The Eternal Debate I

Romantic Friendship: Not Just a Code Word for Gay
by Heather Elizabeth Peterson

"I did not then entreat to have her stay;
It was your pleasure and your own remorse.
I was too young that time to value her,
But now I know her. If she be a traitor,
Why, so am I. We still have slept together,
Rose at an instant, learned, played, eat together;
And wheresoe'er we went, like Juno's swans,
Still we went coupled and inseparable."
—Celia in William Shakespeare's As You Like It (1600)

A number of writers of homoerotic fiction have remarked to me that they write about romantic love because they believe it has been the most intimate form of love throughout history. The above passage from Shakespeare would seem to be proof of that statement.

Yet in fact the passage is evidence of a belief that was once widely held in English-speaking countries but has now been largely forgotten: that romantic love need not be accompanied by erotic love.

Passages about friends offering romantic statements and gestures toward one another abound in historical literature and documents. A look at historical literature will turn up plenty of tales in which two friends send each other love letters, kiss each other on the lips, and cuddle together. Other activities, such as sleeping together or professing undying love, are also common. Modern readers tend to assume that these "romantic friendships," as they are often called, must have their origins in sexual attraction.

Romantic friendships cause problems for historians as well. When friends in history act romantically toward one another, is hidden sexual activity taking place? Are the friends sexually attracted to one another but not acting on their desires? Or are they (in the contemptuous phrase of a world that has devalued friendship) "just friends"?

The most historically honest answer seems to be, "All three." We know that same-sex lovers have sometimes hidden their erotic activities under the guise of friendship. We also have evidence that some of the friends who acted romantically toward one another throughout history were sexually attracted but did not realize this.

This second statement is as far as most historians are prepared to go. The fact is that romantic friendship has mainly been studied by scholars of gay and lesbian history. Living in a world where romantic friendship is no longer a living tradition, and seeking the roots of gay and lesbian history, many of these scholars have assumed that people who have romantic feelings for each other must be sexually attracted toward one another, even if they do not act on that attraction.

Yet in recent years a handful of people who are in romantic friendships have come forward and flatly denied this to be the case. Certainly one can argue that the division between sexual and nonsexual desires is hard to pinpoint. But in practice, we recognize that some relationships involve so little sexual desire that it is proper to refer to these relationships as non-erotic. Some participants in romantic friendships claim that their relationships are non-erotic.

If we deny this assertion, we must face the fact that modern-day romantic friends have the weight of history on their side. Only in relatively recent times has it been assumed that romantic feelings can only exist where erotic feelings are present. The very term romantic friendship was coined at the point in history (the nineteenth century) when this assertion began to be made. Until then, everyone assumed that, while not all friendships were romantic, romance was compatible with friendship.

For many centuries, in fact, romantic same-sex friendships played a much larger role in society than romantic erotic love between men and women.

"I know of these romantic friendships of the English and the Germans. They are not Latin. I think they are very good if they do not go on too long."
—Cara in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited (1944)

In classical times, the boundary between romantic friendship and erotic love was often blurred because nearly everyone, including people opposed to homosexuality, assumed that male/male sexual attraction was ubiquitous. Greek and Roman writers used the word "friend" interchangeably to describe men with same-sex feelings that were clearly erotic, men with same-sex feelings that were clearly platonic, and men who may or may not have held erotic same-sex feelings. Many classical writers saw personal relationships as being located somewhere on a continuum between sexual love and platonic love. Activities that we would now regard as romantic could fall on either end of the spectrum.

In the Middle Ages, Christians built a strong wall between erotic and platonic feelings, declaring that friendship was something entirely different from sexual attraction. One of the side benefits of this is that friendships between males and females flourished as they never had before, since it was somewhat easier now for men and women to declare their love for one another without being assumed to be lovers in the sexual sense.

The immediate question arose as to whether romantic activities, such as writing love letters, fell into the sphere of friendship or sexuality. Given how much distrust many medieval Christians had of sexuality and how highly they exalted spiritual friendships, it is perhaps not surprising that they declared such activities to be legitimate forms of friendship. Clerics wrote love letters to Jesus and to each other, apparently believing, in most cases, that their feelings were entirely platonic. As a result, the classical continuum between friendship and romance was preserved, although the continuum between romance and sexuality had been sharply broken.

By the time the late Middle Ages arrived, male romantic friendship, while still important, had begun to be eclipsed by male/female romantic love. Courtly love, as it was called, was something of a headache for church officials. Officially, the church view had been, since earliest Christian times, that friendships between men and women were legitimate forms of love. Courtly love, though, went beyond this, declaring that male/female erotic love that was not consummated could also play a legitimate role in society. Not surprisingly, some courtly lovers wanted to go further than this. The wall between romance and sexuality was breaking down in a manner that made church officials more suspicious of romantic feelings. Increasingly, the ideal of male/female friendship would come under attack, until such friendships went into decline as a societal institution until the late twentieth century.

In the midst of all this, the Renaissance arrived, and Europeans received new access to classical writings on friendship. Male romantic friendship, which had looked for a while as though it would not survive as a strong societal institution, unexpectedly rebounded. Even more surprisingly, female romantic friendships became popular also.

Romantic friendships did not yet have a special name, for Renaissance people, like medieval people, assumed that romantic activities could legitimately occur within friendships. This made it easy for writers such as Shakespeare to insert romantic friendships into their tales. Regardless as to what their own views on such matters might be, Renaissance authors could assume that their audiences believed that romantic feelings can exist where erotic love is not present.

Thus far in European history, romantic friendship had a relatively untroubled history. So what happened?