Someone posted the above clip on Facebook the other day; luckily for me and this post, it was also available on YouTube. (Probably it came from there.) I haven't seen The Good Lie, a 2014 movie about Sudanese refugees in the US, and I don't know whether I will. But this bit stirred up my urge to write.
It appears that the three young men have been brought to the US, and their caseworker (Witherspoon) has brought them to see the bald guy, who is evidently a farmer, presumably to stay with him. (I said I haven't watched it yet.) They ask permission to see his cows, and ask if there are any dangerous animals they should watch out for. Permission received, they walk off, hand in hand. The bald guy mutters, "I wish they wouldn't do that." Given that this is America and he's the people of the land, the common clay of the New West, I sympathize with him slightly. A good many gay American men would read the gesture the same way, except that they would jerk off to it.
Some commenters on the Facebook clip said that holding hands didn't mean the young Africans were gay, which is true, but added that it was no longer seen that way in Africa because of American gays, which probably is not true: it is because of viciously antigay bigots in Africa, abetted by viciously antigay American Christians. (As some scholars have noticed before, non-Western bigots love to claim that homosexuality is a Western import, even as they happily import Western antigay religious and medical bigotry for their own agenda.) As recently as 2019, though, I saw male African students in my college town holding hands with one another; it was orientation time for international students, and they'd probably been warned about US attitudes so they looked somewhat nervous, but they held on.
What I'm asking here is why men holding hands came to be seen as a sign of homosexuality in the United States. During the US invasion of Vietnam, I read that American soldiers saw South Vietnamese soldiers holding hands and decided they were homosexuals. This fed their contempt for the ARVN, though it's likely that NLF and North Vietnamese men also held hands: they were just unlikely to be observed by Americans, and South Vietnamese troops were capable of as much manly violence as Americans could wish. This was during the 1960s and early 1970s, and I doubt that American grunts had ever actually seen homosexuals holding hands in the US in those days.
Some might argue that men holding hands just is gay, it's common sense. But it isn't, as shown by the number and expanse of cultures where it's routine. Nor do those cultures accept male homosexuality. In the US, norms of male-to-male affection have changed over time, and there's never been unanimity about them. Walt Whitman's moist nineteenth-century poems about "adhesive" love between men seem to have appealed to many heterosexuals, as did the twentieth-century J. R. R. Tolkien's depiction of fondness between hobbits. Academics, gay and straight like, refined the word "homosocial" to explain away these relationships, but couldn't explain why what previously had been endearing suddenly set off alarms. In fact there had always been those who objected that there were "too many kisses in this work to avoid slander, suspicion and mockery." Personally I favor slander, suspicion, and mockery of those trying to suppress displays of affection, but that's another post.
I associate holding hands with childhood: being required to hold someone's hand in public, while crossing the street, while standing in line with other children, and so on. Children are ambivalent about it, if I may generalize from my own experience: it means you're a baby who can't be trusted to cross the street by yourself (which you can't), or you are ordered to hold the hand of someone you dislike, whose hands are sticky (unwashed isn't the problem, stickiness is). But when they feel unsure or unsafe and can't crawl into someone's lap, they'll reach for someone else's hand. It also signifies mutual belonging, for adults no less than children. Some Americans have explained foreign men holding hands to me as a sign of exceptional closeness and trust, but at best I think they're projecting. At least it isn't always the case; men in other countries don't seem to need that much intimacy to reach for each other's hands.
Nor should they. Numerous writers, such as the anthropologist Ashley Montagu, have stressed the importance of physical contact for all people, from infants to adults. I remember someone telling me in the early 70s, about when Montagu's book was published, that American men could only allow themselves to seek touch through sex. That's probably still true for many of us, but I have the impression that things have improved since then, and American men are more affectionate than they used to be. But there's still room, and need, for improvement. We must respect each others' boundaries, and no one including children should be compelled or pressured to give touch. One reason I think it's important to push back hard on antigay bigotry is that it is used not only against sex between men, but against affection as well. That's harmful not only to gay men but to straight ones, and it must not be tolerated.
