On three great bonds of love do all cultures depend: the love between man and woman in marriage; the love between a mother and her child; and the camaraderie among men, a bond that used to be strong enough to move mountains. The first two have suffered greatly; the third has almost ceased to exist.

Sam Gamgee has been fool enough to follow his beloved master Frodo into Mordor, the realm of death. To rescue Frodo from the orcs who have taken him captive and who will slay him as soon as he ceases to be of use in finding the Ring, Sam has fought the monstrous spider Shelob, has eluded the pursuit of the orcs, and has dispatched a few of them to their merited deaths.

Finally he finds Frodo in the upper room of a small filthy cell, naked, half-conscious, lying in a heap in a corner. “Frodo! Mr. Frodo, my dear!” he cries. “It’s Sam, I’ve come!” With a bluff tenderness he clasps him to his breast, assuring him that it is really he, Sam, in the flesh.

Still groggy, Frodo can hardly believe it, but he clutches at his friend. It seems to him all the tissue of a dream—that an orc with a whip has turned into Sam—and it is all mixed up with the sound of singing that he thought he heard and tried to answer. “That was me singing,” says Sam, shaking his head and saying that he had all but given up hope of ever finding his friend again. He cradles Frodo’s head, as one would comfort a troubled child.

At that a snigger rises from the audience in the theater. “What, are they gay?”

An ignorant but inevitable response. Shakespeare, or his narrative persona, expressed in his sonnets a passionate love for an unnamed and not too loyal young man, so Shakespeare must have been homosexual—despite the absence of evidence, and despite his persona’s explicit statement in sonnet 20 that the young man’s sexual accoutrements are of no interest (or use) to him whatever.

The bachelor Abe Lincoln long shared a bed with his closest friend, Joshua Speed, and later wrote letters expressing, with what seems a touch of self-deprecating irony, his fear that he would be lonely once Speed had taken a wife. Lincoln therefore must be homosexual. No matter that men (and women too) commonly shared beds, and also commonly spoke of their friendship in strong, earthy language that now embarrasses. The poet Edmund Spenser, celebrator of his own wedding in one of the most brilliant poems in English, used to share a bed with his friend and fellow scholar at Cambridge, Gabriel Harvey. There you go.

“Your love to me was finer than the love of women,” laments David in a public song, when he learns of the death of his friend Jonathan. We know why. The godlike hero Gilgamesh and his friend Enkidu walk hand in hand into the dark forest of Humbaba. No wonder then that at Enkidu’s death Gilgamesh will weep inconsolably, letting his hair grow long, flinging away his royal robes, and leaving the city to wander in the wilderness.

One Tiny Insight

For many years I have smiled as that ballast known as the Academic Left have taken one tiny linguistic insight, that the sounds we use to denote things are usually arbitrary, and have elevated it to the single law of the universe. It was not a terribly great insight, nor was it at all new.

Plato had broached it in the Cratylus, associating it tentatively with sophism, and having Socrates argue, I fear not convincingly, against it. Dante seems to have accepted it: In the Paradiso Adam himself states with shocking matter of fact that even the name for God had already changed before that unpleasantness at the Tower of Babel, implying that no particular human word to denote him takes precedence over any other. Man’s ability to speak, says Adam, is the work of Nature, but as for the actual words we use, they lie within man’s choice:

Before I went to banishment below
“ Yah” was the name on earth for the high Good
that now has clothed me in the robe of joy;

And then they called it “El”—right that they should,
for mortal use is like a branch’s leaves:
where one may fall, another springs to bud.”

Even so, Dante does not assign language to the arbitrary human will alone, but also to Nature, the agent of God’s providence. The medieval dictum nomina suntcon sequentiarerum—names are consequent upon the things they name—does not hold true, if man expects the causal link between thing and name to be clear and determined, but does hold true, in the mysterious working out of God’s order. If a leaf cannot fall without the will of God, then neither can the leaf be named; our language assumes its place in the providential chances and changes of time.

Thus Adam’s discussion of linguistic change is preceded by his revelation of how long ago and how many years he lived, and then by his revelation of how long he and Eve managed to enjoy the bliss of Eden before they were cast out forever: six hours, from dawn till noon.

Six hours is not long—and that is part of Dante’s point. Man’s loss of Eden and his consequent aging and death may appear as senseless as the change of a word, arbitrary and fleeting. Yet neither the loss of Eden nor the fall of the word, even of the holy word Yah, escapes the governance of Nature and the wisdom of God.

Arbitrary Words

And that order is what the linguists a sinistra object to. For their hearts lie not with words but with what the apparent arbitrariness of words can achieve, if that arbitrariness is assigned to everything else in human life. Again, they are partly correct. Language is a fit metaphor, or a powerful structuring concept, for our customs. As Dante saw, language is itself a custom.

Thus we have a language for the formal introduction of a stranger: the clipped “How do you do” with a nod and a firm handshake, for American men; the automatic smile, head tilt, “It’s nice to meet you,” and presentation of hand, for American women. We know that a certain style of sign outside of a restaurant means you had better go home and put on a tie (or take it off and leave it in the car). We know that if a grown man and woman are walking hand in hand, they are not brother and sister, though there seems nothing inherently untoward about brothers and sisters holding hands. We know what the teenage boy’s modest crew cut means, when all around him are dyeing their spiked hair grape.

Thus the Left proceed syllogistically. Language is utterly arbitrary. Social customs form a kind of language, and sexual customs form a very powerful language. Therefore social customs are arbitrary, and therefore sexual customs are equally arbitrary.

There is no more reason, essentially, for a man’s choosing a woman as his mate rather than a man, than there was for the Hebrews to name God Yah rather than El. The man may of course want children, and having a woman for a mate would obviously facilitate that desire, but that is as it happens. Sexual difference is no more an essential part of the relations between man and woman, and of a man’s sexual being as a man, than the vowel “ah” is an essential part of the name of God.

A Faulty Premise

Well, the syllogism is faulty: Even its major premise, that language is utterly arbitrary, seems to be contradicted on the level of phonology, or sound, by the human wish to use words that correspond delightfully with the objects they denote. Thus it is hard to imagine a language in which a word like “lalala” means “repulsive” or “muscular” or “impenetrable.”

Nor is language arbitrary on the level of syntax, the ordering of our thoughts by means of words. No language has as its typical sentence pattern Object-Verb-Subject; not one. The human mind does not like to work that way, probably because the human mind recognizes an order in actions, namely that some subject does some verb to some object, and likes its sentences somehow to respect the order.

Nor is it arbitrary in its semantics, the relation of words to meanings. That is because language has that annoying habit of referring to what the typical human being perceives as unitary things belonging to a recognizable kind. The typical human being, in his solid naiveté, believes that words have something or other (perhaps something mysterious or other) to do with things, with nature. No language invents a word to describe the union of the top half of your uncle in Milwaukee with the bottom half of your uncle in Baton Rouge.

But even if it were true that our spoken language were utterly arbitrary, it does not follow that the language of our customs is, or that our sense of good and evil is, or that the idea of human nature is. That is an unwarranted leap from phonology to anthropology to moral philosophy to metaphysics. It is a leap the Left makes precisely to attack the notion of order.

A strange double life they lead: professing fascination with language, yet abandoning any deep study of it; using it instead as a tool for dismantling the idea of natural order, or, since even academics abhor a vacuum, using it as a tool for establishing their own order and imposing it on everyone else. The language war of the early feminists—a war they have won resoundingly, despite the occasional embarrassing rout (anyone remember “waitron”?)—was about the ushering in of a new order, or rather a new and unnatural disorder. They were wrong who thought it was only a silly argument over words.

Pansexual Language

What does all this have to do with sex, or with friendship? A great deal, I am afraid. The pansexualists—they who believe in the libertarian dogma that what two consenting adults do with their privates in private is nobody’s business—understand that the language had to be changed to assist the realization of their dream, and also that the realization of their dream would change the world, because it would change the language for everyone else.

Language is not language if it is not communal; it is a neat trick of political abracadabra to argue for an individual’s right to change the very medium of our thought and our social intercourse. If clothing is optional on a beach, then that is a nude beach. It cannot be a nude beach for some and an ordinary beach for others; to wear clothes at that beach at the very least means something that it had not meant before. If you may paint your house phosphorescent orange and violet, and you persuade a couple of your neighbors to do likewise, you no longer have what anybody would call a historic neighborhood.

If all of Kate’s friends leap into bed with whatever male gives them a hearty dinner at Burger King and a round of miniature golf, and Kate chooses instead to kiss her date once on the cheek and leave him on the porch, she will suggest to everybody that she is a prude. She may be, or may not be; she may be more firmly in the grip of lust than they are, for all we know, and may just detest the boy. But her actions have connotations they did not use to have.

Imagine a world wherein the taboo has been broken and incest is loudly and defiantly celebrated. Your wife’s unmarried brother puts his hand on your daughter’s shoulder. That gesture, once innocent, must now mean something, or at least suggest something. If the uncle were wise and considerate, he would not make it in the first place. You see a father hugging his teenage daughter as she leaves the car to go to school. The possibility flits before your mind. The language has changed, and the individual can do nothing about it.

By now the reader must see the point. I might say that of all human actions there is nothing more powerfully public than what two consenting adults do with their bodies behind (we hope) closed doors. Open homosexuality, loudly and defiantly celebrated, changes the language for everyone. If a man throws his arm around another man’s waist, it is now a sign—whether he is on the political right or the left, whether he believes in biblical proscriptions of homosexuality or not.

If a man cradles the head of his weeping friend, the shadow of suspicion must cross your mind. If a teenage boy is found skinny-dipping with another boy—not five of them, but two—it is the first thing you will think, and you will think it despite the obvious fact that until swim trunks were invented this was exactly how two men or boys would go for a swim.

Because language is communal, the individual can choose to make a sign or not. He cannot determine what the sign is to mean, not to others, not to the one he signals, and not even to himself.

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