Saunders, Charlie

Charlie Saunders may have been a member of the “Fred Gray Association,” a group of young men at Pfaff’s whom Ed Folsom and Ken Price characterize as "a loose confederation of young men who seemed anxious to explore new possibilities of male-male affection" (Re-Scripting 62). Members of the group included Walt Whitman, Nat Bloom, and Frederick Schiller Gray (after whom the group may have been named), Nat Gray, Charles Kingsley, Hugo Fritsch, and Fred Vaughan. Paul Zweig links Saunders to this group with his assertion that during 1860-1861 Whitman "was mostly at Pfaff’s with the crowd of drinkers he would soon be writing to from Washington: Hugo Fritch, Nat Bloom, Charlie Saunders, and others" (325).

References & Biographical Resources

Zweig, Paul. Walt Whitman: The Making of the Poet. New York: Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, 1984. [more about this work]: Zweig writes that, "In the evenings" during 1860 and 1861, Whitman "was mostly at Pfaff's with the crowd of drinkers he would soon be writing to from Washington: Hugo Fritch, Nat Bloom, Charlie Saunders, and others" (325). [pages: 325]