I Stop Somewhere Waiting for You: Walt Whitman, America's Queer Poet (1819–1892) | LGBTQ+ History Sleep Story

Restful Rainbow · Aug 25, 2026 · 57m

Drift off to sleep learning about Walt Whitman, the poet of Leaves of Grass, and the most openly homoerotic voice in nineteenth-century American literature.

Born May 31, 1819, at West Hills on Long Island, Whitman left school at eleven to work as a printer's apprentice in Brooklyn, taught in one-room schoolhouses, edited newspapers, and rode the Fulton Ferry and the Broadway omnibuses for the love of the crowds. In July 1855 he self-published Leaves of Grass, twelve poems, no rhyme, no author's name on the cover, and Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote to tell him, "I greet you at the beginning of a…