words, this is the day I learned to crave abuse. To fuck an older man means to be destroyed. My flesh obliterated, I’m able to hear the whistle of inheritance through rectal tears: Daddy, I’m coming home.
Ten years younger, four decades rewound, and I’d be Ginsberg’s type. We’d howl together on our makeshift bed of recycled blankets and mismatched throw pillows. He’d extract every ounce of jouissance from my bones. The prospect of immolation thrills me.
I predictably take after Whitman. In “Song of Myself,” he equates sex to death through the putrefaction of the fleshed body, miraculous in its noxious odors. He deems armpit sweat superior to prayer, the bowels just as delicate as a man’s heart. He builds a religion out of bodily sensations and asserts the holiness of his corporeal form. This is my gospel.
Leo Bersani similarly defines the rectum as a grave, a site where ecstasy and annihilation intersect. To receive anal pleasure is to be powerless. But powerlessness is precisely the value of sexuality, for it’s through the disintegration and humiliation of the self that we detach ourselves from heteropatriarchal expectations of sex. We reinvent our bodies, our rapture.
This must be it: my destruction, my remaking.
*
According to Sigmund Freud, I should want to kill my dad. If the paradigm were reversed, I’d hope for Ma’s death. Neither option works. What category exists for children who wish to be the locus of their fathers’ devastation?
I refused to grow up, so I became non-binary. As a not-man, I avoid replicating my dad’s abuse. I won’t evolve into a Ginsbergian pedophile. Instead of wielding violence, I transform it into cosmic energy. I’d rather be haunted than haunt. Let me be fucked by every Whitman if it means one less ruiner in this waste land.
That isn’t the whole truth. I collapsed into the interstices of gender during a fight with my brother. He beat me hard; I could barely get a punch in. I cried to my mom and thought why. Only 6 years old and I chose surrender.
As Oedipus and Electra’s illegitimate child, I was born without a definable shape. I’m a nothing attempting to materialize my dad’s ghost. Consuming him, I might morph into his twink form as a junior airman: dazed smile, eyelashes doused in stardust. This is who I was always meant to be, I try to believe.
In other words, I submit to older men hoping I find my face: the visage of a renegade who can finally stop running. Stillness: I imagine it tastes of salt.
*
I’m sorry, Ma. For him. For me.
*
Reconsidering Whitman’s river-bathing scene, Michael Moon argues that the omnipresent speaker of “Song of Myself” doesn’t supplant the female observer but journeys alongside her, the two participating in the orgy simultaneously. The onlooker’s femininity lubricates the speaker’s passage toward the river without sacrificing her agency; thus, the two figures’ descent into bacchanalia is a collaboration, not a rivalry.
If my dad entered the spiritual plane as this observer, so, too, did my mom. As a teenager, Ma watched reruns of Magnum, P.I. in her Cebu home and yearned for Tom Selleck’s touch. Little did she know that less than a decade later, she’d marry an ex-military, 6-foot-plus mustache wearer more than twice her age. She was his third wife: another Filipina, a different island.
Ma immigrated to California as a 24-year-old picture bride. She chose to advertise herself in the Asian Romance catalog distributed to American men. She was an agent, my dad her collaborator. I think she and I have the same type.
Extending Moon’s analysis, I interpret the onlooker and speaker’s dual presence as an amalgamation: femininity within masculinity. In this way, the spectral 29th bather transcends gendered expectations and experiences the kaleidoscope of affective states available to men and women. Whitman’s queer democracy saturates each comrade with possibility.
Here, I’m alive-and-not. I exit time and space as the bodiless orgy-goer, a capacity waiting to be reached. I glimpse Dad and Ma, my invisible vellus hairs buzzing at the sight of our overlapping shadows. I wonder if they see me. I wonder if three phantoms can be a multitude.
*
At a nondescript dive bar, I observe a tall man across the room: his hair, salt-and-pepper; his torso, curved like a hawk over an empty glass. He glances at me. I half-smile; he offers the other half.
I fabulate our story: A coughed-out hello. Fingers brushing for half a second. An invitation for a nightcap. Laughing over spilled beer. A glance across the couch. Fingers brushing for a second and a half. A coughed-out Dani, I don’t know. The gap closing. A kiss, tentative.
The ocean starts to swell in my mouth. I contemplate sweet flags dying at the edge of my future grave. I envision my reflected face: I’m coming home.