[Editor’s Note: See “The Gay Manly Men of Film, Part 1,” Dec. 3.]
To be clear, the issue isn’t homosexuality in and of itself. Rather, the problem is how the male body is sexualized – through an abuse of homosexuality – and how that sexualization spills over into other elements of culture. Of course, we don’t talk about it much, in part because gender politics tends to focus on sexism directed towards women while forgetting that you can’t discuss/define the female gender without simultaneously discussing/defining the male gender. It falls to individualist feminists like Wendy McElroy to consider the male side of the gender equation. (And all this is without even getting into a discussion of how gender is socially constructed and how that construction relates to biological realities.) But this whole issue in interpreting Beowulf sheds light on how men are, in their way, restricted and normalized into psychologically crippled states.
Of Male Intimacy
For argument’s sake, let’s say Beowulf as a whole is, indeed, homophobic in the way Zaitchick suggests. This presents a catch-22 and brings me back to the double-standard I mentioned last week. The repressed homo-eroticism is based on a view of masculinity that sexualizes male intimacy – brotherhood and friendship are not merely cigars, but phallic symbols. However, this engenders homophobia in the sense that it forces the heterosexual – or rather, the non-sexual – into an inauthentic category, prompting resistance that can be homophobic.
Homosexuality and Violence
It gets worse, however, when considering that the most disturbing aspect of criticisms like Zaitchick’s is how the homo-erotic interpretation applied to Beowulf and 300 – sword-and- sandal fantasies, basically – is tied to an association of masculinity with violence. Macho brutality by close-knit men with Greek statue physiques – oh yes, there must be gay sexual tension. So here again we have homo-eroticism filtered through homophobia through guilt by association: homosexuality juxtaposed with violence.
It’s worth noting, however, that these issues apply just as easily to a heterosexual context. Invoking When Harry Met Sally, we could ask to what extent the relationship between men and women is also prone to sexualization. Is it, in fact, possible for men and women to simply be friends? Or does sex inevitably get in the way?
To a large extent, the question is not particularly interesting in terms of everyday experience; men and women have “platonic” relationships all the time – although it’s interesting that there is even a word to specifically describe a non-sexual relationship. A means of privileging the sexual even through the absence of sex? But the question is relevant when looking at culture because there aren’t many iconic male-female couples on TV or in film that escape becoming sexualized. Mulder and Scully? John Steed and Emma Peel? Maxwell Smart and Agent 99?
Then there are films like My First Mister, an underappreciated film released in 2000 that examines the friendship between a troubled 17-year-old goth teenager and a 49-year old man. The key word really is friendship, however close, but while the film touches on – and dismisses – the issue of a sexual relationship (they don’t have sex), the story plays very much on a cultural suspicion towards relationships between different ages and genders. Without denying or downplaying the very real tragedy of pedophilia, there is something worrisome about how our culture begins with skepticism on the possibility of friendship between people of different ages and gender.
Keeping in mind how the asexual among us are treated as abnormal for their disinterest in sex, a cultural anomaly possibly because of a singular obsession with sex, what films like Beowulf reflect is not so much this infamous repression we keep hearing about, but a continual displacement. Sex is always lurking about, but kept at arm’s length while shuffled, Foucault-style, from discourse to discourse like a hot potato. The sexualization of friendship, then, suggests that our culture fears only one thing more than sex: the absence of sex.