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IN RECENT YEARS, biographers of Henry David Thoreau have begun to speculate more openly about the sexual orientation of "the patron saint of environmentalists," a man who never married in an age when marriage was de rigueur. "Of our classic American writers Henry David Thoreau is the supreme poet of doubleness, of evasion and mystery," wrote Joyce Carol Oates in an article in The New York Times on May 1, 1988. Was one of the writer's evasions his authentic sexual nature?
One of Thoreau's principal biographers, Walter Harding, was chided by a reviewer of his 1965 work, The Days of Henry Thoreau: A Biography, for "writing as if Sigmund Freud had never existed." Twenty years later, Harding finally felt able to write about Thoreau's sexuality in an afterword to the second edition (Dover, 1982):
I have become convinced that there is evidence of a strong homoerotic element in Thoreau's personality- though I should add that to the best of my knowledge no factual evidence of homosexual activity on Thoreau's part has been uncovered- and that it helps to explain a number of curious facts about his life and facets of his personality and even suggests in the tensions growing out of the conflict between his sexuality and the repressive attitudes of the society in which he lived a possible source of some of his creativity.
Harding, who died in 1996, made an extensive search through Thoreau's journals and other writings to document this conclusion from quotations related to the subjects of sex and marriage. There are many passages in which Thoreau notes with approval the physiques of men and boys whom he encounters, with never a mention of women. Harding noted that a number of Thoreau's close friends commented upon his lack of interest in women, his abhorrence of marriage, and his preference for celibacy.
In previous years, when homosexuality was a taboo subject for many biographers, much was made of Thoreau's hopeless proposal to Ellen Sewell in 1840- after she had already rejected a similar offer of marriage from his brother John. It was speculated that Henry's heart was so broken that, if he could not have Ellen as a wife, he would seek no one else. What seems more likely is that the...