Was herman melville gay

Melville wasn’t like Oscar Wilde, Tchaikovsky, or even Nikolai Gogol level gay. However, he very well may have been bisexual and I also more than suspect he had sex with at least a few sailors out at sea. Although there are zero diary confessions or letters of him doing so.

Melville seems to have presaged the eclipse of their relationship in the review in which the magnetism had begun: It is that blackness in Hawthorne that so fixes and fascinates me.