Among the increasingly uncivil wars tearing the fabric of this country is the war between those motivated by homophilia (affinity or fondness for homosexuals) and those loosely accused of homophobia (fear of or aversion to homosexuals). As always in war, truth is distorted or lost altogether, particularly the truth that there is a large middle group opposed to homosexual demands, not because of homophobia but because they are Christians and therefore accept the Bible’s condemnation of homosex as sin, or because they are aware that virtually all past societies have condemned it as unnatural perversion, including ancient Greece (see both Plato in The Laws and Aristotle). Though the homophile feels that anyone opposed to his demands is a homophobe, he is mistaken. But it is not my purpose to consider the morality of homosex or the merits of homosexual demands.
It is, rather, my purpose to examine what has rarely been noticed: the effect of homosexuality upon friendship. Not just homosexuality but the constant clamor and psychologizing about it. In all the frenetic debate and shouting about homo-rights, there is almost never so much as a mention of its regrettable impact upon friendship—its undermining of friendship.
Before we can consider this hidden cost to friendship, we must be clear about what friendship is. In earlier ages such clarification would not be necessary; in this sex-sodden age it is. Indeed, in the present century friendship has been so wounded that many people would be hard put to say just what friendship is.
Friendship, then, is first of all one of the great natural loves of mankind; and certain splendid friendships of the past—Damon and Pythias in the Greek world, David and Jonathan in the Hebrew—are symbols of friendship at its best. The ancients considered friendship to be the highest of all the human loves because it was deliberately chosen—and because it was not clouded by passion. Probably the clearest, most masterly description of the different loves is C.S. Lewis’s The Four Loves: the supernatural love that is called agape (charity) and the three natural loves: storge (affection), Eros (inloveness), and philia (friendship). Affection or family love—that of a father for his son, a sister for her brother, a child for his schoolmates or his dog or the old gardener—is known to us all; and the thrilling heights of inloveness are celebrated in song and story. But what, precisely, is friendship? We may be fond of the charming couple who give such merry parties or of the man we were in college with, and we may speak of them as “friends,” but “affection” probably better describes the bond. Friendship is, first of all, about something: a shared interest in, a shared devotion to, something outside the two men. It might be fly fishing; it might be a theory of writing poetry; it might be collecting old guns or swords. Friendship begins, Lewis says, when one man says to another: “What! You, too? I thought I was the only one!” The only one to care about this thing I love, the only one to have this special vision. And then the two friends (or, if they are lucky, eventually three or four) happily spend countless hours talking about the thing that absorbs them both. The essential difference between friends and lovers is that lovers are totally absorbed in each other—they stand face to face—while friends stand shoulder to shoulder, totally absorbed in the thing they both love. (This is why homosexual love is a variety of Eros, not of friendship.)
Sometimes lonely people bemoan their friendless state, but more often than not such ones have no absorbing interest for friendship to be about; what they really want is affection. Friendship is not of itself affection, but if two men find friendship, it will not be long before the quiet love that is affection will come to enhance it. Thus, if one of the friends is in trouble, the other will affectionately come to his rescue—but this is not what makes friendship friendship. They will both consider the crisis as an interruption of what they both care about. They can’t wait to get back to planning their round-the-world schooner or the book they’re going to write about Jane Austen.
If a man and a woman, both perhaps fine musicians, become friends through their absorbing interest in music, they may suddenly fall in love, adding another dimension to their relationship. Or a man and a woman, not friends, may fall in love and marry, and then later develop a great shared interest—above all, the absorbed interest of spouses in their children—that will make them friends also. Similarly, two homosexuals caught up in Eros may eventually become friends about something—and remain friends even if no longer lovers.
The single and essential key to what friendship is, is a powerful shared interest in or vision of something outside themselves that absorbs them both. If there is nothing of that kind, there is no friendship. However the loves may be combined, clarity of thought comes from knowing what each is—including the agape that may be added, the ultimate Christ-like love that causes a man to lay down his life for his friend.
Friendship, as the ancients held, may be the finest of the natural loves because it is the least clouded by passion, the most fully human, luminous and rational; but friendship is today the most troubled of the loves. Partly this is owing to the fact that it is the least understood. Even the man who has a fine friendship tends to think it a special miracle rather than simply friendship at its best. And today friendship is not celebrated in literature as both inloveness and affection are.
There is, of course, one obvious reason for fewer friendships today, and that is feminism with its never-ending demand for women’s admission to every male sanctum—even, absurdly, the Boy Scouts. There are of course Girl Scouts, girls’ schools and colleges, but women demand to be in those of the boys and men. C.S. Lewis in “Modern Man and His Categories of Thought” (Present Concerns) says that, with numerous exceptions, “men like men better than women like women… and men, if free, retire frequently into the society of their own sex.” If, that is, they can find the society of their own sex today. All through history men have met with other men: the warriors in the Long House of the tribe, the knights at the Round Table, and in more recent times the gentlemen in their clubs and the villagers in their pubs. Friendships were born in the schools and colleges, and deepened in the clubs and pubs or in the ships and regiments.
If the reader is suddenly formulating the question, why haven’t men resisted the feminist invasion more strongly, let us defer the question for the moment. But a different question may be put: Won’t the feminist invasion of everything lead to more male-female friendships? It will, to be sure, lead to four bare legs in a bed, but, in all probability, only rarely to real male-female friendships, and the reason is not far to seek. In the essay referred to above, Lewis says: “When the young male bird is in the presence of the young female it must (Nature insists) display its plumage. Any mixed society thus becomes the scene of wit, banter, persiflage, anecdote—of everything in the world rather than prolonged and rigorous discussion on ultimate issues, or of those serious masculine friendships in which such discussion arises.” And as I myself have observed and written elsewhere, the presence of even one woman in a group of half-a-dozen men (and no doubt of one man in a women’s group) changes the character of that group (see the essay, “The Bachelor,” in Under the Mercy). Instead of a good claret or burgundy, so to speak, the group becomes champagne. A sparkling atmosphere is delightful on occasion, but every day? Might it not go flat?
There can be no doubt at all that friendship is suffering from the feminist invasion. And it is, therefore, truly remarkable—despite long tradition and scores of judgements on the value of separate education as well as masculine pubs and clubs—that the walls are so easily going down. Why is it that the resistance is so weak? To be sure, government, with an eye to female voters, supports the feminists, and the press savages the man who, despite the right of association, remains a member of a men’s club. Curiously, no one criticizes blacks who in our universities and elsewhere prefer to associate with fellow blacks, or women in all-female associations; but men—white men—may not have clubs. And the question remains about this emotional unreason: Why isn’t the resistance stronger—a hundred times stronger?
Part of the answer no doubt is the Spirit of the Age—unmistakably a feminist Spirit, uttering soprano shrieks of rage if women are denied anything or blamed for anything. However wrong-headed past Spirits of the Age have been (consider the witch-hunting Spirit in the era of McCarthy or the Spirit in the 1930s whispering that the future must be one totalitarianism or the other), the Spirit of any Age seems the voice of absolute truth. The future may see us as having been as wrongheaded about feminism as we see the 1950s about Reds under beds. Anyhow, despite the Spirit of the Age and her blood-chilling shrieks, the question still remains: Why is the resistance so feeble?
The question, I believe, can be answered in one word: homosexuality. I hasten to add that it isn’t the homosexuals’ fault, though they do tend to support the feminists (many of whom are lesbians), which may (from their own point of view) be a mistake for the males. However that may be, it is the existence of homosexuality—the fact of homosexuality—that not only damages friendship by weakening the resistance to feminist demands but, in a more deadly way, directly damages friendship. This requires explanation.
First, then, the damage to friendship by weakening (emasculating?) the resistance to feminist demands: We have already touched upon the mingling of the sexes in the schools and colleges where many friendships are born and in the clubs and pubs where friendships deepen—but, the reader may question, what has this to do with homo¬ sexuality? It is homosexuality that weakens resistance to feminist demands. A great many heads of schools and colleges along with a large part of the public have come to believe that these all-male institutions are breeding grounds of homosexuality. Is it true? In my boys’ boarding school and men’s college I saw no sign of it. And this belief—that young males become homosexuals in school and college—directly contradicts the loudly proclaimed belief that homosexuals are born so or become so practically in the cradle. Whatever be the truth, whether coeducation discourages homosexuality or not, it assuredly discourages the formation of strong male friendships. But the cost to friendship is insufficiently understood because what friendship is is insufficiently understood. Birth control and easy abortion have removed our fear of the cohabiting of unmarried youth, but—mistakenly or not—we fear that boys together will become homosexual. And we do not count the cost to the friendship we have ceased to value or even understand. Therefore we do not vigorously resist the feminist demands.
Far more deadly to friendship is the direct damage of homosexuality. Despite the feminist invasion of every male sanctum, friendship can be born anywhere and anytime that two men talk, even amidst the chatter of a cocktail party (though the hostess will do her best to separate them). One man, in reply to a genial “What are you doing these days?” from a slight acquaintance, says, “Reading Rob Roy.” And the other instead of looking blank says: “Sir Walter Scott! Do you like him?” “Love him!” says the first. And the other, “What! You, too? I thought I was the only one in this whole town!” And suddenly they are talking of Scott and Stevenson and the whole Romantic Vision. The party ceases to be of any importance; they are alone together amidst the babble. And then one of the men says, “Let’s get out of here and go to my place and talk.” The birth of real friendship.
But one of the men, seeing the warmth and enthusiasm of the other and the invitation to his place, thinks: “Oh Lord! Could he—could he mean something else? could he be one of them?” Or, even worse, feeling his own warm response—friendship is a love—he thinks: “Oh my God! am I feeling something homosexual? Is it, oh is it that?” It isn’t, but these dread suspicions have sunk into us all in this sordid world. Maybe in this instance they don’t arise, but when one suggests going to his place, they both suddenly realize: “Oh lord—we can’t go out of here together—two men!” A man and a girl just met leave together, and everyone smiles tolerantly. But people don’t leave in the middle of a party except for sex. And two men in a party full of women! The suspicion in a world that knows all about sex and nothing about what is not sex.
Especially friendship. Indeed, there are psychologists today who deny that there is such a thing as friendship—thus proving only that they have never had a friend. But the denial has been picked up by innumerable amateur or parlor psychologists. The friendship that man has treasured from the beginning of time as the most rational and fully human of the loves is now said by these sterile pundits to be concealed homosexuality. We may know and even, somehow, be able to prove that in our friendship there has never been so much as a hint of the homosexual, but the parlor psychologists will solemnly reply: “but that is just what we should expect: it is latent homosexuality.” That sounds scientific, and we have absorbed—it’s practically in the air we breathe—the fear of it. It is time to turn the cool light of reason upon it. That which is latent is undetectable, invisible, unprovable. If we do not believe in ghosts (despite considerable evidence), why should we believe these psychologizers who cannot experimentally verify their assertion? What they are solemnly saying is something like this: “If there were an invisible cat in that chair, the chair would look empty. The chair does look empty. Therefore, there is an invisible cat in it.” I hope no reader, hearing that argument, would hesitate to sit in the chair. Since friendship by its very nature is an interest, not in the friend but in the thing you and he alike love, there is precisely nothing to suggest homosexuality.
And yet ever since Freud looked at the world through sex-distorted spectacles—and above all in our sex-sodden age—the undermining of friendship by the invisible cat of “latent” (invisible) homosexuality has been increasing. In the world we live in and breathe the tainted air of, everything must come down to sex. Indeed, single friends who room together can be exonerated only by the conspicuous consumption of women. Sex, not Christ, not even reason, is the key to life. If “the ceremony of innocence is drowned,” it is drowned in sex. In past ages affectionate fathers kissed their sons and brother kissed brother, monks and other Christians exchanged the kiss of peace, generals awarding medals kissed the hero on both cheeks, and Captain Hardy of HMS Victory kissed the dying Nelson. Now we must shrink from kissing another man, and even women, who have been freer to exchange kisses and embraces, are beginning to shrink. All that happy normality of past ages is under the cloud of The Suspicion. And it is a measureless and melancholy irony that friendship, the love that is furthest from sexual passion, should be the one most undermined by the fear of homosexuality.
This, then, is the undermining of friendship, not just by the existence of homosexuality but by the confused, pseudo-scientific psychologizing about the invisible cat. What we as a society are most confused and irrational about is what in human relationships is not sexual. It is this dubiety about what friendship is that paralyzes men in forming friendships, and paralyzes them also in resisting the homogenization of humanity by the feminists. The one hope for friendship is awareness and understanding by men—and by women too—of precisely what friendship is.