Were They or Weren't They?

I was procrastinating this afternoon when I happened on an old column by Slate's former movie reviewer David Edelstein.  He had recently reviewed The Return of the King, the final installment of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy, and the vexed question of the bond between Frodo and Sam had stirred up a reaction in Edelstein's email.

Here’s scholar Jeanette Zissell on the tabloid antics of Sam and Frodo: “The intense relationship between Sam and Frodo, for example, is exactly of the same kind as Patroclus and Achilles, or Roland and Charlemagne. These men were extremely close, bonding in situations where their lives depend on each others’ actions. Their relationships read as verging on the homoerotic to a modern reader, and yet fall short of actualizing that tension. In Sam and Frodo’s case, as Tolkein was a devout Catholic, this relationship also reflects the communion between believers, and the respect, self-sacrifice and love they owe to each other. And while such sexual tension may or may not be present in any instance, each has a theme of friendship it is easy to miss. If these were stories of women, would we be so quick to discount feelings of loyalty and sentimental love in this way? As a culture we are often uncomfortable with male sentiment, something medievals had no difficulty in expressing. And while I understand your assertion and to a large extent agree, I would bring attention to the complications of these concepts that modern culture does not understand. We could well benefit from an inspection of that kind of bonding, and to look further at the self-assurance and lack of shame at male feeling that it involves.” Bravo. Gimme a kiss, Jim.

I wonder what Ms. (or Professor?) Zissell is a "scholar" of.  She ought to know that though Homer's Achilles and Patroclus weren't depicted as lovers, they were widely read as lovers by Greeks just a couple of centuries later.  This was not a confusion engendered by "modern culture," nor was it due to discomfort with "male sentiment."  It was an ancient culture revising its forebears, and since the characters in question are fictionalized if not fictional, it's as much a waste of time to insist that they weren't 'really' having sex as to insist that they were.  She should also know that sentiment and loyalty between women, historical or fictional, makes many people uncomfortable too.

As I've discussed before at length, ease with intense male bonding has coexisted with unease about it through most of Western history.  Even now in our supposedly more enlightened day. there are turf wars over the sexual orientation of this fictional character or that historical personage.  Where Frodo and Sam are concerned, I find it very interesting that so many modern readers devoured The Lord of the Rings without apparently being bothered by their closeness.  Maybe they were comfortable as long as they were immersed in the story, and only got nervous when for some reason they had to think about it.  As Jeanette Zissell's remarks show, even specialists in ancient or medieval literature don't think about it very well.  Maybe I should get around to reading The Song of Roland.

I Knew I Shoulda Taken That Left Turn at Albuquerque

I have always secretly admired people who could read a newspaper while eating.  It bespeaks co-ordination, dexterity, and automatic digestion, none of which attributes I seem to possess.  It also gives one an air of being a man of affairs, and I long ago abandoned the attempt to look like a man of affairs.  I even find it difficult, some mornings, to look like a man.

-- Robert Benchley, "Read and Eat"

So I was reading Robert Benchley's 1936 collection My Ten Years in a Quandary, and How They Grew tonight while I ate dinner, and I was amused by his references to his foil and imaginary friend Mr. MacGregor, who always seems to be handy though Benchley carefully states that "he doesn't sleep here."  On the other hand, Benchley complains that MacGregor always leaves "a lot of work undone (I am always the fall guy who ends up by doing the work around the house)".  I began to muse on subtexts.  I don't know (or care) anything about Robert Benchley's innermost desires, though I know he was heterosexually married; I'm talking about the milquetoast persona he created in his humorous writings.  I'm sure "Benchley" and MacGregor were just good friends, homosocial as could be.

So I switched to my old posts on the Birth of the Modern Homosocial, and the rather overwrought defenses of various historical and fictional figures' Kinsey Zeroness.  Which in turn reminded me that I'd heard reports that a recent biographer had suggested that Franz Kafka might have been That Way.  I did some searching to see if there was any substance to these speculations and found a few reviews of the historian Saul Friedlander's brief biography Frank Kafka: The Poet of Shame and Guilt (Yale, 2013), which told me what evidence lay behind Friedlander's speculations.

That evidence turned out to be a bit more substantial than I expected, but there doesn't seem to be much of it.  For example, this passage from Kafka's diary, which his friend and executor Max Brod censored in the English translation (the censored bits are in brackets):

Struggle on the road to [the] Tannenstein in the morning, struggle while watching the ski-jumping contest. Happy little B., in all his innocence somehow shadowed by my ghosts, at least in my eyes [, specially his outstretched leg in its gray rolled-up sock], his aimless wandering glance, his aimless talk. In this connection it occurs to me—but this is already forced—that towards evening he wanted to go home with me.

It sounds like Kafka wanted B. to want to go home with him.  Again, this isn't much, but it seems to make clear that Kafka was erotically drawn to another male and knew it.  "There are also," the novelist John Banville wrote in his review of Friedlander's book, "some admiring glances thrown in the direction of a couple of handsome Swedish youths. It is hardly a damning testament. What is perhaps most significant is the fact that Brod felt it necessary to make these quiet elisions, since it suggests he had definite suspicions about his friend’s sexual inclination."

Where on earth does "damning" come from?  The striking thing here is that Banville treats Friedlander's speculations about Kafka's possible bisexuality as accusations.  A decent person would see Kafka's desire for B. and the handsome Swedes as rather sweet, and his "struggle" with it sad, just like his complicated, frustrated desires for women.

Here's another bit from another review, quoting Friedlander:

“Today in the coffee-house with [Franz] Werfel,” Kafka wrote in April 1914. “How he looked from the distance, seated at the coffee table. Stooped, half reclining even in the wooden chair, the beautiful profile of his face pressed against his chest … His dangling glasses make it easier to trace the delicate outlines of his face.”

Hey, can't a bro admire another bro's beautiful profile without somebody making a federal case out of it?  But this isn't all.

Later again, in mid-November 1917, Kafka wrote to Brod about a dream, the ambiguity of which he himself commented on: “If I go on to say that in a recent dream I gave Werfel a kiss, I stumble right into the middle of Bluher’s book. But more of that later. The book upset me; I had to put it aside for two days …” Bluher, a leading figure in the German youth movement, wrote about male erotic bonding in his 1917 work The Role of Eroticism in Male Society.

Ah yes, a manly kiss between normal manly guys.  And it was a dream, waddaya want anyhow?

The same reviewer continues:

Long before these confessions, Friedlander notes, Kafka was writing in his diary about posing for an artist in the nude at age 19 as a model for St. Sebastian. The picture of Kafka the serial womanizer stripping off his clothes in a Prague studio in 1912 and allowing another man to tie him to a post and paste fake arrows on his chest is slightly jarring even in the 21st century (actual pictures would be yet more jarring still – do they exist? If they ever surface, will we claim we were unprepared?). Friedlander shows that he knows this by presenting it all with becoming gravity, and he has a deeper purpose in doing so at all: his contention is that deep sexual ambiguities and doubt form yet another instructive layer in the complex literary gift prudish Brod bequeathed to readers everywhere.

Apparently there was more homoeroticism in Kafka's life (and perhaps his work) than this, but these examples are what the reviewers I found quoted.  Of course some gay writers and bloggers got all giggly about this, and treated Friedlander's speculations as gospel.  (I refuse to link to them.)  I hope I can fit Friedlander's book into my busy reading schedule sometime in the next century, but for now: What Kafka himself thought about his lust for other males isn't clear, and most likely we'll never know.  I think it's important, though, that he recognized what his feelings were, and it doesn't seem to me that he struggled with them quite as much as Friedlander and Banville, among others, wish he had.  Were these little stories really "confessions," I wonder?  On the surface that word is right down there with "damning."  I suppose one would have to read the diaries at length to get a sense of what Kafka meant by recording them, and whether these epithets come from him or represent the hangups of these guys who are writing about him.

Reiner Stach, another recent Kafka biographer, told the Guardian that Kafka's fears and obsessions about sex were "perfectly normal."  I'm not persuaded.  Yes, fear of venereal disease and unwanted pregnancy were widespread, and quite reasonable, and in that sense normal.  Yet those fears didn't stop men from going out and having sex anyway.  There were many brothels in Europe and the US back then, and syphilis and gonorrhea were epidemic scourges.  One might almost call having a sexually transmitted disease "perfectly normal."

Stach said:

“I don’t know why it persists. Kafka had homosexual fantasies, but everyone does. He had a really intense access to his own subconscious, more than we might have, and this is why he is such a great writer. So, he had homosexual, bisexual, sadistic, masochistic and voyeuristic fantasies and all of these appeared in his works, which is typical for writers like Kafka. But you can’t conclude that he was any one of those things himself.”

I think this is nonsense.  Even if "everyone" has homosexual fantasies, that wasn't accepted in Kafka's day, and probably not now.  I'm always suspicious when someone tries to brush aside potentially embarrassing information with "everybody does that."  "Typical for writers like Kafka" is also a red flag: how many "writers like Kafka" are there?  His fans generally treat him as sui generis, and he was certainly very unusual.  I don't know that he had more access to his subconscious than most people, or how that in itself would make him a great writer.  And if someone has, and cultivates, homosexual, "bisexual," sadomasochistic and voyeuristic fantasies, it's not damning or an accusation to say that he was homosexual, bisexual, sadomasochistic, or a voyeur, even if he didn't act them out.  Stach reveals himself here to be, not a sophisticated, cosmopolitan observer, but a rather crude and provincial one.

The idea that it doesn't count if you don't have overt sex is one of the older "defenses" in the book, used by the crudest most bigoted sexual cops when someone they like turns out to be not quite the paragon of purity they want him to be. "You don't have to be one to play one" is also standard.  At least no one -- that I've seen so far -- has invoked "The modern homosexual hadn't been invented yet."  Kafka lived in the milieu of the newborn Modern Homosexual, and he was evidently well-read enough to know it.

I find it depressing that this embarrassment over, yes, "perfectly normal" areas of human experience is still so much with us.  Of course the embarrassment is perfectly normal too.  It's just nothing to be complacent about.  Meanwhile, I'm saying nothing about "Benchley's" confessed relationship with his imaginary dachshund friend Friedel Immerman.

Leave Kinsey Alone!

Jeez.  I finally got off my butt and after nearly a year I'm again reading William Benemann's Male-Male Intimacy in Early America (Harrington Park Press, 2006).  I'm moving along pretty smoothly, just past page 70, and there's some interesting stuff in it.  I've been making notes for a longer post, maybe more than one, because this is a subject I've been procrastinating on for a long time.  But occasionally Benemann puts his foot in it, and I'm going to write about that too.

At the end of the introductory material that bogged me down before, Benemann rejects the "bifurcated" view of people as either homosexual or heterosexual.  That's a good thing, though it occurs to me that just about everybody -- certainly every scholarly writer -- who addresses this subject pays lip service to Rejecting the Binary.  What counts is whether you can actually apply that concept to the material you're discussing; so far Benemann is trying to.  And, as most such writers do, he cites Alfred Kinsey:

A more useful model is the one presented by Alfred Kinsey in 1948.  Kinsey described sexual orientation as a continuum, a scale from one to six with one being entirely heterosexual and six being entirely homosexual.  Most human beings fall somewhere between the two extremes of the scale [xvii].

So, first: the scale doesn't run from one to six; it runs from zero to six, with zero (not one) being entirely heterosexual.  In an endnote Benemann cites Kinsey, Pomeroy, and Martin's 1948 Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, page 638, so he could have seen for himself.  On that page is a diagram like this one:

Zero to six, right?  But that's minor.  Second, Kinsey didn't "describe sexual orientation as a continuum" -- he didn't describe sexual orientation at all.  The continuum is a map of data points based on individuals' sexual histories.

Third, most human beings do not fall between the two extremes of the scale.  The interval from zero to one includes half (50 percent) of Kinsey's male histories.  The interval from five to six includes one twenty-fifth (4 percent) of his male histories.  Those who fall between the two extremes are the remaining 46 percent.  I don't know who originated the belief that the histories are distributed in a bell curve, but it has no basis in Kinsey's data.

Are They or Aren't They?

The above photograph is apparently world-famous -- in fact, it won the photographer a Pulitzer Prize in 1968 -- but I don't remember having seen it before.  Someone posted it to Facebook this weekend, under the header "Amazing Facts."  It depicts one male utility worker giving CPR to another worker who'd been shocked by a high voltage line. The CPR worked: the stricken man survived to live another forty years, and the man who saved him is still living.

Of course it sparked a lot of comments, some eulogizing the courage of linemen, others questioning how the picture came to be taken -- some speculated that it must have been staged, because who'd have a high-quality camera on a work site? -- some babbling about "heros" and "angles" (meaning "angels, of course), and others fiercely defending the virtue of the men depicted, this was not a dirty gay kiss but the Kiss of Life.  The person who posted the photo set a high tone by beginning the caption with "It's not what you may think."  (Gee, I thought it was a lineman giving CPR to another lineman -- do you mean they were really making out?)  One commenter wrote to another, "I hope Someone lets you die if you need mouth to mouth. Or Elton John is there and does mouth to mouth."

There were, of course, the predictable exhortations to other commenters to "get your mind out of the gutter."  There's nothing wrong with two men kissing, there's nothing of the "gutter" in it.  It supports something I've long thought: you can't always (or even often) tell, just by looking, whether two people are touching each other affectionately, erotically, or (as in this case) therapeutically.  If the circumstances under which this photograph was taken weren't so well documented, it would be hard to be sure what is really going on in it.  (If you can bear to read an ignorant and virtually incoherent account of a homoerotic reading of the picture, look here.)  It could be a carefully staged erotic photo, though it isn't.  I can sympathize, in fact, with those people who question whether it really was unstaged, because the image is so clear and the disposition of the men's bodies looks as if they were posed as lovers.  (On the other hand, the photo also reminds me of paintings of the body of Jesus being taken down from the cross.  "Passion," after all, meant suffering before it meant strong erotic or emotional feeling.)  If you first read the photo as a gay image, that is entirely reasonable.  It just happens that it isn't.  If it's true that a picture is worth a thousand words, it's also true that pictures may need a thousand words to clarify their ambiguity, and the words that label or describe a picture can change radically the way we interpret it.

In the Future Everybody Will Be Queer -- Except Me

I've finally begun reading Queer Universes: Sexualities in Science Fiction (Liverpool UP, 2008), and am in the middle of a contribution by one of the editors, Wendy Gay Pearson. She begins by describing the 1998 call by fan groups for a boycott of an upcoming Star Trek film, Star Trek: Insurrection.

After nearly two decades of lobbying the producers of the various Star Trek shows and movies for the inclusion of a lesbian or gay character in a cast intended to represent all types of humans (including a variety of racial and ethnic types, as well as both sexes) and quite a miscellany of aliens, the group had has finally, it seems, had enough. Curious as it might seem at first glance, sf shows seem to be the last holdout in a medium that is rapidly accommodating itself to the idea that there really are lesbian and gay people in the 'real' world that television claims, however peculiarly, to reflect ...

Spokespeople for the Voyager Visibility Project note, trenchantly enough, that despite the addition of visible lesbian and gay characters to non-sf television shows, 'it is just as important to show that gays and lesbians will exist and will be accepted in the future'. The heteronormative assumptions behind much science fiction, both cinematic and literary, are very neatly exposed by the circular reasoning with which the producers of Star Trek reject demands for visibly non-straight character: homophobia, they say, does not exist in the future as it is shown on Star Trek; gay characters therefore cannot be shown, since to introduce the issue of homosexuality is to turn it back into a problem; in order for Star Trek to depict a non-homophobic view of the future, it must depict a universe with no homosexuals in it. Clearly, logic is not a prerequisite for would-be television gurus.

Nevertheless, while I certainly acknowledge that a visible gay or lesbian character on the cast of a Star Trek show would be a politically astute move for those whose day-to-day politics are focused on an inclusionary, right-based approach to ameliorating the conditions in which lesbian and gay people live, it is worth asking whether the inclusion of a gay character on a show that presupposes an already heteronormative view of the human future can be said to 'queer' that future in any significant way. If a lesbian officer is shown on the bridge, for instance, or a gay male couple is shown holding hands on the holodeck, either might certainly be an instance of 'cognitive estrangement' (to use [Darko] Suvin's term) for many audience members, but neither instance would necessarily be queer. Of course, the producers will have to use a little -- and one might suggest that it would only take a very little -- imagination in showing us that their new lieutenant, shall we say, is lesbian, without making her sexuality into a 'problem' [14-15].

It should take a very little imagination to do so, since the producers would have before them the example of Star Trek's handling of race, with Lt. Uhura, a character of African descent whose skin color was not treated as a 'problem'; and if they wanted, they'd have the example of a great deal of print SF which already by 1998 had shown lesbian, gay, and bisexual characters whose sexuality was not a problem. That's why Star Trek always left me feeling dissatisfied from its first season: it was good for TV science fiction, but not very good compared to print science fiction. Where sex and gender are concerned, the lag between TV/film and print just widened as time went on.

But I disagree with Pearson's take on the producers' circular logic. They're quite right to insist that a non-homophobic future would not regard lesbian and gay Starfleet personnel as a problem; they could even have argued that in such a future, "gay" and "lesbian" would have no meaning. Queer theorists like to talk about "homosexuality as we think about it today" by contrast with the past, but they seldom consider how people might think about homosexuality in the future. In a nonhomophobic society, it seems to me, there would be many people who would become involved erotically / romantically with persons of their own sex, but they wouldn't think of themselves as lesbian, gay, or even bisexual, because there would be no need for such labels. Samuel R. Delany likes to cite a Thomas Disch story which contains the line (I'm quoting from memory here), "Father married again, a man this time and somewhat more happily." This sentence, all by itself, tells us that the narrator and his father live in a society where men can marry other men, where there's not an assumption that because one currently has a partner of one's own sex, all of one's partners have been or will be of one's own sex. That's not to say that in a non-homophobic society everyone would be "bisexual," as some have claimed. It would be homophobic to object if someone preferred partners of one sex or the other. The anthropologist Margaret Mead notoriously said that exclusive heterosexuality is as sick as exclusive homosexuality, which is true only in the narrow sense that zero equals zero, because neither pattern is "sick."

I can't tell so far whether Pearson is unaware of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's schema of "universalizing" vs. "minoritizing" conceptions of homosexuality, or whether she merely misunderstands it. At one point she refers to her "own sense of where queer comes from: a dissatisfaction with both the universalizing (all gays are alike) and the segregating (gay men and lesbians are different) style of 'identity politics' influenced by an ethic of gayness" (17). She doesn't mention Sedgwick here, but if she has her in mind, she misunderstands what Sedgwick meant. A universalizing view doesn't assume that "all gays are alike" -- that would be the minoritizing view, which holds that homosexuals are a stable, discrete group, not all identical perhaps but still possessing the same gay or lesbian essence, which heterosexuals lack. A universalizing view holds that anyone might have homosexual feelings, desires, overt experiences. This is not necessarily either a hostile or an accepting view, just as the minoritizing style can be either hostile or accepting. Sedgwick was interested in exploring and unraveling the tensions and contradictions between the two styles, which aren't mutually exclusive. It's hard for me to figure out just what binarism Pearson is trying to define here.

But maybe Pearson meant something else. Whatever. What I was getting at is that the producers of Star Trek were using the idea of a non-homophobic society as a way of erasing same-sex eroticism. Their logic wasn't necessarily circular, just dishonest. The way to resolve the problem would be to have characters who interact romantically with partners of their own sex without labeling them gay, lesbian, or bisexual. This would probably be too much for television, let alone science-fiction television, but that's the way it has been handled in print science-fiction. I'd say that the producers Pearson quotes were using this valid logic to veil their own homophobia.

What got my attention in Pearson's discussion was that bit about "If a lesbian officer is shown on the bridge, for instance, or a gay male couple is shown holding hands on the holodeck ..." Pearson alludes to the problem of how you show a lesbian officer on the bridge -- what signifiers would tell us that a woman officer on the bridge is a lesbian? a labyris? Doc Martens? -- but doesn't seem to see the trouble with her image of a gay male couple holding hands on the holodeck. Two men holding hands would spell h-o-m-o to an American TV audience, of course, but not to people in every culture. The editors of Queer Universes pay lip service to postcolonial theory in their introduction, but Pearson gives me the impression that she doesn't know much about other cultures in the real world. She certainly hasn't taken them into account here.

In many cultures, from Africa to the Middle East to East Asia, men are physically affectionate with other men and women are physically affectionate with other women to a degree that often makes visiting Europeans uncomfortable. (This despite the fact that such effusive affection between men was not unknown in Europe or America in the recent past.) Men hold hands walking down the street or while having a conversation in a cafe, for example. There's a tendency among some Anglo observers to romanticize this behavior (Jeremy Seabrook on Indian men, for example), which I want to avoid here. Such societies are not less "homophobic" than "Western" societies -- indeed, they are often very homophobic. I have the impression that this same-sex affection flourishes in sex-segregated societies, and that as the culture changes and men and women are allowed to be affectionate in public, affection becomes eroticized and homophobia makes it harder (and eventually impossible) for it to be expressed between same-sex friends.

But there's also a tendency for homophobic spokesmen of those societies to insist that such affectionate displays are not "homosexual", in an attempt to deny that homosexuality exists in their cultures; I reject that tendency too, along with the contemporary "Western" academic tendency to de-eroticize this affection with terminology like the "homosocial." There's no clear line to be drawn between the affectionate and the erotic in general.

To postulate two male characters holding hands on the holodeck as "a gay couple" is a textbook example of that Eurocentric gay imperialism that post-colonial theorists often complain about, though they often try clumsily and ineffectually to "queer" those non-Western patterns -- that is, to claim them for queerness. (I hereby claim this island and its exotic folkways for Queer Nation!) It will take more than just "a very little imagination" to come up with depictions of lesbian and gay characters for Star Trek or other vehicles that don't fall into that trap, yet would work on American television with all its taboos. In a non-homophobic society, how would a lesbian officer or a gay male couple behave? What would two men holding hands on the holodeck signify? I see no reason to assume that such affection is only and always an expression of eroticism, though the erotic is as welcome to me as the non-erotic. What happens to pride and honor in a non-homophobic society? In a homophobic society, men must defend their honor against imputations of sexual receptivity, even (or especially) if they are sexually receptive to other men in private. Will men in the future be accepted not only if they have sex with other men, but if they hold hands with them? Ditto for women.

Questions like these are too much for the likes of Star Trek, of course, but queer theorists and science-fiction writers interested in sexuality, gender, and culture had better start exploring them; they seem to be very interesting, to me. The matter of affection and its relation to eroticism is something I hope to write about more before long.

Are You Born Homosocial, Or Is It A Lifestyle Choice? (Reprise, With Thong)

I was up too late tonight, surfing the web, and I found this article on this blog. (It's not the most work-safe of blogs, so be prudent, Prudence; but it's quite entertaining, a quality not to be sniffed at in this day and age.) Which prompted me to look for, and find, this article by the gay critic Andy Medhurst about Batman, "deviance," and camp, which happily is available online; Medhurst's article had some influence on this earlier posting of mine. Which leads to the question of what a gay critic is, or gay writing, or gay poetry. (Silly! A gay critic is a critic who has sex with other critics of the same sex.) But that's another question for another day.

Are You Born Homosocial, Or Is It A Lifestyle Choice?

You might think that people would get less worked up about fictional characters, but you'd be wrong. I read J. R. R. Tolkien's three-volume novel The Lord of the Rings for the first time in the summer of 2003, when I was 52. Coming to it so late deprived me of the fascination that grips so many adolescents, inspiring them to learn Elvish and so on, but it also allowed me to notice things that an adolescent might miss. My ears pricked up, so to speak, when I read in the prologue that among hobbits, "Bilbo and Frodo Baggins were as bachelors very exceptional as they were also in many other ways, such as their friendship with Elves" (The Fellowship of the Ring [De Luxe Edition, London: Allen and Unwin, 1969], 19). I noticed too their Dorian Gray-like extended youthfulness (35 and 55f), an effect of an evil magical ring instead of an evil magical portrait, but no less "unnatural", "peculiar," and "queer" for that.

Before I read the books I had already seen the first two parts of Peter Jackson's film adaptation. And even before seeing the movies I knew about the friendship between Frodo and Sam Gamgee, thanks to some remarks in interviews by the actors who played them, and thanks also to some overwrought reviewers, like one Nathan Shumate:

Fairly obligatory side note: You may be unlucky enough to hear a reviewer blather on about "homoerotic undertones," usually focusing on the Frodo/Sam relationship. (I heard it first from Steve Oldfield, whom I like well enough, though his tastes in film are a little too studiously plebeian for me.) I only have two things to say to these reviewers: 1) They should see the 1978 version, in which Sam seems only a short step from leaping into Frodo's lap; and 2) they should read the book (Oldfield admitted he hadn't). Tolkien is very obviously harking back to long-standing traditions of platonic same-gender devotion being the highest form of bond, and the fact that such things have to be seen through the modern lens, wherein every display of affection must be interpreted sexually, is unfortunate. I'm also a product of modern Western civilization, and I too can see how the modern sexual interpretation lends a level of meaning that Tolkien didn't mean in the slightest, but I think Oldfield's comments that "I expected Frodo and Sam to join hands and go skipping off in the end" only show that he's unqualified to professionally review this movie.

Peter Jackson's film version, as Shumate indicates, generally toned down the emotion between Frodo and Sam, though not enough to ward off uneasy tittering among many straightboy viewers and reviewers. The film shows Frodo reacting fondly to Sam's adoration, much more than in the books as I recall it, where he simply accepts the attention and service as if it were his due. The changes are more in details that might prompt boyish squirming and giggles: in the book Return of the King, for instance, after Sam and Frodo have been rescued, they wake up in the same bed, but in the film they've been put in separate rooms (!). Sharing a bed is one of those "innocent" platonic practices that might be "misunderstood."

Shumate does come close to making a point when he complains about reviewers "blathering on about 'homoerotic overtones'": "homoerotic" does get thrown around too freely by people who aren't clear on what they mean by it. But why does he bring up Ralph Bakshi's 1978 animated version? Does he think it does have "homoerotic undertones"? Does he believe that if it does, Jackson's version therefore has none? He seems to mean something like: If you thought Sean Astin and Elijah Wood were acting like a couple of fags, you should see this. Evidently he's also unaware that "homoerotic undertones" have been detected in Tolkien's trilogy, as in "platonic same-gender devotion" generally. All of which indicates Shumate's own lack of qualification to review this movie.

It might be useful to distinguish between what I'll call a homophobic (or gay-baiting) interpretation -- which detects eroticism in same-sex bonding in order to mock and discredit the people involved, while furiously denying the possibility of eroticism in pairs whom the homophobe does not want discredited -- and what I'll call a homoerotic (or gay) interpretation, which sees eroticism in same-sex bonds as positive and desirable. (An example of the latter is the ancient Greek reinterpretation of Homer's Achilles and Patroclus as lovers, a reminder that what Shumate calls "the modern sexual interpretation" is neither "modern" nor necessarily derogatory.) Granted it's not always clear whether a given reading is meant to be gay or gay-baiting, Shumate seems not to believe that a positive homoerotic reading is even possible.

Shumate is as homophobic, then, as the reviewer he's criticizing. For both of them, a man holding another's hand is a dirty joke about sissies jumping into each other's laps and skipping together into the sunset. Shumate agrees that sex between men is nasty; he just refuses to let Frodo and Sam be tainted with it. It all reminds me of a joke an old Hoosier lady once told me: "You know, I defended you the other day! Someone said, 'That Promiscuous Reader ain't fit to eat with the hogs!' And I said, 'He is so!'"

I sent e-mail about some of this to a lesbian friend I've known for thirty years, a professor of English lit and a Tolkien fan. "I disagree w. you about the homoerotic qualities of Frodo/Sam," she wrote.

Homosocial, yes. Tolkien is writing in a time and place where the homosocial in Brit society, esp. of his social class, is dominant. You can see the same sort of thing in the relationship of the animals in "Wind in the Willows", in the relationship of Bunter and Lord Peter, etc ad nauseum. This is not to say that some of these homosocial relationships didn't have an erotic component--some of them did, of course--but they "read" culturally as homosocial. It's hard for us at this point in history to grasp the distinction, but there is one, and it's real.

Funny thing: I had not used the word "homoerotic" at all in the message I'd sent her, let alone about Frodo and Sam's friendship. What I wrote was that "the Frodo-Samwise coupling, in which a simple but competent younger man adores and devotes himself to a man in middle age, seemed like a wish-fulfillment fantasy on Tolkien's part." That description still seems to me not only fair, but obvious. My friend apparently jumped to the conclusion that by "adores" I meant a sexual bond; so who's seeing sex sex sex everywhere? (In all the critical writing I looked at, the focus was always on the friendship between Frodo and Sam: no one, that I noticed, addressed Tolkien's own descriptions of Bilbo and Frodo as oddball bachelors and loners.)

It isn't really hard at all "for us at this point in history" to grasp the distinction between "homoerotic" and "homosocial"; Nathan Shumate, for one, grasps it very well. Some version of that distinction is whipped out like a crucifix or sprig of garlic whenever someone gets nervous about male (or female) bonding, usually with the implication that the writer is able to grasp what the ignorant masses cannot. Other terms have been used at other times, but the specific words matter less than the crucial task of defending any same-sex pair against what is still seen as the accusation of the foul crime against nature not fit to be named among Christians, a task which unfortunately is still taken very seriously today. My friend's misreading shows that it isn't only insecure heterosexual males who are determined to defend the virtue of Hobbits. When people claim that something extremely common is extremely rare, critical attention is called for.

The "homosocial" move fails for several reasons. For one thing, "homosocial" doesn't describe relations between two people, nor the inner selves of the persons in a relationship. It denotes the structure of social relations in a given environment. To use it in this way is not only inaccurate, it is anachronistic, since "homosocial" was coined about a century after "homosexual," which we are not supposed to use of persons or relations before 1870, or outside of Europe and the United States. Despite Kinsey's attempt to de-essentialize "homosexual," the word's ambiguity led to the use of "homoerotic," and later “homosocial,” to defend various protagonists against imputations of sodomy and tribadism. "Homoerotic" was still ambiguous, so after Eve Sedgwick wrote of "homosocial desire" in Between Men, that phrase rapidly became essentialized, enabling homophobes to ward off implications of unnatural vice in their favorite historical and fictional characters.

For another, the "homosocial" and the "homoerotic" are not mutually exclusive. Gay bars are often homosocial environments, and homosocial institutions such as the military, prisons, and monasteries harbor a lot of homoeroticism. Nor does the erotic exclude the social: gay male cruising areas, for example, are homosocial spaces, used for gossip and seeing friends as much as for hunting sexual partners, and except for solitary masturbation, eroticism is a social relation.

Finally, this move begs the question: it assumes non-erotic bonds as the default, transparent and natural, while erotic bonds are brought in perversely to spoil everybody's innocence. But it ain't necessarily so. A Korean woman once told me that she felt more at home in San Francisco than in any other American city she knew, because there, as in Korea, she would see women (and men) holding hands and being affectionate with each other in public generally. So, although she eventually learned better, she "read" clearly "homoerotic" behavior as "homosocial."

Her misreading was innocent, however, compared to the agenda-driven misreadings that are still the norm in heterosexual culture. Most of the passionate same-sex friendships of history and literature have been "read", indeed rather shrilly postulated as devoid of eroticism. Homophobes have often accused gay and lesbian historians of trying to defame the historical figures they read as gay. Historical figures now widely accepted as having been gay, lesbian, or bisexual were, until fairly recently, "defended" against the allegation with absurd arguments that amused and annoyed me and my queer contemporaries. "The homosocial" has always been dominant, both in social interaction and as a means of erasing homoeroticism. Such homophobic reading is what gay and lesbian historians have called into question. While they may have been mistaken in specific cases, defamation was usually the opposite of what they were trying to do.

Tolkien's homophobic biographer Humphrey Carpenter wrote that "as to homosexuality Tolkien claimed that at nineteen he did not even know the word" (J. R. R. Tolkien: a Biography, Houghton Mifflin, 2000, p. 53; see also 148). Leaving aside the fact that one need not know the word to do (or depict) the deed, Tolkien didn't write LOTR at nineteen. He wrote it in his forties and fifties, mostly during the 1940s -- after "the homosexual," after the trials of Oscar Wilde, after The Well of Loneliness. Living and working in an elite British university, he must have known an invert or two. Whatever his personal views, Tolkien was a twentieth-century man, not a prehistoric Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings is a twentieth-century book, not a medieval romance.

Tolkien doubtless drew on "long-standing traditions of platonic same-gender devotion", but he himself was "a product of modern Western civilization", and consciously or not, he stirred in a dash of the "modern sexual interpretation" by depicting Frodo and Bilbo as inverts, to use the 19th-century term that was still current through the middle of the 20th century, when Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings. (Anthropologist David Gilmore used it in print as late as 1990.) I would classify them as "inverts of the finer sort," the sort who would form clammy, repressed, intense friendships with (supposedly clueless) "normal" men, letting off steam (if they did at all) only with palace Guardsmen or hot-blooded gondoliers.

Tolkien put a number of anachronisms into his story, such as potatoes, tobacco ("pipe-weed"), bound books, domesticated horses, wheeled vehicles, and "in many cultural respects the society of the Hobbits, with its small towns, farms, inns, parties, letter-writing and clannishness, is closer to the experience of modern, even 'bourgeois' modern man than that glimpsed by Wells's Time Traveller" (Brian Rosebury, Tolkien: a cultural phenomenon, 2nd edition, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, p. 15). LOTR reflects its author's distaste for industrial modernity, but it is a modern book, even if not a modernist one. (Or is it? Tolkien's deliberate archaism is also a common device in literary high modernism -- see Eliot, Pound, Djuna Barnes, and Joyce, among others; so is satire of the supposed soullessness of modern life. And don't forget Tolkien's older contemporary D. H. Lawrence, who hated industrialized modernity as much as Tolkien did, and who was probably read by many of the same students who made a cult of LOTR. Maybe the category of literary modernism needs to be rethought.)

While the concept of the invert would be anachronistic in Middle-Earth (as it is today), there is no reason to suppose that eroticism between males (or females) would be. There is nothing "modern" about sexual love between persons of the same sex. Labeling homoerotic readings as imposing a "modern sexual interpretation" is lying, pure and tortuous. Too many people, including scholars, deny the eroticism even of unquestioned and overt genital contact between persons of the same sex. Accounts of sexual relations between fifth-century BC Athenian males, or oral copulation among New Guinea tribal males in the twentieth century AD, will be explained away with vague hand-waving to the effect that such behavior is not really "homosexual", or not "homosexuality as we know it today."

Who are "we", and what do we "know"? The criteria are rarely made explicit, but they seem to be stereotypical caricatures of 21^st century urban American gay subcultures. Socrates and Alcibiades did not attend Judy's Carnegie Hall concert, and few if any Sambia males own the all-important Abercrombie and Fitch apparel. Ruth and Naomi never went to Michigan, as far as we know; nor did Emily Dickinson own a pair of Doc Martens. Frodo and Sam never danced shirtless in a Pride Parade. I'm being deliberately snotty here, but I'm not exaggerating: one online reviewer declared that the male lovers in Brokeback Mountain weren’t gay, because they’d never danced shirtless in a Pride Parade. (By that criterion, I’m not gay either.) Compare Gayle Rubin ("Thinking Sex", in Carole Vance [ed.], Pleasure and Danger, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984, p. 205): "The earl [of Castlehaven, executed for sodomy in 1631] did not slip into his tightest doublet and waltz down to the nearest gay tavern to mingle with his fellow sodomists." (The more I look at this, the battier it appears. Imagine someone arguing that a 17th century lord wasn't heterosexual because he didn't put on a gold medallion and cruise down to the nearest singles tavern to score babes.) Anyone who refers to "homosexuality as we know it today" or "gay in the sense we know it" needs to make it quite clear what they do mean.)

In the case of historical figures, questions of evidence can be debated, regarding real people who did or did not have sexual relations with each other, regardless of what later generations wish to believe. Where fictional characters are concerned, claims about their "real" sexuality are even more obviously a defense of heterosexual turf, which homophobes depict as embattled and diminished already to a tiny space, The Homosexuals having taken over everything else. Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee, Batman and Robin, Achilles and Patroclus, Ruth and Naomi, Captain James T Kirk and Mr. Spock -- these and many others have been seen as lovers by some of their fans. In the case of Kirk and Spock, there is even a rich lode of fiction by female fans depicting them as such. To insist that they really aren't gay, that they are certainly straight, isn't just homophobic, it's absurd. If it pleases a reader to imagine Frodo and Sam as lovers, if Tolkien depicted them in a way that makes it easy to think of them that way, who is harmed? It's clear from the indignant reactions that someone thinks someone is harmed, but it's not clear who, or why, or how.