Girls Will Be Boys and Boys Will Be Girls

I just read a short (106 pages of text) book, Gender Diversity: Crosscultural Variations (Waveland Press, 2000) by Serena Nanda.  Nanda, a cultural anthropologist, is the author of an ethnographic study of the hijras of India, though lately, as a professor emerita, she's been working on a series of "anthropological murder mysteries."  Gender Diversity is meant as a brief introduction to its subject, and it's good that its crosscultural scope (while limited) includes Europe and America.  But there are problems, which are all the more visible in such a short book.  That's a good thing, but it doesn't make the problems go away.

There are some errors that are clearly Nanda's fault, like her reference to "the Genesis story, in which Adam creates Eve from his own loins" (87).  Of course in the second Genesis creation myth, it is Yahweh who creates Eve, from Adam's rib.  Less egregious but still significant is the claim that in Plato’s Symposium "Aristophanes argues that three sexes were part of an original human nature, “man, woman, and the union of the two …. having a double nature” before all three groups were split in half by Zeus (Symposium 252-3); as a consequence, human beings spend their lives seeking their lost other half.  Aristophanes doesn't "argue", he simply declares that he's talking about the original human condition.  Moreover, the primordial humans with the "double nature" were the source of what we now would call heterosexuals: "Now all who are the men's slice from the common genus, which was then called androgynous, are lovers of women; and many adulterers have been of this genus; and, in turn, all who are women of this genus prove to be lovers of men and adulteresses."  Those males who became lovers of other males, and those females who became lovers of other females, were originally single-natured, so to speak.  Classical Greece also had stereotypes of effeminate, sexually receptive males, which we know about from hearsay.  The institution of pederasty, in which adult male erastoi courted and loved adolescent male eromenoi, distanced itself from effeminacy in either partner.  So Aristophanes' myth has little if anything to do with the kind of gender variation Nanda is writing about.

Most of Nanda's exemplars of gender variation are our contemporaries, who can be studied and interviewed directly.  In the case of American Indians (as with some African variations, but Nanda doesn't cover Africa in Gender Diversity), this is less true, though that's changing.  So, like others writing about this subject, Nanda must rely on older travelers' and ethnographic accounts, which often leads to trouble.  Her description of gender variants -- alyha (males) and hwame (females) -- among the Mojave, for example, is "based on interviews by anthropologist George Devereux (1937) with some old informants who remembered the transvestite ceremony and had heard stories about gender variant individuals from their elders" (21).  Devereux, then, was writing about a phenomenon he'd never encountered personally, often at third-hand ("stories [they had heard] about gender variant individuals from their elders").  So I'm a bit skeptical about the rather detailed description of alyha sexual behavior Nanda provides, especially since she also apparently accepts John H. Honigmann's account of "female berdaches" among the Kaska of the Yukon -- also based on interviews with gender-normative male Kaska informants who hadn't met such individuals themselves but had heard stories about them from their elders.  Honigmann's work was dissected by Jean-Guy A. Goulet in his contribution to Two-Spirit People (ed. Jacobs, Thomas, and Lang [Illinois, 1997]).  Nanda knows and cites that collection, but evidently didn't read Goulet's piece, since she claims that "Among the Kaska, a family who had only daughters might select one to 'be like a man'; by engaging in the male activity of hunting, she would help provide the family with food" (24).  That's exactly what Goulet cast doubt on.  (Such selection isn't unknown in the West, if only as folklore; see, for example, Isabel Miller's novel Patience and Sarah, one of whose protagonists was raised "as a boy" in a large family with no sons.)

Luckily, we can talk to real gender variants around the world today, and observe how their families and neighbors treat them.  Nanda herself talked at length to hijra, for example, as did Gayatri Reddy in With Respect to Sex (Chicago, 2005).  We also have numerous works by gay Indian writers, based in India itself or in the diaspora.  One hijra, A. Revathi, has written his own autobiography in English, The Truth About Me (Penguin Global, 2011).  Martin F. Manalansan IV, an anthropologist who identifies himself as a bakla, has written about the experience of Filipino gender variants in the US; J. Neil Garcia, another bakla academic, has written about bakla and gay life in the Philippines.

Because Gender Diversity is such a short book, its contradictions are thrown into relief, which is handy.  Nanda makes the typical errors on gender variation in the West, saying now that the Western model of homosexuality is homogender, and then that it is based on inversion.  So, for example, she writes that Brazil assimilated a "modern Euro-American 'medical' model of sex/gender relations ... in the late late-nineteeth and early-twentieth centuries."  But this model

…in the last three decades has been challenged by a (postmodern) gay ideology, in which both partners in a same-sex sexual relationship are viewed equally in terms of their sexual orientation.  This model, which continues the homosexual /heterosexual divide of the medical model, but without its pejorative connotions [sic], is gaining a foothold in the more highly industrialized urban centers of the South (Rio and Sao Paulo), as well as among the more wealthy and educated classes throughout Brazil [55-6].

To her credit, she recognizes that "In Brazil, as increasingly in many contemporary cultures, several sex/gender ideologies coexist" (55), but this has always been true in contemporary cultures and in the past as well.  (Compare classical Greece, with its homogender but age-stratified institution of pederasty which coexisted with a model of penetrable effeminate males.)  As for the "postmodern" (?) ideology, "in which both partners in a same-sex sexual relationship are viewed equally in terms of their sexual orientation," this is a gross oversimplification.  The "ideology" that only the penetrated male was "homosexual" was current, and perhaps dominant, in the United States until the middle of the twentieth century, and the denigration of effeminacy has meant that many males in a variety of cultures have used flaming queens as cover for their own activities.  In Mexico (as in much of Latin America), for example, the queen with plucked eyebrows, makeup, and a wardrobe of gowns is the official metonym of male homosexuality, and anthropologists have often mistaken the part for the whole. (Vestidas are so much easier to find and study.)  But gay male anthropologists and travelers have found plenty of sexual partners in such places without having to put on a dress or wig, and there's so much homogender activity going on that perhaps we should be more skeptical whether the activo/pasivo model is actually gendered.  (The same goes for contemporary South Africa, where the white anthropologist Graeme Reid was propositioned by black men who wanted to penetrate him, even though he didn't fit the codes of the lady that supposedly governed male/male sex there.)  For that matter, a naive observer might conclude from popular entertainment that a gendered ideology of homosexuality was dominant in the US, and many people do.  Maybe it is.

I enjoyed this remark by Nanda about Thailand, especially after some people I know on Facebook were getting their pants in a bunch about American evangelicals who blame earthquakes on Teh Gay:

Same-sex/gender eroticism (what would be called homosexuality in the modern West) was considered inauspicious, resulting in natural disasters, such as droughts, being struck dead by lightning, or becoming crazy.  These consequences do not appear to have been directed at (heterogender) man/kathoey relationships … [74]

(Kathoey [กะเทย] are the feminine transgenderish males in Thai society.)  And, of course, she mentions numerous times that "gender variants" almost never, in any culture, copulate with other "gender variants" -- that would be "lesbianism," "incest," even "cannibalism."  For example:

And, similar to India, Brazil, Thailand and the Philippines, but in contrast to the West, gender nonconformists [in the Pacific Islands] do not have sex with each other [74].  

However, it is not true that gender nonconformists in "the West" normally have sex with each other, as Nanda here implies.  For one thing, Latin America is part of "the West"; more important, the idea of two sissies "bumping pussies" (as queens I've known delicately put it) is as outrageous in some contemporary American circles as it is in Rio, Mexico City, Bangkok, Hyderabad, or Manila.  Try this for size, from John C. Howard's Men Like That (Chicago, 1999): "A drop of sissy come would choke us. If we were going to go down on anybody, they would have to be men, trade" (122).  I heard this sentiment expressed in the gay communities of southern Indiana in the early 1970s.

I'm also skeptical about the claim, which is not particular to Nanda, that "The sexual partners of gender variants were never considered gender variants themselves" (17).  As she says a few pages later, Mohave gender variants' "husbands were teased for marrying them" (21).  Numerous scholars have doubted similar claims about males who penetrate other males in Latin American societies: Annick Prieur is one observer among others who's found it difficult to get mayates (gender-normative Mexican men who penetrate Mexican sissies) to admit, let alone talk about their same-sex copulations; see Mema's House, Mexico City (Chicago, 1998).  Stephen O. Murray has written, more stringently, that

Whether the complementary role is a "gay macho" (bujarron) indifferent to what he penetrates is a matter of some controversy among observers -- and also one of dissensus among natives ... Usually, the category is linguistically unmarked (hombre-man) although Schifter and Madrigal reported hombres de verdad (true men), Lancaster attested the reduplicated (hence, highly marked) hombre-hombre, and Tierno listed muy hombre and mucho hombre (very man and much man).  The masculine partner, then, at least sometimes is referred to with linguistically marked forms and is, thereby, distinguished from men in general [50].

And, he adds:

Latinos with whom I have discussed claims that masculinity can be enhanced by fucking a maricon vociferously disagree with Lancaster's assertion that fucking men enhances "male honor."  They also question the extent of banter about homosexual exploits among adults in Latino cultures ... Lancaster does not appear to have asked direct questions of the residents of the working class barrio in Managua, Nicaragua, among whom he lived[,] about whether one gains honor from using a pasivo (cochon in the local lexicon) [54] ...

Murray also notes that Lancaster might have produced a more accurate picture of Nicaraguan society if he had "studied those who call themselves cochones rather than picking up tidbits of hombre-hombres' views of cochones" (56n8).  These considerations may not refute Nanda's remarks, but they do complicate them and the consensus she represents.  Although she cites several authors from the collection in which Murray's critique appears (Stephen O. Murray, Latin American Male Homosexualities (New Mexico, 1995), she evidently skipped his contributions, just as she missed Goulet's in Two-Spirit People.

It's ironic that Nanda, like so many of her colleagues, opposes "third sex" and "third gender" concepts to "modern" (or are they "postmodern"?) "Euro-American" ideologies.  The thing is, "third sex" and "third gender" are both Western concepts, developed in the nineteenth century* by European doctors and disseminated (along with Euro-American homophobia) to doctors and lawyers around the world.  Whether, or how well, these concepts actually correspond to non-Western figures like bakla, hijra, katoey can be and should be discussed more, but like "queer," which is also applied indiscriminately, regardless of culture or era, they are Western in origin and content.

While Gender Diversity is a good introduction to its subject for undergraduates, it also shows some gaping holes in the Euro-American academic account of sex and gender, whether of the "West" or elsewhere.  That could be a good thing, if it leads to a reconsideration of the consensus.

*In fact the idea of a "third sex" has been traced back to the second-century North African Christian father Tertullian, who wrote in his treatise To the Nations:

You ['O unjust pagans'] too have in your midst a third gender -- not so much a third religious persuasion -- but a third sex. They are well suited for both male pleasure and for female pleasure, endowed with male and female aptitudes. Do we offend you with this particular shared affinity?  Equality lends force to envy.  Thus the potter envies the potter and the craftsman envies the craftsman.

I learned this from Willy [Henri Gauthier-Villars, 1859-1931], The Third Sex [ET of Le Troisième Sèxe, 1927]  Translated and with an introduction and notes by Lawrence R. Schehr.  Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007, page 99n4.  The things a promiscuous reader finds ...

And Never Mark Twain Shall Meet

I've finally begun reading Two-Spirit People: Native American Gender Identity, Sexuality, and Spirituality,* after owning my copy for fifteen years.  (I have other still-unread books I've owned longer.)  It's a well-known book, collecting work by Indian and non-Indian writers, most but not all of them academics, and it's often cited in other works, so it's long past time I read it myself.  So far it's interesting, but of course I still argue with some of the writers' assumptions.

Co-editor Sabine Lang's "Various Kinds of Two-Spirit People: Gender Variance and Homosexuality in Native American Communities," for example, draws on the literature and on Lang's own fieldwork.  She begins by disavowing the term "berdache", which was long used by anthropologists to refer to "alteratively gendered people of either sex" in favor of "two-spirit," and to her credit she announces her intention, that whenever "talking about gender variance in a particular tribe, the terms existing in that tribe will be used" (100).

Lang points out that, though "the role of womanly, two-spirit males in Native American cultures (i.e., American Indian and Inuit-Eskimo) has long been viewed as institutionalized (male) homosexuality", "quite a number of reports mention 'berdache' males living with women or who had sexual relationships with women," and these reports have "been downplayed or overlooked by most writers."  She reminds the reader that "(to my knowledge) most anthropologists who collected data on the lives and sexual relationships of 'berdaches' never talked to a two-spirit person but interviewed members of a given tribe who were knowledgeable as far as their tribe's culture was concerned and were willing to cooperate" (102).  (This failure to talk to two-spirit Indians was already changing by the time Two-Spirit People was published in the 1990s: Lang, Will Roscoe, Sue-Ellen Jacobs and other anthropologists met and interviewed two-spirit people.)

So Lang argues, for good reasons, that

the traditional two-spirit roles ... are apparently not defined in terms of sexual preference; they are defined in terms of gender according to the way a given Native American culture constructs gender and gender roles, as well as appropriate sexual behavior relating to those roles.  Cultural constructions of gender and gender roles varied, and still vary, widely in Native American cultures given the diversity among these cultures. ...

Thus, in many native American cultures there existed -- and in a number of instances still exists -- three or four genders: women, men, two-spirit/womanly males, and, less frequently, two-spirit/manly females.  In each Native American culture that acknowledges multiple genders there also exist specific words to refer to people who are of a gender other than woman or man. ...

These terms do not refer to sexual behavior even though certain kinds of sexual behavior may be considered culturally appropriate for an individual belonging to any gender category [103].

This is all good, and should be known by people of varying backgrounds who still, to this day, equate gender variance among American Indians with homosexuality or gayness, or who talk as though all Indian cultures had the same pan-Indian concept of two-spirit.  ("Two-spirit" is a new word, coined around 1990 by Native American sex/gender variant activists as a substitute for berdache.  Like any such blanket term, it has an unfortunate tendency in use to erase historical and cultural differences.)  But there are problems.

Lang implicitly contrasts the various two-spirit "roles" with other constructions of gender and erotic variance, especially "homosexual," "gay," and "lesbian."  But many of the terms used by European Americans to refer to people who relate erotically to others of their own sex do not "refer to sexual behavior" either.  "Gay" and "lesbian," most obviously, but also older terms popular and clinical: "invert," "pansy," "dyke," "fairy," even "queer."  The older terms especially are based on gendered behavior first, with erotic behavior at most implied, just as Lang says of the Native American terms she lists.  The pansy or fairy was characterized as an effeminate man, given to certain styles of dress (including but not limited to cross-dressing) with a tendency to work in certain occupations (hair-dresser, interior decoration, shop clerk, hairdresser, etc.) and a tendency to want to be penetrated by a "normal" male.  The dyke is a masculine woman, characterized by her manner of dress and her hairstyle, likely to work in male-associated jobs like truck-driving, and drawn to feminine women.  Even the cliched description of the invert, the soul of a woman in the body of a man, refers primarily to gender and not to sexual behavior, and has spiritual connotations not so different from those that supposedly characterize the two-spirit.

So, when Lang goes on to say that

In Western culture, a homosexual relationship is defined as being between two men or two women -- two individuals who are of the same sex and the same gender [104]

-- she's flat wrong.  Her use of the blind passive ("is defined as") is a giveaway: Just who is doing the defining?  I'd really like to know.  Just about the only people I know who define homosexuality in these terms are Western or Western-trained academics like Lang, and they do so solely to distance themselves from that definition.  She can't mean biologists or psychologists, since they overwhelmingly conceptualize homosexuality in terms of inversion.  At the grass-roots level, most American gay people I know of agree that there's some kind of connection between homosexuality and inversion.  The respectability-minded gay people I call Homo-Americans, when they're in public-relations mode, insist that we are and should be gender conformists -- but when they want to raise money for their organizations, they put on drag shows.  And remember the gay male clone who told the gay sociologist Martin Levine, "Darling, beneath all this butch drag, we are still girls."  So it's hard to be sure, when some avowedly manly gay men throw tantrums over figure skaters, that the same guys don't have a Dolly Parton costume in their closets for those private moments, or enjoy lip-synching with Dianna Agron.  William S. Burroughs "was notoriously dismissive of pansies, fags, and swish" and once raved to Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac that "All complete swish fairies should be killed, not as traitors to the cause of queerness, but for selling out the human race to the forces of negation and death"**  -- but in the 1980s documentary Burroughs Allen Ginsberg affably reminisced with Old Bull Burroughs about their youthful drag personae; I believe Burroughs was The Countess.  But maybe he wasn't a complete swish fairy.

So what could Lang have meant?  My point is not that homosexuality really, essentially does equal inversion, it's that there is no such thing as the Western definition of homosexuality: there are several.  They coexist, however uneasily, and interpenetrate.  But the inversion model is prominent among them, and probably dominant (or hegemonic, as they say).

A few pages later, Lang writes,

Because most anthropological researchers classified relationships between two-spirit males and men and two-spirit females and women as homosexual, when doing fieldwork in North American cultures they failed to look for relationships involving two persons of the same sex and the same gender.  Thus, hardly anything is known about the way homosexual relations in the Western sense were seen in Native American cultures at a time when two-spirit roles were still largely intact and about concepts of homosexuality that may have existed in American Indian cultures before the massive impact of Western influences.  It seems, however, that there was generally no way to acknowledge a sexual relationship between two men formally, or between two women formally, the way various kinds of heterogender relationships (woman and man, male two-spirit and man, or female two-spirit and woman) were acknowledged formally [106-7].

If non-Indian anthropologists defined homosexuality as sex between two individuals of the same sex and same gender, then why did they classify relationships between a two-spirit male and a social man as "homosexual"?  On Lang's assumptions, they should have regarded it as something totally foreign to their culture, looked (apparently in vain) for homogender homosexuality, and concluded that there was no "homosexuality" in American Indian cultures.  Instead, Lang says, they looked at two-spirits and classified them as "homosexual."  This makes no sense, on Lang's assumptions.  It makes plenty of sense, however, if we recognize that the dominant "Western" model of The Homosexual was the invert, and the model of "homosexual" relationships was heterogender.  Indeed, Will Roscoe has shown*** that the doctors who constructed the European medical model of inversion drew on American Indian "berdaches" as one of their historical inspirations.

Suddenly Lang is concerned to discover evidence of homogender homoeroticism among the Indians.  I think it is a safe bet that social males did sometimes have sex with one another and even form enduring bonds with one another, as did social females.  This also happened in the West despite the dominance of the inversion model.  But homogender relations were, as Lang admits, rendered invisible by a conceptual model that refused to admit their existence, and other writers in Two-Spirit People offer evidence that homogender sex was usually proscribed among the Indians, whether between social males/females or between same-gender two-spirits.

Lang herself writes that among the Shoshoni, "The only sexual relationship that is considered inappropriate is between two taina wa'ippe [i.e., two-spirits].  Such a relationship seems to be viewed as incestuous because male taina wa'ippe regard each other as 'sisters'" (106).  But the rejection of sexual relations between inverts is worldwide, with terms like "incest," "lesbianism," and even "cannibalism" used to express their abhorrence of the very idea.  Annick Prieur reports in her study of Mexico City vestidas that she has "also heard jotas comment with disgust at the sight of two mustache-wearing men kissing each other, seeing it as something "abnormal." ****  Yet Mexico is a "Western" culture.

Despite all the evidence of variety and difference within cultures, even dissident anthropologists and sociologists have an amazingly difficult time recognizing that societies aren't uniform or monolithic.  I don't know what to do about this resistance, but it's a problem: it distorts not only their understanding of other cultures, but of their own.

------------------------
* Edited by Sue-Ellen Jacobs, Wesley Thomas, and Sabine Lang (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997).

** Quoted in Barry Reay, New York Hustlers: Masculinity and Sex in Modern America (Manchester, 2010), 171-2.

*** In Roscoe, "Was We'Wha a Homosexual? Native American Survivance and the Two-Spirit Tradition," GLQ (1995) 2(3), 193-235, esp. 215.

**** Annick Prieur, Mema's House, Mexico City: On Transvestites, Queens, and Machos (Chicago, 1998), 149.

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.