Tenney Nathanson: On "I Hear It Was Charged Against Me"
These lines offer an instance of the paradoxical anti-institutional institutionalism . . . central to Whitman’s work. Here, this ambivalent stance might be understood as a particular response to a particular predicament: Whitman is simultaneously seeking to establish a tradition of homosexual ritual and struggling to distinguish it from the entrenched mores and ceremonies of the dominant heterosexual culture.