Men With Men: Romance

Going back to my recent post about relationships between men, it occurs to me that a subtext there, although I don't think I stated it explicitly, is that Ishihara brings us a highly romantic vision of relationships between men, not only in the sense of "moonlight and roses," but in a deeper sense, and one that I think informs works as diverse as Kimi Shiruya, Mary Renault's The Charioteer and The Last of the Wine, Jim Grimsley's Kirith Kirin, and any number of others.

It's a romance built on ideals, one that makes a place for passion -- indeed, the whole thing is founded in passion -- but that tries to channel that passion into something with integrity and a kind of nobility. We see that most openly in The Last of the Wine, in which Lysis and Alexias try to adhere to Socrates' ideal -- what we've come to call "platonic" love -- but ultimately give into the demands of their bodies. And yet the only thing that happens after that is that their love becomes stronger and surer: they have moved beyond the erastes/eratomenos arrangement into something that is much more a relationship of equals, two adults who love:

They are, in a sense, blessed because the love they share is genuine and deep, but in trying to live up to Sokrates' ideal of a love from the soul, they forget that Eros will have his due, and he is a much older, darker god than Reason. They must, somehow, make accommodation between their ideals and their natures and, when they have done that, their love becomes truly an ideal: a love founded on trust and generosity, engaging them on a mutual search for the best in each other and in themselves, to find the seeds of honesty and integrity that we all have and to make them flower. Renault has drawn this in such a way as to say, "Yes, we must have our ideals, for, being human, we must strive for perfection; and, being human, we will fail. That does not mean we are any less worthy."

In their case, there is a tradition that they are upholding, one that, as it happens, allows them to move past the mentoring stage into a truly adult relationship. So even from the beginning, they have guidelines, a framework to help put their feelings in perspective.

In The Charioteer, which relies on Plato's Phaedrus for its central image, Laurie is trying to make his ideals fit reality, or rebuild reality to suit his ideals -- even he's confused on it, I think.. Like Lysis with Alexias, he wants to maintain a "pure" love for Andrew, and at least has a chance on that score: as the story progresses, Ralph Lanyon becomes available for the necessities of "earthly" love, which makes its own demands -- but also provides vast rewards. Renault descibes Laurie as someone who's holding onto his few sureties with both hands, and I think that aptly describes many of us today: we've had to build our own world, bit by bit, and that includes how to love. Renault is telling us in this one, I think, that Plato's ideal is just that -- a dream, perhaps, and one worth reaching for, but not something that will ever exist in the real world. In this case, Laurie's dream of "perfect" love is shattered with one kiss -- he can't help himself, and of course they are caught. I think Renault is pointing out here that we are what we are, earthly as well as divine, and what we really need to do is learn to reconcile the two.

Kirith Kirin is a singular work, one of the more original fantasies I've encountered (and for those fans of fantasy who are reading this, I highly recommend it) In this case, his relationship with Kirith Kirin is perfectly acceptable among Jessex's people (although there are some eyebrows raised at his age, which is fourteen when the story begins -- being a forceful, if somewhat reticent young man, he eventually puts his foot down and moves in with his lover), but there is no particular tradition to reinforce their feelings: it's an acceptable love, but not an institution. And yet we see the same thing again that we see in the other books I've mentioned here: it's a love based on mutual respect and generosity -- in this instance between two men who are not competitors (and note that in this discussion, competition is not the issue) but who are searching for something that will unite them beyond death -- in this case, literally.

I think we can find things in all of this that apply to men who love men in what promises soon to be the twenty-first century. (I'm of the school that holds the new century doesn't really get its feet under it until about fifteen years in -- we're still working off the twentieth right now.) We've been building on these things for a couple of generations, and I think now it's time to take a look at what we can do from here. I think a romantic vision has a lot going for it -- it's an acknowledgment of the power of Eros -- in a nice, safe, bourgeois kind of way -- and I think for men it's a valuable antidote to the traditional ideas of masculinity, which don't make a lot of sense to me when I stop to look at them.