Relations between men can be placed on a hypothetical scale ranging from the purely homosocial (non-sexual but nonetheless strong emotional bonds between men) to the purely homosexual (involving sexual attraction, arousal and genital activity). Within modern Western societies homosocial and homosexual are meant to be kept strictly separate, a separation enforced by homophobic policing of any signs of sexual interest between men. Where, then, does this leave homoeroticism?
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, homoeroticism is ‘pertaining to or characterised by a tendency for erotic emotions to be centred on a person of the same sex; or pertaining to a homo-erotic person’. The definition is interesting because while it refers to emotions it says nothing about physical acts. It also mentions a ‘homo-erotic person’ who, if we accept the first definition, may be homoerotic emotionally but not necessarily in deeds. Yet the OED also includes the following entry under ‘eroticise’: ‘To transform an emotion into a sexual feeling’, and ‘To make erotic, to stimulate sexually’. In Webster’s dictionary, we find a similar progression towards a more sexualised definition in the following entry: ‘Erotic: pertaining to, or prompted by love; treating of love; amorous; tending to excite sexual desire.’ In the Webster entry, the shift is from ‘love’, which need not immediately suggest sex, to ‘amorous’, which has stronger sexual connotations, to the explicit ‘sexual desire’. In all the above entries the relationship between erotic emotions and sexual acts is ambiguous. Both are clearly related to each other but the exact nature of the relationship between them and which has priority is unclear.
Given the ambiguous combination of the emotional and sexual in definition s of ho eroticism, we might expect it to emerge where homosocial and homosexual relations overlap to produce social ties between men that are informed by an unstable emotional—sexual amalgam.
The instability of homoeroticism reflects the instability of the categories created by the polarisation of men into either heterosexual or homosexual. The dichotomy is relatively recent and is constantly produced and enforced through a range of cultural and social practices including homophobia and the psychic and cultural disavowal of any form of sexual interest between men. The concept of homoeroticism illustrates well the poststructural argument that meaning is achieved through exclusion and that what is excluded in order to create a cultural category both maintains but also inhabits and therefore destabilises that category. Having been expelled from the Western cultural definition of normative male heterosexuality, sexual interest between men, however diffuse and implicit it may be, is a continual ‘absent presence’ that threatens to undermine its integrity. Indeed, the stronger the repression and denial, the more strenuous the efforts put into recognising and eradicating all signs of homoeroticism in order to strengthen the bulwark against homosexuality. Freud was of the opinion that the boundary between homosexual and heterosexual is unclear when he argued that we are all capable of making a homosexual object choice and have all done so in our unconscious. He argued that polymorphous perversity, which is the starting point for everyone’s sexuality and which includes homoeroticism, is the bedrock on which later oedipalised heterosexuality is built (Freud 1905). Consequently, homoerotic emotions and identifications are present in the unconscious of everyone.
Homoeroticism is therefore an unstable concept that attempts to signify relations between men that are poised precariously between homosexuality, which is socially and culturally recognised and fixed within dominant discursive frameworks, and heterosexuality, in which the homosocial ties of male bonding and friendship are strong but expected to exclude and disavow all forms of sexual interest between men.
In Freud’s view, some apparently nonsexual human activities are in fact driven by the force of sexual instinct. Within heteronormative regimes, forms of sexual attraction between men are desexualised and displaced into non-sexual activities that are socially valued. Freud’s point is that the force of this sexual attraction can be sublimated into social and cultural ends without losing its intensity (Laplanche and Pontalis 1988). These include relations between men that are central to the creation of society as a whole. On this account, homoeroticism is a repressed but inescapable dimension of male bonds that permeates all relations between men—the more effectively, the more it is sublimated and concealed—and through them, all the central institutions of society including politics, industry and commerce, and not least single-sex organisations, like the military, and activities like sport. Thus, rather than being a matter only for a minority of men who identify as homosexual or gay, homoeroticism is a part of the very formation of all men as human subjects and social actors.
On occasion, the eroticism that is a subtext in relations between men appears to surface under controlled conditions. The initiation ceremonies that are common in all-male institutions, such as the armed forces, are a case in point. Rituals intended to faze new recruits may include inserting objects into the anus of the young men, simulated anal intercourse and analingus. To an outsider these actions strongly suggest sexuality, however burlesque in form. Yet those taking part normally dismiss any suggestions that these actions have any sexual dimension whatsoever (Zeeland 1995). The possibility of a sexual subtext in male relations is ‘recognised’ in these ritual practices but not explicitly named as such. Explicit comment, to the extent that it occurs, involves denial. In short, there is the usual combination of recognition and misrecognition at work which is a leitmotif of the homoerotic.
In contexts where there is a prohibition on homosexual practices and emotions, cultural references to them may often be oblique (Woods 1987). The poems of Walt Whitman and their intense celebration of male bodies and ‘friendships’ are well-known examples. Such is the cultural imperative to deny the possibility of sexual interest that many examples are denied, go unremarked or are subjected to a heterosexual interpretation even to the extent of making alterations to texts in translation. The literature of ancient Greece provides numerous examples which have been systematically subjected to censorship of any homoerotic dimension, including the works of Plato (for an example, see Tripp 1987:217–19). This has not always been the case. Literary traditions in the West and elsewhere contain many examples of explicit homosexual interest, such as in the works of ancient Greece, and also in works of Arab literature in which authors praise the beauty of male youths, as well as in Chinese literature stretching back many centuries (Hinsch 1990). In present day male ‘buddy’ films, strong friendships between male protagonists are sometimes referred to as homoerotic. The level of concern, attentiveness and the obvious love of the male characters for each other are of an intensity normally expected within heterosexual relationships.
However, the term ‘homoerotic’ is often confined to relationships that appear to be platonic. This raises a question: Why call them homoerotic? Does the willingness to use the term to refer to relations between men signal a greater awareness or belief that there is a strong erotic dimension to close male friendships? Or is the term simply a shorthand device for intense male bonds? To label something as homoerotic is, then, immediately to become embroiled in questions of interpretation. When do male bodies become homoerotic objects that arouse homoerotic feelings and even sexual feelings? Is it enough to have several attractive men, nude or semi-nude for example, in close physical contact with each other to signify homoeroticism? Or must the image provoke a sexual response in the viewer such that (s)he reads the image as signifying some kind of erotic relationship between the men, or at least the potential for such a relationship? Or is it the experience of the men themselves which decides whether their relationship to each other contains a sexual, that is to say homoerotic, dimension?
Different historical periods and different cultures have prescribed or tended to favour certain male—male relations over others. Homoerotic attraction has been expected to follow differences in class or age, and to reflect local ideals of male physical beauty. Differences in power between men may also be eroticised. Cultural icons such as sportsmen and entertainers are all the objects of homoerotic interest. Forms of masculinity that are perceived to be unattainable for gay men have often become erotic objects, including soldiers, police, fire-fighters and men from traditional working-class occupations that are regarded as the preserve of heterosexual men, such as construction workers. These ‘forbidden’ masculinities are eroticised and made available for sexual fantasies; they are the staples of gay pornography.
For men who do not identify as homosexual or gay, interest in other men, not least an appreciation of their bodies, is only permissible in certain contexts, sport in particular. In sports, men are free to be in physical contact with and to stare at other men as much as they wish as long as the stares are ostensibly engaged in judging skills whether with the ball or the cricket or baseball bat, or admiring the stamina of a swimmer or the force of a rugby tackle. The intense admiration, even hero-worship, of men for sportsmen may be interpreted as stemming from unconscious and unacknowledged homoerotic feelings.
The male body has increasingly become an object to be admired within Western consumer culture beyond the bounds of sport. Whereas previously only the female body was an erotic and sexualised object in advertising, pin-ups and pornography, nowadays the male body—usually young, physically attractive, able-bodied and ostensibly heterosexual—is a common sight in advertising and a range of other media (Mort 1996; Nixon 1996).
However, most advertisers still wish to avoid having their advertisements and the products they sell interpreted explicitly and unambiguously as ‘gay’ or ‘homosexual’, especially when the product is meant to appeal to and bolster traditional male gender. The possibility is foreclosed by various devices, of which the commonest is to introduce a supernumerary woman into the advertisement. Her presence, usually alluring and obviously displaying heterosexual interest in the man or providing him with a heterosexual object, guarantees his heterosexuality and confirms that the product has made him heterosexually attractive while excluding homosexual attractiveness and homoerotic narcissism. The device is particularly obvious in advertisements for male grooming, such as shaving products, shampoo, soap and skin creams where the male body is nude or seminude and an object of beauty to be admired. The ubiquity and frequency of this device suggests strongly that advertisers are well aware of these possible interpretations. At the same time, there is an increasing number of advertisements that play on sexual ambiguity and allow both a heterosexual and homosexual interpretation which does not exclude any potential buyers. As we have repeatedly seen, it is this ambiguity which is at the centre of much homoeroticism.
When attempting to identify the homoerotic, we would do well to recall that Freud had reservations about the term ‘erotic’ itself, because he recognised that it could be used to camouflage sexual phenomena in favour of its sublimated forms by means of a less sexually explicit term (Laplanche and Pontalis 1988:153). There is considerable merit in Freud’s reservation. If homoeroticism involves sexual desires, why not simply call it homosexual? If the term ‘homoeroticism’ must be employed, then it might be best to use it to refer to the sublimated and unacknowledged forms of homosexuality that inform all male relations, while using ‘homosexual’ to refer to explicit sexual interest in other men.
Homoeroticism, as a concept and label for a form of sexuality, ought perhaps to be seen as the product of the strict heterosexual— homosexual binary that pervades Western culture and which demands that homosexual feelings be confine d to and associ ated a particular sexual type, homosexual men who are thereby clearly differentiated from heterosexual men. The term ‘homoeroticism’ is, then, often used to refer to a border or transition zone where neither of these two master categories can enforce an uncontested claim. If it were not so vital to maintain the two as mutually exclusive sexual types, then it might be possible to admit that the sexuality of all men includes a homosexual (and heterosexual) dimension without recourse to the slippery and ambiguous term ‘homoeroticism’.
References and further reading
Freud, S. [1905] (1953–74) ‘Three essays on the theory of sexuality’, The Standard Edition, VII, of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited and translated by J. Strachey, London: The Hogarth Press and The Institute for Psychoanalysis.
Hinsch, B. (1990) Passions of the Cut Sleeve: The Male Homosexual Tradition in China, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Laplanche, J. and Pontalis, J.-B. (1988) The Language of Psycho-analysis, translated by D. Nicholson-Smith, London: Karnac Institute and the Institute of Psychoanalysis.
Mort, F. (1996) Cultures of Consumption: Masculinities and Social Space in Late Twentieth-Century Britain, London: Routledge.
Nixon, S. (1996) Hard Looks: Masculinities, Spectatorship and Contemporary Consumption, New York: St Martin’s Press.
Simpson, M. (1994) Male Impersonators: Men Performing Masculinity, London: Routledge.
Tripp, C.A. (1987) The Homosexual Matrix, 2nd edn, New York: Meridian.
Woods, G. (1987) Articulate Flesh: Male Homoerotidsm and Modern Poetry, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press.
Zeeland, S. (1995) Sailors and Sexual Identity: Crossing the Line Between ‘Straight’ and ‘Gay’ in the US Navy, New York: Harrington Park Press.
