Finding Out, Ch9: Homosexed Art and Literature

With Whitman, Eakins, and Homer, there seems to be an emphasis on the difference (or uncertainty) between the homosexual and the homosocial. Homer “typically portrayed the camaraderie of men doing “masculine” things: hunting, laboring, boxing, and so on” (234). These men could not be seen as inverts because they were models of masculinity; their sexuality never brought into question their manliness--nor could a lack of manliness make them suspect in their sexuality. When John Addington Symonds asked Whitman about male-on-male sex, hoping “that Whitman was making a place for physical sex between men” (234), Whitman’s defense against what he may have seen as an accusation or a dangerous discovery leaves many possibilities. Was Whitman afraid of losing popularity? Was he reluctant to admit to himself that he was what we would label a gay man? If he called sex between men “damnable,” did he perhaps see it as something that was morally wrong while the emotional connection was okay? It is difficult to decipher his motives in the letter to Symonds without understanding the extent of the prosecution of “sexual inverts” or the various ideas about sex, sexuality, or gender in America at the time. 

Today, male homosocial relationships are encouraged, even lauded as one of the greatest and most essential connections between any two people. In many places, we still see a delicate balance between the acceptable homosocial relationship and the unacceptable, contemptible homosexual relationship. We end up with homophobic language that divides a gesture that is meant to be homosocial from one that is perceived as homosexual; for example, many guys will use the phrase “no homo” after confessing something intimate or taking part in emotional bonding. While the act stays the same (and even the meaning, in most cases), the perception of the act changes with whether or not it is homosexual in nature. A more striking example of this division is in same-sex interaction in the military. Military recruits are automatically more masculine than others by justification of being in the military, and many acts committed as recruits are forgivable as homosocial acts--even those that would be problematic and ridiculed as homosexual in other contexts. In The Culture of Desire, Frank Browning notes that “homosexual acts in the military are often ignored as long as the participants do not acknowledge homosexual desire” (217). Acts, then, are not what is threatening. The threat must lie in the possibility of disturbing an important structure of homosocial environments--of camaraderie--that would allows men to be “real” men while indulging in emotional and even physical intimacy with other men. Additionally, Browning believes that “only by excluding the prospect of homosexuality in a homosocial setting is it possible to police and exclude desire, and even then it doesn’t always work” (217). The men who write off their sexual exploits as relief rather than desire are distancing themselves from homosexuality in order to maintain a homosocial atmosphere. In effect, they remain masculine, their relationships legitimate. Browning asks, “Could that barracks retain the same sort of esprit de corps, the same sense of homosocial bonding (or buddy love), that displaces desire with comradeship?” (217). Perhaps Whitman did the same in his disavowal of male sex: Browning even uses the same terms, as Whitman called himself “the poet of the comrades” (quoted on Alexander, Gibson, and Meem 233).

Browning, Frank. The Culture of Desire: Paradox and Perversity in Gay Lives Today. New York: Vintage Books, 1993.