Gays of Yore

Herman Melville was a huge gay slut and Twitter is just finding out about it

By

· Updated on December 18, 2023

How often do the sexploits of 19th-century writer American Herman Melville wend their way into your brain? What’s that–almost daily? Well, me too, and somehow, we’re not alone. Today, the twin poles of book Twitter and gay Twitter have come together to ask the age-old question: just how gay was Mr. Whale Sperm after all?

The answer should be obvious, especially when you think about the complex, uncomfortable relationship between Melville—whose “Moby Dick” has been reclaimed as a gay text many times over—and his sometime-friend and fellow writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was famously super hot, though unfortunately (most likely) straight. Because no matter how many times you rest your eyes on the phrase “[he] shoots his strong New England roots into the hot soil of my southern soul,” it only gets hornier.

Related:

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But some readers would have you believe otherwise. No sooner did an account called Owl! at the library tweet out the facts of the case than some dude decided to jump in with a “no homo” reply.

Writer Aaron Gwyn simply wasn’t having it. Shooting something hot into something else hot? Seems pretty hetero to me!

Of course the lit gays clapped back as only they can… with hard evidence!

But there’s even more to the story. Melville and Hawthorne did have a correspondence, and while it was less one-sided than many scholars seem to believe, it was still a pretty sad case of one dude being way more into one guy’s hot soil than the other. Listen we’ve all been there, it happens.

Now everyone’s asking…where the hell is the limited Hulu series about this gay mess?

RIP Melville, you would have loved Scruff.

It’s the love we’re all looking for, isn’t it?

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