Could the father of Gay poetry, Walt Whitman have ever imagined his 1855 poem I sing the Body Electric would inspire musicians The Sisters of Mercy, writer Ray Bradbury and Born to Die singer Lana Del Ray? It even appears in Rushdie's Satanic Verses

This was a man who, alone in a Washington DC street car one night, started nonchalantly chatting  – where have we heard this before? -  to the tram conductor. A life-long relationship began, one which saw Leaves of Grass become the Western world's first seminal gay poem. This excerpt,written in 1855, celebrates physical intensity. It`s worth looking up.

I sing the body electric,

The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,

They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,

And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul...

I have perceiv’d that to be with those I like is enough,

To stop in company with the rest at evening is enough,

To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh is enough,

To pass among them or touch any one, or rest my arm ever so lightly round his or her neck for a moment, what is this then?

I do not ask any more delight, I swim in it as in a sea.

There is something in staying close to men and women and looking on them, and in the contact and odor of them, that pleases the soul well,

All things please the soul, but these please the soul well.