What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life, author Mark Doty detailed a sexual experience with a man from Provincetown named Frank.
In the midst of the encounter, he looked up at the face of his lover to observe "another man with short gray hair and beard, the same half-smile, but with the visionary dazzle of starlight in his eyes.""I was, quite calmly, looking into the face of the Walt Whitman of 1856, the year of the Brooklyn daguerreotype, the picture in which he seems to be slowly and with a great inner radiance returning to earth from wherever it is he’s been," Doty wrote.In a recent Zoom session with The Advocate and a former student of his, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Jericho Brown, Doty revisited the significance of the encounter..