There's this line in the Bechdel profile in this week's New Yorker, about how her father ruined any potential for Whitman to be a "queer, radical, lunatic companion" b/c he kept pushing "great writers" on her. I remember my dad always had hundreds of volumes on his shelves, including a thick collected Whitman with an Eakins painting of sexy boyflesh on the front cover--i mostly got my love of Whitman as a queer radical lunatic companion (and Dickinson in her way) because i wanted to make sure that my tastes were less bourgeois then my fathers, who i thinks taste was a bourgeois attempt to radically dismiss my grandparents petit bourgeois tendencies. so there was like three layers of queer recursion against a central goal there, mostly centered on not particularly liking my father.