I suppose it’s important to remember that we all view the world with through our own lenses. Just so long as we don’t get bent out of shape when people don’t fit our expectations we’ll be ok.
I don’t know about that. Growing up I can remember having crushes on numerous girls but I don’t ever remember having a desire for another boy. The only way I could see having sexual feelings for another man would be if I were segregated from women for an abnormally long time. Like if I was on a pirate ship cruising the Caribbean for booty or something. Maybe it varies from person to person.
Hopefully I haven’t hijacked this thread and I apologize if I have. To get things on the right track, it wasn’t until fairly recently that blacks in America have been included in general history. I wouldn’t doubt that we’ll see more examples of homosexuals throughout history. I didn’t really learn that Whitman was a homosexual until college.
There’s something to what you say, Guin. As the lava pours down Mount Doom and it looks all up for our heroes, Sam is talking about how sorry he is not to be going home and marrying Rose, and it’s possible that the look Frodo gives him doesn’t mean “What am I, chopped liver?”, but in that case [vetinari] "if I were you, I’d sue my face for slander[/vetinari].
On the other hand, on the evidence of the film, Denethor was a drooling simpleton who wasn’t fit to run a whelk-stall, far less Gondor; Elrond was too petty and spite-filled to give Aragorn the reforged Sword That Was Broken until Arwen herself was at death’s door; Arwen was a warrior princess only the snip of a pair of cutting-room scissors away from winning the Battle of Helm’s Deep by herself; and Aragorn brought the Army of the Dead to the Pelennor Fields, where they buggered at least one mumak to death in an unintentionally comic background scene. So don’t treat the films with too much respect when it comes to getting an insight into what Tolkien thought.
As one who’s vehemently argued against the notion that Sam and Frodo might have been easing their journey to Mordor with numerous off-camera episodes of hot, sweaty, hobbitmanlove, I guess it’s partly the straight-man baggage that regards being called gay when you’re not a keenly-felt insult, and partly an objection to what looks like an attempt at creeping legitimisation of gayness by ascribing homosexuality to practically anyone you can think of. Which isn’t to address the question of whether queer ought to need creeping legitimisation, of course; that’s another topic entirely, and one that gets very little coverage on these boards. :dubious: But mostly an intuition that Tolkien himself would have been horrified at the thought that a devoted, selfless, loyal same-sex relationship necessarily entailed the protagonists playing chocolate-dip-the-sausage at every opportunity, or indeed ever.
MGibson,I don’t think that you hijacked the thread, and I doubt that Hamish would mind such interesting discussion going on one of his first threads. However, I see discussions going on here about the legitimacy of race types, famous homosexuals in reality and fiction, and a discussion of the nature of sexuality. Do not think that just because one person has posted on one topic, that that is the only legitimate topic now, or things will get boring. If you have nothing to say about my post, then make your own, or comment on a past one belong to someone else. I doubt anyone will be offended. With that said:
You know, it interesting to note an exception to this rule. What happens when a know gay male actor plays an everyman character, with no hints of being gay, or straight?
Not knowing that the actor is gay, someone uninformed might assume that the character was straight, while a fan believes differently. The actor himself may have refused to comment, or claimed the character was straight, or he might just say that “It doesn’t matter that the writer or director said nothing about unnamed Evil Overlord’s Lieutenant #1, my part, but for the record, His name is Mike, he’s gay, collects antique wax cylinder recordings, and knows how to fly a scuba dive.”
For an example, in Out LGBT television characters I pointed out that Captain Mike Yates, of the show Doctor Who, has been presumed to be gay, due to the fact that he is played by Richard Franklin, who is openly gay. Well, that plus the fact that in“Terror of the Autons”, he can be seen to stare at a repairman’s ass. (Yates himself gained a boyfriend in one of Keith Topping’s books.)(Cite: Keith Topping, authorized Doctor Who Novelist’s statements.)
P.S. While I was writting this, Malacandra has posted about Homoerotic scenes in the LoTR movie. I do not disagrre, and furthermore, prior to the movies, I saw such scenes in the book. One apoligist has pointed out that Tolkien was in the war, and ways trying to convey the feeling you can get for another man, when your life is in his hands. :D, I just reread that, and took a double-take.
From what little I’ve been able to piece together of the Greek thinking on the subject, the latter. (It’s worth noting that while “Greek love” is synonymous in slang for anal intercourse, the proper behavior of erastes towards eromenos in those pederastic relationships mentioned above was interfemoral frottage, not anal insertion. (I hope that phrasing walks the proper knife-edge between TMI overexplicitness and too-fey euphemism in the moderators’ eyes.)
I know, though, that I’ve gotten some very sharply worded comments for discussing the Boston marriage of Katherine Lee Bates and how it may have contributed to the content of her most famous poem/song. As well as attacks from both sides for suggesting that, like Frodo and Sam, the relationships of David and Jonathan and of Jesus and John in Scripture are on the evidence of the Bible itself true love relationships, as opposed to “they were just good friends,” where no indication of explicitly sexual activity is implied. (There are a couple of questionable phrases about the D/J relationship, but to me it’s a real stretch to say that they prove the relationship was sexual. Physical, yes; sexual, perhaps, but “'tain’t proven.” On the other hand, “the disciple whom Jesus loved” and who reclined against His breast at the Last Supper, was clearly set aside as the one among the Twelve whom Jesus loved in a special way as opposed to the “Jesus loves me, this I know” of His agapetic love for all mankind. I see John’s role as being the intimate friend who fulfilled for Jesus, committed to an itinerant teaching lifestyle, the role that spouse and family would in a person without that call. But Scripture clearly shows that intimate love between two men is not itself forbidden or condemned; the efforts of homophobes to paint it as something else are worse than any alleged “reinterpretation to suit one’s agenda” that they would ascribe to us liberals. And, IMO, Tolkien was fully aware of the meaning and depth of such platonic relationships and specifically painted Frodo and Sam as having such a relationship. Not a homosexual one, but a homophilic one, if you catch the distinction.
Polycarp, I believe that’s exactly it (re: Frodo and Sam). There’s a similar depth of feeling expressed in Kipling’s poem “The Thousandth Man”.
But as to gays in literature, there’s always the explanation of why Robinson Crusoe invented the five-day week: because he was always buggered by Friday.
Ever read Eleanor Roosevelt’s letters to “Hick”? (Lorena Hickock). It’s screamingly obvious that their relationship was beyond a mere friendship.
After Eleanor’s death, Hickock destroyed many of the letters, noting to Eleanor’s daughter that, “your mother wasn’t always so very discreet in her letters to me.” It wasn’t political stuff she feared-- she actually copied those passages before destroying the letters.
Yet some people insist that this was just “a way of talking” and that there’s no way Eleanor could have had a homosexual relationship with Hickock. A bi First Lady? Perish the thought!
I suppose it’d be an insult for being the catcher. Another favorite of mine is referring to someone as an individual who “plucks the hairs from his anus among the tombs.” It’s important to note that Greeks had a pretty complicated view of sexuality that is largely different from what we have today. Also, we can’t view the entirety of the Greek world as being monolithic since attitudes change depending on the time to place.
In short, yes but the answer is a lot more complicated.
Wow. My very first thread ressurected like (keeping with the Neon Genesis Evangelion theme) a Rei clone.
If I’d started this thread today, I might have put in Cafe Society (which didn’t exist then). Should the mods care to move it, that’s okay, though I can see how it fits in GD as well.
Over the last few years, my impressions on this subject have hardened. I’ve spent the last semester reading critical theory, and in dozens of these pieces, the same neurosis: deny, deny, deny even the slight possibility of homosexuality.
Some are particularly rabid. E.J. Clery, who wrote the intorduction to The Castle of Otranto devoted at least a paragraph to denying that Walpole’s obsession with his male cousin’s beauty, Walpole’s lifelong bachelorhood, and the rumours going around about him mean anything.
Another author, commenting on a Medieval author whose name I’ve forgotten, devoted one of his three biographical paragraphs denying the possibility that this author’s descriptions of having sex with Jesus should be construed as homoerotic in any way (“We should resist the urge to psychologize”).
The editors of the edition of Byron’s Don Juan I used for my essay have anal footnoting that tells you every single biographical hint in the poem (including mentions of Byron’s pets), every single historical and literary allusion (including very vague possibilities), and so on – but refuse to explain the hints towards Byron’s homosexual romances, like John Edlestone, or classical allusions about homosexuality unless absolutely unavoidable (These editors do mention “Sappho’s inversion”).
It’s been like this all semester. Speaking of Tolkien, the version of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight edited by Tolkien, Gordon, and Davis carefully omits the homoerotic (and homophobic) elements from translation. It’s surprising they don’t see it, since the same author probably wrote the tract Cleanness/Purity, in the same manuscript, and all about the dangers of homosexuality.
As for the original impetus for the thread, the company that put out Evangelion released a new translation that was uncensored, on DVD. They still haven’t restored the original coverart from the Japanese home version, which had the boys cuddling – it was the only original coverart they didn’t use.
Now the manga is setting up for the same battle. The editor of the English version says that while he saw one-sided attraction in the anime between the boys (Shinji to Kaworu), he doesn’t see it in the manga. Meanwhile, the French translation of the same manga makes it absolutely clear it’s there.
MGibson, thanks for your cogent response. And Scott_plaid is right. I don’t mind the hijack. I, too, feel that the sexuality-is-always-fluid crowd make the same mistake they decry. I’ve never felt attraction to a woman, so I understand where you’re coming from. It’s arrogant to assume you understand another’s sexuality better than they do, and the only way to make sense of things without calling people liars is to assume that human sexuality is a scale with both extremes and grey areas.
I’ve heard this one before, and I’m pretty sure it’s been made up by historians to cover things they don’t want known.
It’s pretty horrific what’s been done to the history books in the name of preserving public morality. John Boswell’s brilliant book Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality devotes its introduction to covering the inventions – gross breaches of scholarly integrity – used to “prove” that the Greeks and Romans weren’t really “like that.”
Since Boswell says it was anal sex, and since his ancient Greek is fluent, and since he’s proven himself trustworthy on this, and since probably nobody in the world has read as much about homosexuality in ancient Greece than he has, I think I’m going to go with his opinion on this. At least until I see some strong (and reliable) evidence to the contrary.
I see nothin I disagree with in your claim that books deny, deny, and some more deny, however, I hafta say that ::snicker:: you ::snicker:: tha- ::guffaw::
::BwaHaHaHaHAHA::
In Spoil Neon Genesis Evangelion for me, you did the exact same thing, posting under matt_mcl name, and then you said the exact same apology! I hope you have the words “Me again in the post above, not my roommate, matt_mcl”, as a macro, to save typing. ::snigger::
Ask anyone around here who knows me, and they’ll tell you I do it a lot, unfortunately. After awhile, the response becomes routine. I seem to have some mental block about it.
I was getting better at remembering to check, but I’ve been on other boards lately that let you delete and edit posts, so I’ve become lazy again.
Well, yes, no one’s saying it’s not possible. Just not all the time. Like I noted when this thread was an infant, the Empress of Russia used to write very florid, demonstrative letters to Rasputin, about sleeping in his arms, which SOUND erotic. But when you actually study what all went on-that this was a man she considered holy, a living saint, and all the other stuff there, you realize she’s being metaphorical-that she wanted him around because he was able to save her son, and she felt that his presence was a blessing.
(And speaking of Russian royalty, Alexandra’s brother was a flaming bisexual, and one of the Tsar’s uncles, Grand Duke Konstantine was gay and very much in agony over it. His diaries are full of him lamenting about “falling into sin.”)
If you want flaming gay royals, though, you might want to look at Ludwig II of Bavaria. Or maybe not, since he went stark raving mad, poor thing.
People were much more touchy-feely back in the day, and in other cultures. You don’t dismiss people being lovers out of hand, but you don’t automatically jump to that conclusion.
So, yeah, Eleanor was most likely bi, if not an outright lesbian. (I thought she had affairs with more than just Hickock, if only in retaliation for FDR’s philandering)
And no, Tolkien didn’t intend for Sam and Frodo to be gay. But even in the BOOK (not just the movies!), they definitely had that vibe going. So while they weren’t gay, at least not in canon, they SHOULD be, because they’d make an absolutely adorable couple.
If I remember my classics lessons, the insult wasn’t that the person was gay, but that the person took the female role. Being the top was just fine. But the ancient Greeks had a very different idea of sexuality.
I can see I should have been more clear anout my meaning. What I meant was that acts viewed as sexual perversions could be used to insult your rivals. Catherine was accused of sex with animals, H. Clinton is accused of being a lesbian, and Greek men could be accused of enjoying anal sex. Other great Greek insults included katapugon, euruproktos (wide anused), cistern assed, and gapers or gaping assed. Christ almightly I’ve spent an awful lot of time in this thread talking about asses.
Again, I have to stress that the Greeks viewed the universe far differently the we do. Not all Greeks approved of homosexual relationships though they were considerably harder on bottoms then they were on the tops. Unfortunately many different people have tried to use Greek sexuality to futher they own beliefs or goals. Some groups like to pretend that homosexuality didn’t exist at all, others try to justify their pedastry by citing man/boy relationships, and still others seem to think the Greeks were into free love.
All in all I think we can all agree that looking to the Greek world for examples of a healthy attitude towards homosexuality is probably a bad idea. It’s a sticky subject because so many people want to apply their own standards to the standards of people who viewed the universe in a very different way then we do.
People, and I mean Gay people, forget that Stonewall was really more than just a silly riot in NYC. Prior to that, there was no “Gay”…sure, there was lots of homosexual sex, but unless you go back to ancient Greece, it was never something “nice people” ever talked about and sadly, seldom even documented, It was always swept under the carpet and denied, even by the men involved. Sadly, that is exactly what politicians want us to do today - pretend it doesn’t exist. Gay Pride Festivals may seem tired to people living in urban areas, but the way things are going, it might be time for more people to start showing up and once again getting into people’s faces.
