As we saw in the previous chapter, at a crucial moment in After Lorca “Jack” addresses himself to the Spanish poet as “your special comrade,” a term that joins the Whitmanian euphemism for gay lover to the discourse of international communist fellowship which came to the fore so prominently among the American left during the Spanish Civil War – the occasion, of course, of Lorca's death. While Spicer was not a communist, it is hardly by chance that at the heart of the McCarthyite 1950s he chose such a politically charged term of endearment. Nor is it a coincidence that the book which Spicer himself considered his breakthrough in terms of poetics was written under the auspices of an exchange with a gay predecessor, and holds at its heart a reckoning with Whitman, for if the work is concerned throughout with the possibilities of contact, exchange, community, and “correspondence” in general, it is utterly specific in its address to gay poets. As Robert Duncan retrospectively stressed in his 1972 preface to Caesar's Gate: “It seemed to us, to Jack Spicer as to me, in our conversations of 1946 and 1947 as young poets seeking the language and lore of our homosexual longings as the matter of a poetry, that Lorca was one of us, that he spoke here [in the “Ode to Walt Whitman”] from his own unanswered and – as he saw it – unanswerable need” (xxii).