Nineteenth-century poets also introduced complicated strategies to dissociate male friendships from suspicions of homosexuality. Although Lord Byron sometimes presented his attachments to boys and youths as the recovery of a noble classical past, his contemporaries characterized it in less exalted terms as aristocratic decadence.

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In "A Discourse on the Manners of the Ancient Greeks Relative to the Subject of Love" (1818), Percy Bysshe Shelley nervously explains the intensity of Greek same-sex affection as a consequence of the debased status of Greek women: Since friendship depended on the full parity of moral excellence, Greek men could not experience it with uneducated women.

At first, Alfred Lord Tennyson's In Memoriam: A.H.H. (1850), a elegiac sequence lamenting the death of his friend Arthur Hallam, appears to be the nineteenth-century's least paranoid expression of male romantic friendship. But by elegiac definition, Hallam is dead: Although Tennyson imagines him in one poem as his own bridegroom, his death prevents that quasi-conjugal passion from ever achieving a physical consummation.

Romantic Friendship in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

The triangulation that neutralized the threat of homosexuality in nineteenth-century British experience did not necessarily apply to American representations of same-sex friendship on the frontiers of white civilization. In the figure of Natty Bumppo, James Fenimore Cooper introduced a recurrent American character type, the white man who exchanges domestic stability with a wife and children for a friendship with another man who embodies the freedom of uncivilized nature.

While Natty Bumpo finds his most intense personal commitment in his friendship with the Indian Chingachgook, Herman Melville's Ishmael finds it with Queequeg, and Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn with the runaway slave Jim. As Leslie Fiedler has argued, American literature repeatedly posits an Eden devoid of women, a Paradise in which same-sex friendships take the place of heterosexual marriage.

In Democratic Vistas (1871), Walt Whitman hails male romantic friendship as the basis for a revitalized American democracy. Adopting two terms from nineteenth-century phrenology, Whitman distinguishes between a spiritualized bonding between men, "adhesiveness," and a more crudely material attraction between men and women, "amativeness."

Classical phrenologists did not present the two categories as either antithetical or specifically gendered: For them, "amativeness" referred to sexual attraction and "adhesiveness" to intense, but not essentially erotic, friendship. As Michael Lynch argues, Whitman anticipates the modern distinction between heterosexuality and homosexuality by setting the terms in strictly gendered opposition. For Whitman, amativeness refers only to opposite-sex attraction and adhesiveness only to same-sex attraction.

Romantic Friendship Versus Homosexuality

Since the emergence of "homosexuality" as a specific psychological category, Western culture has posited even sharper divisions between divergent experiences of affection. In current discourse, "male friendship" suggests an "innocent," "normal," fundamentally nonerotic bond between members of the same sex. Friendship so conceived opposes "homosexuality," a "deviant," "abnormal," and preeminently erotic bond between men.

Sex education manuals typically reassure adolescent boys that they can harbor intense affection for members of the same sex without being "homosexuals."

Conclusion

But clear distinctions between erotic and nonerotic affections rarely hold up in practice. Wherever the dream of an all-male Eden persists--in westerns, science fiction, sports stories, detective movies, or prison narratives--romantic friendship retains its unmistakably erotic dimensions.

In Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited (1944), all-male Oxford colleges foster a passionate devotion between Sebastian Flyte and Charles Ryder. The mountains and trout streams of Spain form the backdrop for Jake and Bill's friendship in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926).

A particular subset of male romantic friendships that dates at least to Virgil's Nisus and Euryalus, the attachment between a boy or youth and an older man, dominates Hollywood westerns like Red River (1948) and Shane (1953). By emphasizing the older man's role as mentor and surrogate father, such films only partially dispel anxieties about .

Given the intensity of post-World War II homophobia, it is not surprising that the entertainment industry has increasingly restricted its representation of romantic male friendships to those between prepubescent boys safely destined for heterosexual marriage.

A poetic response to the death of a greatly loved person, the elegy has had since classical times a homoerotic component.

The United Kingdom has a rich and vibrant legacy of queer cultural expression despite a long history of severe legal sanctions against male-male sexual acts and other manifestations of sexual and gender deviance.

A distinctive American narrative genre that has developed over more than two centuries, the Western is now consumed worldwide; characteristically depicting homosocial relationships, it is also frequently suffused with homoeroticism.

The bisexual Lord Byron treated many of his homosexual love affairs in his poetry, encoding them by the use of classical references or by purporting that they were affairs with women.

Dutch friendship glasses, which were made on order to celebrate friendship in the eighteenth century, may also have covertly celebrated same-sex sexual desire; one surviving friendship glass celebrates sodomitical pleasure.

Ernest Hemingway, himself sexually insecure, included negative, even abusive portrayals of gay men in his fiction.

The most important American novelist of the nineteenth century, Herman Melville reflects his homosexuality throughout his texts.

While Milton accepted the biblical condemnation of sodomy, some of his works suggest that his attitude toward same-sex relations was enlightened for his age.

Among Greek writers on homosexual themes, Plato is preeminent not only as a major philosopher but also as the greatest master of Greek prose.

As one of the key figures that western civilization has used to define itself, William Shakespeare stands in a complicated, fiercely contested relationship to homosexuality.

Although he was sexually attracted to women, Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote poetry suffused with homoeroticism, including the most beautiful homoerotic elegy in the English language.

Virgil wrote approvingly of male love in many works, and his second eclogue became the most famous poem on that subject in Latin literature.

Evelyn Waugh, who had homosexual affairs while at Oxford but later led a heterosexual life, treated homosexuals both nostalgically and contemptuously in his novels.

Celebrating an ideal of manly love in both its spiritual and physical aspects, Walt Whitman has exerted a profound and enduring influence on gay literature.