San Francisco: Gay Sunshine Press, (1989). First edition - A book which "brings together the correspondence between Walt Whitman and the numerous soldiers he met and attended as a volunteer male nurse during the Civil War. He details the environment of the encampments and the hospitals, the many situations in wartime which encouraged homosexual friendships among the soldiers, and the particular attraction that Whitman felt of the soldiers and patients he met. . . Shively includes representative letters from fifty soldiers and lovers, and they form a dramatic portrait of Whitman as caregiver, as confidant, and as lover. . . but Shively weakens his book by taking a side journey conjecturing the sexual orientation of both John Wilkes Booth and Abraham Lincoln." (GLBTRT) Illustrated with photographs. Includes a short selection of poems by Whitman, bibliography. 256 pp. ISBN: 0-917342075.