Intimacy

I have recently read a few articles and blogs and heard several conversations that really bothered me. Not offended-bothered, just saddened-bothered. The subject was questioning whether or not homosexual emotions/lusts were at work in the relationship dynamics of characters and people who just about everyone is familiar with: whether it's David and Jonathan, Frodo and Sam, or Jesus and John, people seem to have a propensity for jumping to conclusions. While I will readily agree that in some instances the authors of some literary works did intend for that to be evidence in their work, I do not feel that it is the case with any of the above or many other examples, and I would like to offer an explanation, that I feel uniquely suited to give, for the actions and behaviors that people most often hold up as evidence of characters being homosexual.

Clearly from Scripture homosexuality is almost as old as time but to suggest that David and Jonathan, or Jesus and John, were bi- or homosexual seems absurd to me and the result of a lack of personal experience with being relationally intimate with some one whom they are not sexually intimate, and because of the sadly prevalent and thoroughly erroneous Freudian notion that everything is and must be connected to sex. As I have 6 brothers in my family with whom I am very close, and as a member to a group of guys who have all been very close friends from childhood, I think I can safely say that most people in our over-sexually-aware (and homosexually-aware) society read far too much into any instance of same gender intimacy. While it is true that most men are uncomfortable with prolonged physical contact (like holding someone while they cry, or putting one’s arm around someone), lots of eye contact, back rubs, use of pet names, overt verbal displays of affections or other similar actions, I firmly believe that this is simply because they strongly associate those actions only with the opposite sex interactions, and that if these actions are looked at objectively it can be seen that there is no reason for them to be viewed sexually.

My friends, siblings, and I grew up putting an arm over each others shoulders while standing or sitting next to each other in the car, watching a movie, or just talking, to show unity, to show that we were 'best friends,' and we still do it for those same reasons despite the fact that I am 25 and have two kids. We give each other back massages while standing around talking, or after working out, wrestling and sparring, hiking and climbing, fishing and swimming. We give long bear-hugs when greeting and when parting. We hold hands when we pray, and we've held each other and cried when life was shitty or when the Holy Spirit beat us into broken contrition over our sin. We call each other mean names in a playful, joking tone as a 'manly' way of calling each other by endearments, and we say "I love you" to each other every time we end a phone call or a visit.

We are all straight as arrows, most of us are married, and half of us have kids. We act that way with each other because we know that there is no hint of homosexuality to it, merely comfortable familiarity. We've all been friends for so long, been through so much together, hurt each other so deeply and worked through it so determinedly and thoroughly, that we know that we can trust each other with our very lives because we've shared our deepest failings and our greatest successes together; we know each others' dirtiest secrets and our brightest hopes. We are family: a band of brothers—some by blood, all by the Holy Spirit—that we know we can turn to for anything because no matter the time or space that separates us, we always have been and always will be committed to our relationships with each other.

Physical and relational intimacy between members of the same gender is not a sign of homosexuality, it is a byproduct of a relationship so deeply intimate, constant, and permanent, that unless a person in our over-sexed society has personally experienced it the only way they can interpret it is by miss-labeling it as sexual.

Again, I say all this not because I am offended, but because I feel saddened by and sorry for anyone who makes false assumptions about same-sex (particularly male) intimacy through ignorance and to offer, not only a different perspective, but the hope that so much more can be put into and gotten out of our interactions with other members of the Body of Christ if we are willing to move past the Freudian stigmas of our hyper-sexualized culture.