[Borges]

Whitman was probably gay. Does that negate his standing as a poet? Baldwin was gay too btw and is one of those writers who croses political boundaries. Even people who disagree with his ideas think so. As opposed to say Richard Wright who was more of an literary political activist than a great writer.

And 'Waiting for Godot' is Beckett not Pinter. What the author 'meant' to say is irelevant. What matters is what's on the page and what could be derived from there. I don't care what Shakespeare 'meant'. I care about the text of Hamlet.

[Oberon]

Okay...I'm about to confess something...I don't much care for Gore Vidal's politics nor his personal habits, but the man writes a darned fine novel.

I don't think they're particularly important texts culturally, but they are well-crafted.

[AnAmericanMother]

Bah. If you listen to the modern revisionists, everybody was "probably" gay.

Whitman was pretty odd, and quite scandalous in his day, but as C.S. Lewis says, the moderns interpret every expression of affection or honest love between males as "he's gay!" ("What, Boswell and Johnson (a pretty flagrantly heterosexual couple), and all those hard-bitten hairy old toughs of Romans in Tacitus asking for last kisses when the legion was broken up . . . ALL pansies? If you can believe that, you can believe anything.")

Whitman was celebratory of affection between males and the human form, including the males, but I haven't seen any information that he ever acted on it sexually . . . we just have to quit buying into the propaganda.

. . . and, btw, it might or it might not affect the quality of his poetry. THESE days, it seems that a writer's political, social, and sexual leanings positively INFECT his work.

[BlackElk]

Borges: Neither James Baldwin nor Walt Whitman are or ever were necessary to or desirable for the education of my children or sufficient moral exemplars to be held up as though they were. Shakespeare is and was. The homosexuality of Baldwin and Whitman is no more an intellectual or moral credential for them as writers than the unlamented Mapplethorpe's perversions were qualifications ranking him as an artist.

Neither Beckett nor Pinter nor Ginsberg nor their ilk are necessary or desirable to the education of my children. Purely on the "merits", their "work" is trash.

How you handle your kids' education is your business and how I handle my kids' education is mine.

Isn't that the real point of the entire controversy in this thread? Conservatives respect that choice by parents. Supporters of socialist funded education do not. Our leftist enemies want to cram amoral and immoral leftist agitprop down the throats of everyone's children at everyone's forced expense and enforce societal ignorance and error while they are at it.

If the text is what matters to you, you will get more out of Shakespeare than will the everyday English Literature professor who does in fact want his/her students to know what (he/she imagines) Shakespeare meant to say when writing the precise opposite. My kids get the point by reading Shakespeare without the socialist prism getting in the way.