Homoeroticism and Homosociality
HOMOEROTICISM AND HOMOSOCIALITY
"Homoeroticism" and "homosociality" designate sometimes opposed but ultimately interdependent concepts. Whereas the notion of the homoerotic refers to same-sex desire, some treatments of homosocial institutions and practices emphasize segregation by sex that lacks or disavows any sexual component. Yet the terms, like the ideas and activities they seek to represent, are often revealingly elusive. If a gay bar, men's bathroom, and college fraternity house are all homosocial male spaces, is it clear that only the first allows for homeroticism? Might spaces and events constructed in part to isolate women from heterosexual interaction, such as girl's schools, slumber parties, and convents, nevertheless encourage homoerotic fantasies, and even sexual relations, between women? Although early-twentieth-century African American lodges or the Chinatown "bachelor societies" created by restrictive immigration policies were most explicitly defined by racial segregation, such same-sex societies may have also served to complicate or clarify the sexual identities of their inhabitants. Investigations of the mutable relationships between the homoerotic and homosocial attempt to illuminate such questions.
Recognizing the Homoerotic
For some critics, homoeroticism is open, explicit, and acknowledged. For example, gay pornography, whose sexual appeal for its consumers is blatant, is obviously homoerotic, although the term "erotic" is often used to distinguish more "sophisticated" and artistic expressions of sexual desire from more ordinary and everyday expressions. Homoerotic art might include the avant-garde films of Barbara Hammer, the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe, and the poetry of Allen Ginsberg or Thom Gunn, all carefully crafted works that nonetheless directly depict lesbian or gay desire and sexuality. As more popular forms, the beefcake drawings of Tom of Finland, the pulp fiction of Ann Bannon, and the detective novels of Joseph Hansen or Mark Richard Zubro also treat gay or lesbian sexuality openly and sometimes explicitly. Such artifacts of high and popular culture are more or less produced and consumed within or at least on the margins of a culture that recognizes the existence of LGBT people, and in large part defines them, for better or worse, by their sexual desires. Homoeroticism is thus a visible expression of any society that includes homosexuals.
More often, however, homoeroticism has been treated as a covert, indirect, and coded meaning, addressed and available to LGBT audiences but possibly unrecognized by straight society. Most obviously, this sense of homoeroticism as suggestive rather than direct characterizes work from earlier historical periods. In his study of nineteenth-century American fiction, for instance, Scott S. Derrick emphasizes that "homoerotic desire" could not be directly articulated in the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne or Henry James, not only due to social restrictions, but in part because the very concept of the "homosexual" was not yet in place. In a prominent example, most critics and readers now affirm the homoeroticism central to many of Walt Whitman's poems, but this feature of his work was overlooked or ignored for decades by many readers who presumably could not recognize Whitman's expressions of male same-sex desire—much less reconcile it with his status as America's greatest poet. Critics of Emily Dickinson have similarly located expressions of lesbian desire in her poetry that earlier readers may not have suppressed so much as found literally inconceivable: such cases imply that homoeroticism must in some respect be a historical phenomenon. As Thomas Waugh has demonstrated, the long history of male nude photography, which now appears obviously homoerotic, was permitted through the alibis of art (with nude photos evoking classical Greek statues) and health (allowing the exposed male "physique" to be represented as a picture of health rather than an image of transgressive sexuality).
Homoeroticism, then, is often understood to require interpretation, an active reading that mainstream society tends to dismiss or resist as a forced, subjective imposition onto "innocent" texts: a work might only be homoerotic for homosexuals. However, the notion of the homoerotic can also hint that anyone might be susceptible to the desires suggested by certain texts and images. Even a straight man might respond to the physical beauty of a movie star like Montgomery Clift and thus experience a homoerotic charge; a negative response to such unanticipated desire is one way to understand homophobia, as precisely a fear of what one recognizes in oneself. Broadly, of course, the homoerotic is simply a particular manifestation of the erotic, which remains a fundamental but still mysterious and persistently controversial human pleasure. Following a logic explored most diligently by psychoanalysis, homoeroticism may seem more transgressive and so more exciting than socially sanctioned heterosexual desire (which masquerades as "eroticism" itself) precisely insofar as it has been more repressed and censored throughout modern history: the culture that fears homoeroticism might then inadvertently deserve some credit for sustaining its ongoing fascination and appeal.
The Male Homosocial World
Although the term was then nonexistent, "homosociality" summarizes a way of life common in Victorian America that isolated men and women into "separate spheres. "The word has been most influentially redirected by the critic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick to emphasize the continuum between homosocial institutions and homosexual desire, despite the apparent homophobia of many homosocial formations. Before the twentieth century, American men might commonly attend all-male schools and join fraternities, serve in the all-male military, and work in all-male professions and occupations; their increased leisure time could take them to saloons, clubs, fraternal organizations, hunting lodges, and ballparks that encouraged practices of male bonding, shared physical activity, and idealized camaraderie in part by excluding women. While these spaces reinforced patriarchy and often bred misogyny, they sometimes also generated bonds of deep affection and physical intimacy between men. In a culture that viewed marriage and fatherhood as social norms to be achieved eventually, homosocial institutions also allowed many men to remain lifelong bachelors, a category that evoked suspicion but which also offered refuge to men with no sexual interest in women.
Although most men lived as heterosexuals in their homes, their common experience of all-male environments in their working lives and during much of their leisure encouraged intense male bonds that would only weaken when women began to enter these spaces in the first decades of the twentieth century. The sentimental relations that characterized Victorian male friendship were then renegotiated and repressed, so that firm, brief handshakes came to replace the hand-holding common among earlier male friends (as vintage photographs consistently reveal). Nonetheless, remnants of Victorian homosociality remain whenever and wherever men use social systems to remove themselves from women—whether by forming street gangs or joining golf clubs—or retain social rituals, such as the team victory celebration, that still allow them to indulge in physical intimacy. The social assumptions that still segregate college dorms or public toilets and showers also maintain easily over-looked homosocial spaces in our everyday lives. The all-male gay disco and coming-out support group might be recognized as significant post-Stonewall variations on a model in fact established by ostensibly straight males in the previous century.
The Female Homosocial World
In the nineteenth century, the traditional restriction of middle-and upper-class white girls and women to the sphere of the home and church began to slowly break down; if women were not yet allowed access to many public spaces, an exclusive female world of newly established colleges, social clubs, study groups, sewing circles, and political organizations allowed a circulation among women that facilitated close and sometimes fully romantic friendships. Women were commonly allowed more emotional and physical intimacy than even the notably "sentimental" men of the period were, and this closeness could lead to relationships and acts that we would now unhesitatingly designate as "lesbian." Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, among others, has especially highlighted the role that the new women's colleges, established beginning in the 1870s, played in facilitating emotional as well as erotic affiliations between some of the first young women to venture far outside the family home. Educated women trained in a profession could also more easily avoid marriage and motherhood after college and could establish households with other women without arousing the sort of suspicion that would condemn unmarried working-class women. As many feminist historians have emphasized, however, earlier intimate, often lifelong relations between women might not have involved genital contact, and so demand a broader understanding of intimacy and romance than current assumptions allow. Most famously, some women established "Boston marriages," typically long and intense alliances that outsiders might misunderstand as the simple coming together of a couple of "spinsters" or "old maids" choosing cohabitation over loneliness. Other scholars, such as Terry Castle, have cautioned against the tendency to conflate lesbianism with other forms of homosocial bonding by attending too carefully to rare but revealing evidence of libidinal pleasure in some of the private diaries and letters that chronicle early female romances.
By the middle of the twentieth century, women whose romantic and sexual experiences had developed in homosocial environments would begin to form a genuine lesbian subculture, marked in part through the establishment of support organizations like the Daughters of Bilitis, begun in the midst of one of America's most homophobic eras. Like gay men, contemporary lesbians have both perpetuated and radically reinvented the earlier tradition of female homosociality through the establishment of lesbian bookshops, theater troupes, bars, softball leagues, and musical festivals, which attempt to provide safe, communal, male-free zones within a culture that still offers only limited spaces of genuine social tolerance. As lesbian homoeroticism redefined itself through expressions of lust rather than earlier models of affectionate friendship, such homosocial spaces remained important for the ongoing exploration of lesbian desire safely removed from mainstream male surveillance.
While the term homosociality can designate supportive communities as well as exclusive and even oppressive same-sex groups, homoeroticism circulates through both formations, whether as the welcome charge that energizes a gay or lesbian bar, or as the unconscious and repressed attraction that may exist between buddies and girlfriends. Sometimes explicit, but more often suggestive, homoeroticism often slips past the protective borders of social structures that assume sexuality can be excluded within segregated groups.
Bibliography
Carnes, Mark C., and Clyde Griffin, eds. Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.
Castle, Terry. The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.
Chudacoff, Howard P. The Age of the Bachelor: Creating an American Subculture. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999.
Derrick, Scott S. Monumental Anxieties: Homoerotic Desire and Feminine Influence in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997.
Faderman, Lillian. Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present. New York: Morrow, 1981.
——. Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.
Rothblum, Esther D., and Kathleen A. Brehony, eds. Boston Marriages: Romantic but Asexual Relationships among Contemporary Lesbians. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.
Showalter, Elaine. Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle. New York: Viking, 1990.
Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll. Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America. New York: Knopf, 1985.
Waugh, Thomas. Hard to Imagine: Gay Male Eroticism in Photography and Film from Their Beginnings to Stonewall. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.
Corey K. Creekmur
see alsoboy scouts and girl scouts; friendship; romantic friendship and boston marriage; samesex institutions; situational homosexuality; smashes and chumming.