This is a question historians continue to delve into, and no doubt the causes of the decline of romantic friendship were complex. But one important factor seems to have helped to kill the idea that romantic feelings can exist alongside platonic feelings: the rise of the belief in sexual orientation.
Until this time, Europeans had continued to hold to the belief popular in classical times, that any ordinary person might have homosexual feelings. Most medieval and Renaissance Christians would have regarded such feelings as sinful, but they would be no more inclined to regard these people as entirely different than they would regard a person who was tempted to hit a friend as being entirely different from the rest of humankind.
Beginning in the eighteenth century, though, a notion was popularized that people with homoerotic feelings were a "third sex," very different from the ordinary person. This idea varied in the impact that it had on Europeans; in some parts of Europe, such as the Mediterranean, traditionally romantic activities continued to be practiced by same-sex friends up until the present day.
English-speaking countries were inclined to embrace the new view, but even there it was slow to arise. At the end of the nineteenth century in the United States, the third-sex view still had not yet supplanted the older idea that homoerotic feelings are potential in everyone. As a result, few people in Victorian America worried as to whether romantic activities such as holding hands or professing love were signs that two men were sexually attracted to one another. To have done so would have seemed as ridiculous to them as worrying whether a mother was incestuously attracted to her son if she kissed him. Though concern about homosexual leanings was beginning to creep into society, most Victorian Americans held to the classical belief that friends are just as likely as lovers to engage in romantic activities.
At that juncture, though, the sexologists arrived.
The impact that turn-of-the-century sexologists had on people's views of friendship cannot be underestimated. While a number of homoerotically attracted men and women over the centuries had regarded themselves as immutable members of a separate sexual group, this idea had never fully captured the popular imagination. Nor had these men and women tried to argue that same-sex romantic love was a sure-fire signal of the presence of same-sex erotic feelings. The sexologists, on the other hand, laid forth a vision of the world in which passionate love for another person was necessarily a sign of a heterosexual or homosexual orientation that was difficult or impossible to change. Their vision was embraced by society.
Within a few years, the societal belief that romantic activities are a legitimate form of friendship was crushed under the sexologists' assertion that same-sex romantic activities are always a sign of homoeroticism, which most sexologists regarded as a mental disease. Male romantic friendships did not survive the blow; female romantic friendships, which had flourished in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries under strong societal support, went largely underground. In English-speaking countries, societally supported romantic friendships died a hard death.
"You boys stopped fighting? Pals now? That's good. I love a little macho male bonding – I think it's sweet, I do, even if it probably is latent homosexuality being re-channeled, but I'm all for re-channeling so who cares, right?"
—Annie Savoy in the movie Bull Durham (1988)
In the meantime, what were homoerotically attracted men doing during all these centuries? Well, they were tailgating on the bandwagon of support for romantic friendships.
It must have been apparent to such men, from the moment that homosexuality became taboo in Europe, that romantic friendship could provide a cover for their love. In some cases, it appears that the love affairs started on a romantic platonic level and then became erotic as time went on; in other cases, the participants' feelings were erotic from the start. In either case, men who were sexually attracted to one another gratefully accepted the fruits of societal support of romantic friendship. The earliest arguments in favor of gay love, such as Edward Carpenter's Ioläus: An Anthology of Friendship (1908), used code language to indicate that same-sex erotic love was a form of romantic friendship.
Turn-of-the-century gay writers seem to have been struggling to revive classical ideas of a continuum between friendship and sexuality. But they did so in an era when it was dangerous to make such arguments. Since late medieval times, people had become increasingly suspicious of the idea that male/female romantic activities could live alongside platonic feelings. As a result of this and the sexologists' belief that this was also impossible in the case of same-sex romantic activities, a new wall was built between friendship and sexuality. This time, romantic activities were finally declared to be on the sexual side of the wall.
Friendship, especially male friendship, became the preserve of a few harmless, restrained activities, such as clapping one another on the back. Strong demonstrations of love were only permitted between friends if an emergency arose, such as one of the friends being injured. Not surprisingly, friendship began to go into decline, eclipsed by romantic love, which was now identified with erotic love. If any two non-related people were strongly drawn to one another, they were assured by society that they must be "in love" – that is, they must be sexually attracted to one another.
Gay writers, seeking to find their ancestors in the barren terrain of post-classical history, often strongly encouraged this trend, as did pro-gay heterosexual writers. For example, Byrne R. S. Fone, in his Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature, says about the love poems between medieval monks: "It can certainly be argued that such intense seemingly eroticized language need imply neither actual sexual experience nor even any sublimation of desire. The conventions of literary expression in the High Middle Ages were well attuned to an exaggerated profession of feeling between friends as well as between lovers." These are the only two possibilities that Fone puts forward in interpreting the poems: that they arose from sexual desire or that they were a literary convention of "exaggerated" expression.
The writers of the poems would have argued that there was nothing exaggerated about their expression – rather, we live in an era that is abnormally cool in its professions of friendship. Likewise, the writers would have objected to the idea that, if their feelings toward one another were non-erotic, their only reason to use romantic language must be literary convention (just for the decoration). Why, they would ask, do you people of the future assume that friends cannot have romantic feelings toward one another?
Other writers on homoeroticism, primarily scholars of lesbian history, have put forward a more subtle argument. They do not deny that some romantic friendships in the past involved people who held platonic feelings for one another. Instead, they say that such relationships, if they occurred today, would be labelled gay or lesbian. Therefore, they assert, it is legitimate for us to call these relationships homoerotic.
This may seem to be a suitable compromise, recognizing that some societal institutions, such as marriage, change dramatically over time. But unless practiced carefully, such pronouncements can become a form of cultural imperialism.
The assumption often underlying such arguments is that our modern belief that romance is nothing more than a subcategory of sexuality should be imposed upon people in eras that did not hold this belief. Romantic friendship is renamed gay love or lesbianism because our modern notions of friendship do not allow for the possibility of friends embracing romantic activities.
But such renaming obscures the fact that many people in the past would have vehemently disagreed with our notions of legitimate activities of friendship. They would have strongly opposed the idea that same-sex romantic friendship must be regarded only as a subcategory of homosexuality, in the same way that some bisexuals object to bisexuality being regarded only as a subcategory of homosexuality. Like bisexuals, romantic friends throughout history have engaged in activities that have been practiced at both ends of a spectrum. To say that romance must be identified only with sexual love is to deny romance its historical power as a form of friendship.
Many writers of gay history have rightly asserted that we can learn much about the history of homoeroticism by studying same-sex attracted people who practiced romantic friendship. But to leave the statement there – to imply that romantic friendship is nothing other than the stepchild of homoeroticism – is to practice what C. S. Lewis referred to in A Preface to Paradise Lost as the doctrine of the Unchanging Human Heart.
According to this method the things which separate one age from another are superficial. Just as, if we stripped the armour off a medieval knight or the lace off a Caroline courtier, we should find beneath them an anatomy identical with our own, so, it is held, if we strip off from Virgil his Roman imperialism, from Sidney his code of honour, from Lucretius his Epicurian philosophy, and from all who have it their religion, we shall find the Unchanging Human Heart, and on this we are to concentrate. . . .
Fortunately there is a better way. Instead of stripping the knight of his armour you can try to put his armour on yourself; instead of seeing how the courtier would look without his lace, you can try to see how you would feel with his lace; that is, with his honour, his wit, his royalism, and his gallantries out of the Grand Cyrus. I had much rather know what I would feel like if I adopted the beliefs of Lucretius than how Lucretius would have felt if he had never entertained them.
The loss of romantic friendship as a concept in English-speaking countries was a loss to humanity, because it left us with rigid notions about the division between friendship and erotic love. The wall between friendship and erotic love will only be strengthened if we strip romantic friendship of its distinctive features and treat it simply as a subcategory of homoeroticism. Instead of adopting this method, writers of gay history would bring greater benefit to society if they recognized gay people's kinship with platonic romantic friends, granting those friends their own, legitimate space in which to challenge modern society's views on friendship.
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