The Fred Gray Association  Details about the Fred Gray Association are sketchy at best, and the extant historical documents provide only the most basic details.  Ed Folsom and Ken Price characterize the group as "a loose confederation of young men who seemed anxious to explore new possibilities of male-male affection" (<cite>Re-Scripting</cite> 62).  Members of the group included Walt Whitman, Nat Bloom, and John Frederick Schiller Gray (after whom the group seems to have been named), Nat Gray, Charles Kingsley, Charles Chauncey, Hugo Fritsch, a man known only as "Perkins" and someone referred to as "Raymond" that may be Henry J. Raymond.  

Whitman's letters speak of the group's adventures while "wandering the east side of the city [...] in the lager beer saloons" (Allen 316).  In Whitman's memories of Pfaff's, his evenings with the Fred Gray Association "conjure[d] up animation, hilarity and 'sparkle'" (Stansell 118).  

According to Stephanie Blalock, Fred Gray's military service and later marriage potentially complicate conventional wisdom about the workings of the Bohemian crowd at Pfaff's, which included other students from the New York medical community as well. Blalock argues that these links between the Broadway medical community and the frequenters at Pfaff's raise critical questions about Whitman's interests in nursing during the Civil War and about "his efforts to heal the national body with his postwar editions of <cite>Leaves of Grass</cite>" (60).

References & Biographical Resources

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. New York: MacMillan, 1955. 
Allen quotes a letter from September 11, 1864, from Whitman to William O'Connor about his trip to New York.In this letter, he writes of his "amusements" that "last night I was with some of my friends of Fred Gray association, till late wandering the east side of the city first in the lager beer saloons &amp; then elsewhere" (316).
 [pages:316]
Blalock, Stephanie M. "'My Dear Comrade Frederickus': Walt Whitman and Fred Gray." Walt Whitman Quarterly Review. 27.1 (2009): 49-65. 
Blalock claims that Gray's biography sheds light on Whitman's connections with the crowd at Pfaff's as well as the broader New York medical community. Blalock suggests that Whitman's interests in Gray indicate Whitman's more literate and polished tastes above his associations with Pfaff's Bohemian crowd. Whitman's role in the Fred Gray Association can be linked to his broader interests in American literary and medical practices.
Charley Shively, ed. Calamus Lovers: Walt Whitman's Working-Class Camerados. San Francisco: Gay Sunshine Press, 1987. 
Shively doesn't mention the group by name, but he goes into great detail about Whitman's relationship with one of the group's members: Fred Vaughan.
Folsom, Ed and Kenneth M. Price. Re-Scripting Walt Whitman: An Introduction to His Life and Work. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005. 
"A loose confederation of young men who seemed anxious to explore new possibilities of male-male affection."
 [pages:62]
Folsom, Ed and Kenneth M. Price. "Walt Whitman." The Walt Whitman Archive. http://www.whitmanarchive.org, 2006. 
It was at Pfaff's," write Folsom and Price, "that Whitman joined the 'Fred Gray Association,' a loose confederation of young men who seemed anxious to explore new possibilities of male-male affection."
Karbiener, Karen. "Whitman at Pfaff's: Personal Space, a Public Place, and the Boundary-Breaking Poems of Leaves of Grass (1860)." Literature of New York. Ed. Sabrina Fuchs-Abrams. Newcastle upon Tyne, U.K.: Cambridge Scholars, 2009. 1-38. 
Mentions the "Fred Gray Association" as perhaps New York's first gay society. 
Morris, Roy Jr. The Better Angel: Walt Whitman in the Civil War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. 
Suggests that the group is named after a physician's son, Frederick Schiller Gray.Members included Frederick's brother Nat, Charles Chauncey, Charles Kingsley (an athlete), and Hugo Fritsch.
 [pages:38, 187]
Stansell, Christine. "Whitman at Pfaff's: Commercial Culture, Literary Life and New York Bohemia at Mid-Century." Walt Whitman Quarterly Review. 10.3 (1993): 107-126. 
Stansell writes that at Pfaff's Whitman "regularly socialized with a group of young male friends -- 'the beautiful young men?' -- dubbed the 'Fred Gray Association' after one of their principals" (107).
Stansell writes that in Whitman's memories of Pfaff's, his evenings with the Fred Gray Association "conjures up animation, hilarity and 'sparkle'" (118).
 [pages:107,111,118]
Whitman, Walt. Letter to Hugo Fritsch. 1863. 125-127. 
The Fred Gray Association is not specifically mentioned in this letter, but both Whitman and Fritsch were core members of the group.
Whitman, Walt. "Letter to Nathaniel Bloom, September 5, 1863." Walt Whitman: The Correspondence. Ed. Edwin Haviland Miller. New York: New York University Press, 1961. 141-143. 
The Fred Gray Association is not specifically mentioned in this letter, but both Whitman and Bloom were core members of the group.
Whitman, Walt. Letter to Nathaniel Bloom. 1863. 141-143. 
The Fred Gray Association is not specifically mentioned in this letter, but both Whitman and Bloom were core members of the group.
Whitman, Walt. Letter to Nathaniel Bloom and John F.S. Gray. 1863. 80-85. 
The Fred Gray Association is not specifically mentioned in this letter, but Whitman, Bloom and Gray were core members of the group.
Whitman, Walt. "Letter to William D. O'Connor, September 11, 1864." Walt Whitman: The Correspondence. Ed. Edwin Haviland Miller. New York: New York University Press, 1961. 241-242. 
Whitman mentions having gone out with some of his friends from the Fred Gray association.
 [pages:241]