Last week I spent a few enjoyable days in the United States, in Boston and New York.

It seemed as though the Americans had already almost forgotten about the war in Iraq. There is no surge of gratitude to the President, though he is popular. There is rising concern about the economy. I was, as always, conscious of the variety of American cultures.

The first time I came across the word “gay” in its modern sense was in The Observer in 1956, used to “out” — another modern usage — a large and flamboyant Conservative Cabinet minister of that time. The earliest usage I have since come across goes back to 1938, and appears in that brilliant Hollywood comedy, Howard Hawks’s Bringing Up Baby.

Katharine Hepburn has taken Cary Grant’s clothes in order to prevent him going to New York to marry a rival. Grant has responded by dressing in Hepburn’s very frilly nightgown.

He is confronted by her millionaire aunt at the front door, who naturally asks why he is wearing such a costume. He replies, briefly: “I haven’t suddenly become gay”.

I’m sure the original audiences had no idea what that meant, nor probably did the censor.

Whether one is writing about Shakespeare’s sonnets, Brideshead Revisited, The Turning of the Screw or The Importance of Being Earnest, or more generally about English or American culture, one cannot get away from the issues of gay sensibility, of what gays think. I suppose the same is true of Chinese history, but I do not know enough about the gay history of the Ming dynasty to assert that.

It is, of course, dangerous territory. I once wrote about the possible influence of his gay culture on Maynard Keynes’s contribution to economic theory and was promptly accused of being “homophobic”, yet another new word.

While in Boston I visited, as I usually do, one of the many good book shops. I found a very interesting book, which has been published this year in the United States by the St Martin’s Press. Perhaps it is going to be published over here, but I’ve not yet seen any reviews. The book is called The Crimson Letter, and is written by a Harvard scholar, Douglass Shand-Tucci. Its subtitle and subject is Harvard, Homosexuality and the Shaping of American Culture. It is American culture that determines American politics.

This belongs on the same shelf as another book on the modern history of American culture, The Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand, which also covers the development of ideas in 19th-century Boston. The books cover some of the same characters, including those remarkable brothers, William and Henry James. The Metaphysical Club discusses the early years of the American philosophy of pragmatism, of which William James was the most influential proponent. Henry James was gay; William was not. Indeed, Shand-Tucci writes, “in his Principles of Psychology, (William James) reacts with horror to homosexuality”.

Both books celebrate the influence of Harvard on American political life in the period between the Civil War and the First World War, that is from the 1860s to 1917. The Crimson Letter has a particular thesis about the character and impact of the US gay community in these decades when it was still very much “in the closet” — another modern usage.

Near the end of his book, Shand-Tucci writes: “This study began with two 19th-century visitors to Harvard Yard, fructifying visitors, controversial even then — Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde — who represent as I see it the two classic gay archetypes: in Whitman’s case that of the warrior (and by extension the athlete, the worker, the man’s man — in fact the modern Western bourgeois gay man); in Wilde’s case that of the aesthete (by extension the artist, the littérateur, and in some measure the dandy and the bohemian).”

Walt Whitman is a notorious difficulty for the English. He’s obviously a great poet, in the same way that Tennyson is obviously a great poet. But he is a great poet who has a hyper-American quality which jars on the English. I only know one British student of literature whom I would rely on to have read the main body of Whitman’s work; that would be the former chairman of the Arts Council, Lord Gowrie, who has taught the subject of American poetry.

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