Reading Our Leaves 2.1 -- Walt Whitman, Sunday April 27th
Hello Dear Reader!
A reminder that our first meeting of Reading Our Leaves: A Book Club About The Gay Experience will be taking place on Sunday, April 27th, at 7pm Eastern Time. The link to join this free Body Electric event is in the header of this post.
Here’s some more info about the group, below the fold:
We’ll be discussing the book that really started it all, when it comes to the theory of this book club, which is that the ‘gay male’ identity that has done so much to fight from within against White Christian colonialist heteronormative patriarchy, and has done so much to begin to allow us to name our desire and spiritually erotic inclinations from within this imperium as queer people, has had a way of promulgating itself through the lineage of the community of men loving men through all kinds of creative expression and art, but especially the art of literature.
That book – the book that gave us the name for Body Electric, as well as The Dear Love of Comrades – is Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, a book he revised throughout his lifetime, in its most radical and most homosexual and sex-positive original edit of 1858. You can purchase a physical copy of the book at the following link and a portion of the proceeds will go to benefit the Body Electric School: bookshop.org/p/books/l…
An optional, very good book about Whitman that will be a principal interpretive companion in our discussion of the book is Mark Doty’s 2021 memoir What Is The Grass: Walt Whitman In My Life, which you can purchase from the BE bookstore at: bookshop.org/p/books/w…
The list of all the books we are going to read in this monthly ‘deconstructed book club’ is at the following link on our blog:
readingourleaves.org/2025/02/1…
What we mean by a deconstructed book club is that you don’t actually have to read the book to participate productively in our meetings. We’ll begin with a short opening presentation on the history of each book and its author in which we’ll share readings of important passages, and we’ll segue into structured discussions of the themes raised in the work that will be enriched by these selections and what we all have to contribute that is of equal and infinite importance: our own stories. It’s Body Electric, so this is what we specialize in – getting in a circle and letting the truth and eros flow to address and enhance the matters at hand in the room.
Also, please be aware that this book club is open to all people interested in the subject matter – you do not have to identify as a gay man to be welcome and encouraged to contribute.
You can join our Whatsapp group here to meet your fellow gay book enthusiasts:
And please don’t hesitate to drop me a line at gmail if you have any questions:
‘Time, Which Is Intolerant/ Of The Bold And Innocent/ And Indifferent In A Week/ To A Beautiful Physique/ Worships Language/ And Forgives/ Everyone In Whom It Lives/ Forgives Cowardice, Deceit/ Lays Its Honors At Their Feet’ – WH Auden (as slightly interpolated by my memory)
Yours Very Truly,
Johnny Sagan aka Snowy Wilderness
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The Dear Love of Comrades by Walt Whitman I hear it is charged against me that I seek to destroy institutions; But really I am neither for nor against institutions, (What indeed have I in common with them?—Or what with the destruction of them?) Only I will establish in the Mannahatta, and in every city of these States, inland and seaboard, And in the fields and woods, and above every keel little or large, that dents the water, Without edifices, or rules, or trustees, or any argument, The institution of the dear love of comrades.