Selected Writings Volume 1: Sex

Carpenter had the liberation of a fully integrated personality: for him, the soul is freedom, the body is joy, and "flesh is the root of the soul." Like Whitman, Carpenter in Towards Democracy (1883) sings of the abstrations equality, democracy, freedom, and love, but the ideas are always illustrated by convincing concrete examples. Equality is the feeling that all persons has equal dignity: "If I am not level with the lowest, I am nothing." The "lowest" are not merely the ideological categories of the outcast, the rejected, and so forth, but real persons who are prostitutes, drug addicts, thieves, Blacks, and homosexuals.