"Honor Equals Heterosexual," Revisited

I did a take-down of James Bowman's ludicrous piece The Weekly Standard on "why we should keep DADT" some while ago, but, via Sullivan, here's a point-by-point dismemberment from Nathaniel Frank.

This particular bit caught my attention:

BOWMAN: "The robust heterosexual... knows, or believes, what it seems the homosexual cannot know or believe, or doesn't want to know or believe, namely that the two sorts of love [brotherly and erotic] are different in kind and not just in degree. The resistance from military men to the idea of gays in the military seems to be due to this perception... Eros is so strong that it corrupts and destroys the other kinds of love."

RESPONSE: Putting aside the question of what makes a heterosexual "robust," the idea that all gay people refuse to distinguish between brotherly and erotic love is simply bizarre. More to the point, the idea that open gays must be banned from the military because erotic love destroys military friendships is belied by the millions of healthy bonds in both the U.S. and foreign militaries that have open gays throughout their ranks.

Graham Jackson, a Canadian Jungian psychologist, wrote a very interesting book titled The Secret Lore of Gardening: Patterns of Male Intimacy that deals specifically with this issue. (In fact, a large part of his source material is the work of the WWI British poets and writers, who actually served in the military and whose writings explore the relationships of comrades in arms -- which itself is the term used to describe relationships between peers.) First off, Bowman is mischaracterizing the concept of "eros" as it is used in psychology, particularly the Freudian and Jungian brands. (Somehow, this doesn't surprise me. I don't know whether to ascribe it to ignorance, of which Bowman seems to have an ample supply, or the regulation right-wing hat trick of changing definitions, as in the creationists' use of "theory.") As Jackson describes it, eros is a fundamental drive that, while probably generated by sex (as is most everything, at least almost everything to do with interpersonal relationships, it would seem), has a much wider effect as a means of structuring relationships. What it boils down to is that Bowman is flat wrong -- as Jackson quite effectively demonstrates, the two kinds of love are, indeed, a matter of degree. Going off on my own speculation a bit, I would suggest that, if we accept the idea that human sexual orientation is fluid and does not fit tidily into a "gay/straight" dichotomy (and there is evidence to support that idea), then the relationships between comrades in arms do indeed partake of the erotic in the sense that Bowman uses it.

A personal footnote on this: I've had too many experiences of "straight" guys coming on to me (as in "Dammit, man! Watch those hands!" and no, they weren't all closet cases) to subscribe wholeheartedly to the idea that "friendship" is a different order of creature than "desire," or for that matter people are either "straight" or "gay." The mechanisms and sources of attraction, like so much else in human behavior, are far more complex and variable than we can understand, at least right now, and to try to fit such things into nice tidy boxes speaks to me of nothing so much as an agenda powered by a limited and unrealistic world view.

At any rate, Frank does a thorough job of debunking everything that Bowman wrote, which strikes me as tedious rather than difficult. I admire his patience.

And what is a "robust heterosexual," anyway?