Grumble magazine

When I was in high school, I had an American lit teacher who offered only one interpretation for everything we read in his class. Everysinglefreakingtext prompted him to say, “There is obvious homoerotic tension between the two main male characters.” And by the standards of modern American culture, he had a point. That is: if any of those stories had been written in post-1950 America, the actions of the two main male characters and the words they used to describe and speak to each other would indeed read as something between homoerotic and openly gay.

This means, of course, that every male friendship depicted in literature from, let’s say, Hamlet and Horatio on up, is actually, beneath its surface, a gay lover relationship fueled by both deep love and erotic desire.

Um. No.

In the last few years (since Lord of the Rings was released, mostly), I have felt myself caught in a timewarp, back in my junior year American lit class. The consensus of modern American scholarly and/or geek culture appears to be that there is only one interpretation for any male friend pairing, no matter the context or culture or time period in which it was written. Arthur and Lancelot. Hamlet and Horatio. Holmes and Watson. Earp and Holliday. Frodo and Sam. Homoerotic tension. All of ‘em. No other possible explanation. We’ve discovered the Inherent Truth in every piece of Western literature ever written.

Except, um, no, we haven’t. I sincerely doubt that Tolkien (for instance) intended to imply that Frodo and Sam were having hot hobbit sex offscreen. But when I bring up my objections, they are shrugged off.

“Hey, doesn’t Sam marry Rosie at the end?”

“Frodo doesn’t marry anyone, so Frodo obviously wants to marry Sam and can’t; and Sam is trapped by the conventions of his society and doesn’t dare break them.”

“Tolkien said he based the two of them on the experience of a soldier and his batman during World War I — an emotional relationship based on shared horror, rather than a physically erotic relationship that would have seemed deviant to a British Catholic of 1920-something. I doubt Tolkien meant it to be read as sexual.”

“It doesn’t matter what Tolkien said or what he intended. The homoeroticism is still there. It’s obvious.”

These conversations (with otherwise brilliant and insightful people) make me want to bash my head into a wall in frustration. I believe that, although there may be a good argument for individual readings of individual hero-companion pairings as homoerotic, there are also good counter-arguments in almost every case; and there certainly is not enough evidence to support a universal reading. To say it another way: “I beseech you in the name of all the love that ever was between us,” means something hugely different when it is spoken in an Arthurian tale written by Sir Thomas Malory in the twelfth century than when it is uttered in a movie like Brokeback Mountain. That’s not to say it’s impossible to have a Brokeback Mountain story masquerading as something else, but that it is not the obvious reading, the Occam’s razor reading. To say that a particular hero-companion friendship story is actually a homoerotic story in masquerade, you need to have a reason to think so — say, a pattern of behavior atypical for a hero-companion friendship story.

My contention is threefold: first, that the traditional hero-companion relationship has nothing to do with sex; second, that assuming that the perception of the reader is as important as the intention of the author is misleading as well as arrogant; and third, that the specific assumption of sexual undertones in relationships written to be non-sexual carries additional dangers. I will explain each point separately.

Firstly, in all of the pairings I mentioned above, it is important to note that the universes these characters inhabit are sharply divided into the world of men and the world of women. The things men do, women do not do. Women are separate, protected, childlike or on pedestals. A man can’t talk to a woman, not about anything that matters, not a deep level, in the same way a man can’t talk deeply to a child or a pet. The child, pet, or woman does not have the experience to comprehend the things the man needs to talk about. You can’t have an emotional partnership with one who needs protecting and/or “pedestalling. ” So the core emotional relationships — emotional partnerships — are formed with other men. Call them emotional marriages, if you like, but don’t think that makes them sexual. Sex is what you have with your wife (or a girl, after a battle), and you may feel lust or fondness for the woman who shares your bed. Sex is decoupled from the love of partners. The fact that nowadays we strive for emotional partnership and sexual satisfaction with one person, of our preferred gender, in a monogamous marriage, does not mean that the same social norms were in place in the old West, Victorian England, the Shire, or medieval Britain.

And the rest of the social norms of the old West, Victorian England, the Shire, and medieval Britain bear considering too. It must be noted as part of the analysis that all of these societies were hetero-normative (to state it very mildly indeed). Victorian England is perhaps the most obvious example: its laws against sodomy were clear-cut and unmistakable. Whereas female prostitution was one of those things that red-blooded young men partook of, and formerly-red-blooded old men shook an indulgent head at, male prostitution was grounds for imprisonment and serious levels of disgust. The kind of trust and respect that characterizes a hero-companion relationship makes it exceedingly unlikely that either party would degrade the friendship with something disgusting, shameful, illegal, and often presented as abuse of a power dynamic. Sex is what you do with women, for the relieving of lust or the procreation of children. Partnership is what you do with other men. Men who have sex with other men are deviants who are arrested and have their careers and lives ruined. (Oscar Wilde provides a famous example.) With all these facts as a given, is it really the Occam’s razor reading that Sherlock Holmes and John Watson spent all their varied adventures dying for a shag with each other? Is it not more likely that some other kind of love and some other kind of story is being described?

This is why, when my assertion is shrugged off with, “But you are assuming a hetero-normative society,” it is all I can do not to snap Damn right I am. Most hero-companion pairings (Arthur/Lancelot, Holmes/Watson, Hamlet/Horatio, Earp/Holliday, Frodo/Sam) were written in hetero-normative societies. “But you are assuming that the author’s intent matters,” is usually the second counter. The first time I heard that, it took me a moment to understand why my opponent thought that was a valid objection. Of course the author’s intent matters. In matters of personal pleasure reading, the reader is welcome to allow their perspective to dictate the meaning of the story. But in matters of scholarship, it is unspeakably arrogant to assert that the perspective of the modern reader sees more in the story than the perspective of the historical reader. That is, to determine what the author was saying — the truth of the text — the scholar needs to know what the reader for whom the author was writing would have seen.

If it amuses you to assume that a jumper is a girl’s dress, and to therefore picture Harry Potter in a girl’s dress, knock yourself out. But your interpretation is incorrect.

To take an obvious (and absurd) example, the word “jumper” means different things to the American and the British reader. To correctly read the text, it is useful for the scholar to familiarize himself with the meaning of the word from the perspective of the author, and the perspective of the reader for whom the author was writing. It is not true that the perception of the American reader is as valid as that of the British writer writing for a British reader. To be blunt — if it amuses you to assume that a jumper is a girl’s dress, and to therefore picture Harry Potter in a girl’s dress, knock yourself out. But your interpretation is incorrect. Rowling, Harry, and Rowling’s original readers interpret the word “jumper” as “sweater”, and if you’re in search of the truth of the text, so should you.

Similarly, it is of paramount importance to know whether the men holding hands are depicted as doing so by a Middle Eastern or a Western author. It is of paramount importance to understand what key words and phrases meant to those raised in the era when the words were written. (My favorite examples are “dear”, “monster”, and “demon”, all of which used to connote something hugely different than what they connote now.) It is the height of arrogance to impose one’s own cultural values when reading the stories of another culture. It is, at the very least, shoddy scholarship.

Finally, I contend that the specific reading of everysinglefreakingliteraryrelationship as sexual has some truly disturbing connotations. If every relationship can be read as sexual, then no relationship can be read as asexual. This opens the door for some tiresome hysteria. It means that every maternal figure in literature is open to the charges of emotional incest. Every paternal figure is open to charges of pedophilia. Every emotional connection between characters sexually coupled elsewhere opens the characters to charges of infidelity. It means that there is no love without sexual overtones. And it means that if you believe sexual overtones between certain types of couples (those married elsewhere, let us say, or those of the same gender, or those who represent a parent-figure and a child-figure) are immoral, then you cannot allow any emotional closeness of any kind between these types of couples, lest immoral feelings develop. Mothers must not be too nurturing of their sons. Or daughters. Men must not have emotional bonds with any human being other than their wives. No one is ever allowed to mentor another person of the same (or the different!) gender. Almighty God, what a cold world that would be.

It seems incomprehensible to modern America that any two people could share love without sexual desire, but that says a great deal more about post-1950s Americans, and our obsessions and repressions, than it does about any previous era of which we claim to be discovering the secrets. Perhaps we would do better to turn the eye inward and try to determine what it is about our culture that makes all love look like sex. And when we’re done with that, we might try to understand the story of the hero and the companion — which is a fine, deep, and moving story, in its many iterations, and which does have something share with us about love. Just not lust, homoerotic or otherwise.