It’s Aromantic Spectrum Awareness Week and it’s also LGBTQ+ History Month in the UK, which seemed like a good time to talk about a topic I’ve been thinking about a lot recently: the peculiar tension of caring about queer history as an aroace trans person whose experiences of queerness don’t primarily revolve about romantic relationships. This is a complicated, nuanced topic about which I’m still constantly refining my thoughts and feelings; it’s something I have both personal and academic investment in, and that means I spend a lot of time thinking about it, but also that I regularly backtrack, rework, and elaborate on my opinions.
It’s also something I’ve found myself talking about in more informal contexts online, as well as passively hovering on the edge of wider conversations that are happening. To reflect this more informal context alongside my probably pretentious semi-academic prose, this post will be punctuated by Tumblr posts that I’ve seen recently that have spoken to me, shaped my ideas in some way, or just made me laugh. In general, though, I want to make it clear that this post represents a snapshot of an ongoing process of thought and grappling with methodology and intentions. All of this, too, goes beyond just thinking about historiography and how we approach these topics in, for example, medieval literature — but if I let myself start talking about how these attitudes influence discourse about queer art being produced today, this post would have been even longer than it already is. Perhaps I’ll write another post exploring it from that angle.
(And I’ll note that I’m open to discussion as always, but reserve the right to moderate or close comments if the vibes are off, because this blog is my space and this is, as noted, a deeply personal topic!)
My academic research is focused on friendship in the Ulster Cycle, and my work on friendship is always informed by queer theory and related disciplines. That is to say, I look at friendship from a perspective that doesn’t assume certain relationships can only exist between people of certain genders or that gender and gender difference is always being constructed in a way that is familiar, and that allows the possibility for feelings and behaviours to exist within relationships even when not essential to the formation of that relationship. (For example, many marriages throughout history were not contracted because of romantic or sexual attraction, but that doesn’t preclude the possibility that romantic or sexual attraction existed within them. The same may apply to many other forms of relationship.)
Recently, I’ve been writing an article exploring narrative and emotional parallels in the relationships between Cú Chulainn and Emer (his wife), Láeg (his charioteer), and Fer Diad (his fosterbrother), in a handful of late medieval/early modern texts. Considering the ways in which these relationships with men are constructed and structured in terms that resemble marriage obviously opens the door to exploring the homoerotic dimension of these relationships, and I’m very ready to do that — indeed, I went into this article thinking that was what I was going to be doing. But the more I allowed that openness to lead me to consider how relationships were actually being constructed, rather than just how I expected them to be constructed, I also found myself doing the opposite: considering the ways in which marriage was constructed to resemble these specific kinds of friendship.
To put it frivolously and anachronistically, I had started out looking for evidence that friendship was romantic, and come to the conclusion that marriage was platonic.
These terms are deeply problematic for thinking about historical relationships, and literary relationships of the past. The separation of the terms “platonic friendship” and “romantic love” is a remarkably modern one, even before we start dealing with additional linguistic complications of working with non-English material. My PhD has so far involved a great deal of work on the terminology used to define relationships and express affection, and what I have learned is that there is a huge amount of overlap, with relationships from military alliances to marriage to friendship to casual or illicit sex all being described with many of the same words. That doesn’t mean that these relationships were interchangeable to a late medieval Irish audience, but it does caution us to be aware that the lines between them may not be drawn in the same places that we would draw them, and the defining or distinguishing features of one type of relationship versus another may not be the features we would have focused on.
Of course, these terms aren’t exactly universally defined, concrete, or even helpful in the contemporary world, either. I spent a great many years trying to determine whether I experienced romantic attraction, and how one was meant to recognise it and distinguish it from earnest, passionate platonic friendship, especially if one removed sex from the romantic equation or allowed it into the platonic one. While the split attraction model — separating romantic and sexual attraction and acknowledging that people may feel them differently — is helpful for many asexual and aromantic people in conceptualising their feelings and their identity, I increasingly started to find it made me more confused, because I could not for the life of me pin down what made something “romantic” vs “platonic”. I eventually came to the conclusion that the difference is the label that the person in that relationship puts on it: the same behaviours may mean very different things to different people.
Admittedly, I still think I was possibly born in the wrong century and was destined to be a fourteenth century knight having a Profound Bond with my sworn brother such that we’ll end up buried together, rather than fumbling around in the twenty-first century trying to decide if “queerplatonic” is a term that has any use to me personally. (I also still find the split attraction model doesn’t wholly work for how I understand my own experiences, and as such, my exploration of aromantic approaches to history here largely encompasses asexual approaches without a clear distinction between them, though I’m aware that others experience them more distinctly.)
Nevertheless, this was a useful lesson to learn both in ordinary life (it teaches you to mind your own business about how other people define their relationships, and also frees you from thinking that certain behaviours are automatically expected within certain relationships and proscribed outside of them), and as somebody interested in history and the literature of the past (again, it frees you from thinking that behaviour and labels are automatically and unchangeably linked, such that a relationship that contains A must be B and a relationship that is X cannot contain Y).
It also creates a certain tension in how you talk about the past, and how you talk about queer possibilities in the past.
Once definitions become unstable and contextual, sentences get bogged down in caveats and uncertainties which can seem, especially at first glance, to participate in the erasure of queer history. Warnings not to apply anachronistic labels can become a denial of queer pasts — the truthful statement that an individual wouldn’t have understood themselves as homosexual because the concept of identity formed around sexual attraction was still a few hundred years off is taken as denying the possibility that the individual’s feelings and behaviours may have been more or less indistinguishable from those of somebody who would understand themselves as gay now.
And sentences like “this person expresses what we would probably now consider to be romantic love for another man, although in this time and place its expression does not fall outside normative expectations for close friendship”, while a fairly accurate representation of the tension of balancing contemporary and historical approaches to emotions and relationships, are taken by some as an example of the much-memed homophobic erasure: “Historians Will Say They’re Just Friends”.
The tension arises because it is undeniably true that homophobia has erased erotic and romantic relationships in the historical record, whether at the time — by requiring individuals to conceal the nature of their relationship, destroy evidence, and/or express it in normative terms that obscure specifics — or subsequently in scholarship — by twisting and contorting evidence to explain how it can’t possibly be queer. There is an understandable desire to recover and highlight these pasts, to emphasise that queerness has always existed and to reclaim what has been lost.
But several challenges arise here. There genuinely is ambiguity in many of these relationships, both in terms of the behaviours they might have involved and in the labels that might accurately be applied to them. Even when we have reasonably accurate records of behaviours, we might not have records of feelings that would tell us what those behaviours meant to those people, and when we’re dealing with quite a different taxonomy of relationships, identities, and emotions, that is an issue.
And inevitably, many of these approaches end up falling into the same amatonormative trap.
“These two men described themselves as lifelong friends” Okay! “and it’s clear this relationship was the most important relationship in their lives” Great! “and it was passionate and potentially physical in its intimacy” Sure! “so this was definitely romantic, not friendship” Aaand you lost me.
“He describes the other man as the most important person in his life, there’s no platonic explanation for that” Isn’t there?
You see, once you allow the possibility for friendship to be transformative, physical, lifelong, and passionate, there is no obvious reason to disagree with historical individuals’ characterisation of their relationships as ‘friendship’ — in fact, to do so runs the risk of erasing their self-definition and replacing it with ours, something that is not less of an erasure because the label replacing it is different.
Evidence for homosexuality is often found in the failure to adequately perform heterosexuality, in literature and in history. I’ve lost track of the number of novels I’ve read where a character, having reluctantly come out of the closet to a surprisingly understanding friend or relative, is told that it was their lack of interest in the “opposite” sex that gave them away. Queer readings of medieval narratives like Guigemar assume that the protagonist’s failure to conform to heterosexual expectations must mean that he should be read as potentially homosexual, despite the lack of evidence in that direction either — indeed, within medieval narratives themselves, failure to express socially expected attraction to women is taken as evidence that somebody must only be interested in men (cf. Lanval; actually, he’s neither gay nor aroace, but dating a fairy woman whose existence he is prohibited from revealing). The idea that inadequate heterosexual attraction might constitute a lack of any attraction is rarely countenanced.
We see this in many euphemisms used to describe queer people: “not the marrying kind”, “confirmed bachelor”. These phrases imply that lack of desire for the gender one can legally marry automatically suggests desire for the gender one can’t — and of course, this was often true, which is the challenge of it, because such phrases can’t be ignored as evidence of queer possibilities. Homosexual possibility dominates the subtext for many valid and understandable reasons — but once elevated to text, once that possibility becomes permissible and can be expressed openly, what is left unspoken? What of the confirmed bachelors and lifelong spinsters who still aren’t the marrying type? Whose ‘friendships’ were never a normative cover story; whose ‘lifelong companion’ was genuinely that; whose failure to claim a more legible queer identity was not a closet or a hiding place but a genuine expression of who they were?
As romantic possibilities expand, it can seem that aromantic ones diminish. If all the lifelong friends and passionate brothers-in-arms of the past were “actually gay”, what is left for those seeking models of another way to live, another mode of affection?
This raises the question of what we’re really doing when we seek out queer histories. If our intention is to prove that people outside of a rigid heterosexual binary cisgender model have always existed, then we should take care to represent as many facets of those non-normative experiences as we can. What makes a relationship non-normative? What does it mean to defy expectations? What even are the expectations being defied? Amidst a rigidly heteronormative and patriarchal set of expectations, such as has dominated the past centuries, two women who chose to build their lives together rather than marry men were defying norms whether or not they were also having sex. Sexual activity is far from the only factor (or the most important factor) in claiming those lives as part of queer history, unless our definition of queer history includes only unambiguous sexual activity between people of the same gender (a deeply limited and problematic definition).
If our intention is to dismantle assumptions about what types of relationships are possible, then this is likewise true: not only are other forms of romance possible, but lives outside of that framework exist. If we are seeking people whose experiences resonate with queer people today, then we should take care not to simply narrow our models in a new direction: aro and ace people also deserve to explore those resonances. And if we’re trying to recover the most accurate way that historical individuals might have described their relationship had they been completely free to do so, we need to grapple with the idea that that might not look like any of our options, because our entire model of feelings and social organisation would be alien to them.
At the same time, there are disproportionate efforts to censor, ban, and conceal alternative expressions of sexuality, and explicit sexual content is usually the first to go. Some might argue that aromantic and asexual stories represent less of a threat to these campaigns, and so will be less directly targeted, meaning that there is a need to bolster the visibility of stories where the most concerted effort at erasure is taking place — often through the reframing of queer relationships in ways that obscure their true nature, removing overt sexuality and replacing it with the less immediately challenging ‘friendship’. But while this may be true in some spaces (like historiography), aromantic and asexual people do face much of the same censorship, erasure, violence, and oppression in the public sphere as others do (and that’s before we start getting into granular nuances such as the overlap between aro and ace identities and other forms of queerness, such that aro and ace people may be facing that violence and oppression because of other aspects of identity as well).
Make no mistake: while friendships may not be an obvious target for queerphobia, aromantic and asexual people are. To a worldview that sees heterosexual marriage and reproduction as the only productive/acceptable form of adult sexuality, it remains a “wayward and unproductive” identity (to paraphrase Foucault). It offers a model for a future and a lie that does not require conforming to heteronormative models, and it centres alternative forms of kinship, love, and solidarity that threaten a conservative insistence on the nuclear family as the primary site of interpersonal relation. Moreover, the nuanced approach to attraction, behaviour, and identity as all fundamentally separate things, a concept that underpins a lot of aro and ace thinking and indeed the entire split attraction model, really problematises a lot of the assumptions on which hegemonic norms of gender and sexuality rest: it dismantles hierarchies for relationships as well as liberating people from the expectations that certain behaviours require certain labels and certain labels require certain behaviours.
From a historiographical point of view, the issue really lies in black and white thinking that offers only extremes of interpretation. We generally find two models of history dominating popular discourse: a heteronormative model, in which only male/female relationships may be readily accepted as romantic or sexual and so all same-gender relationships must be read as socially normative friendship, or an amatonormative model which, in being open to the possibility of same-gender romance or sex, reads all intimate friendship as actually romance in disguise. The latter is an understandable compensation for the former, which dominated much 19th-20th century scholarship, but is just as essentialising and limited. The reality in the vast majority of cases is going to sit somewhere between the two, and requires explorations of nuance and acceptance of ambiguity.
Many things may be true at once: bed sharing was a conventional form of intimacy for a lot of history, and some of those people were having sex; friendship in many historical societies was conceptualised as more physical and tactile than is typical today, and some kisses still had overtly erotic meanings; language of kinship and affection was complex and often used freely across different types of relationships, and sometimes when a man called another man his husband, he meant exactly what he said — and while conventions of passionate or romantic friendship have sometimes been used to conceal other forms of relationship from a hostile society, others have experienced such friendships as genuine, meaningful, and important forms of interpersonal relationship in exactly the terms in which they were described.
Sometimes, our desire to fit historical relationships into a box that we recognise does a disservice to both romantic and non-romantic experiences in the past. We will never know if something was “really” friendship or “really” romance until we stop projecting our expectations of what either of those things means and start looking — openly and non-judgmentally — at how they are actually being constructed in the sources and societies we’re working with, particularly when that challenges our sense of the divisions between them. To properly understand and appreciate a passionate physical friendship, we need a degree of openness to the possibility of queer sexualities, so that we can see what that friendship is and isn’t doing, and how it sits alongside counterculture and transgression; to properly understand queer sexualities, we need an openness to emotional and behavioural norms that may allow for a degree of physicality and intimacy outside romantic or sexual relationships that the homophobic anxieties of the modern world have largely eliminated.
The danger is that in trying to recover and celebrate queer possibilities in history and literature, queer people often participate in the erasure and exclusion of aro and ace possibilities by privileging romantic and sexual relationships above friendship and creating hierarchies of intimacy based on a modern amatonormative worldview. As a result, in celebrating alternative forms of love and its expression beyond romance and sex, such as friendship and kinship, aro and ace people are seen as erasing the more visibly embattled forms of alternative sexuality to replace them with something more ‘family-friendly’. Friendship-focused readings of literature or historical evidence are understood as an alternative to queer possibilities, rather than a queer possibility in themselves, and so positioned in opposition to gay and bi histories, rather than intrinsically connected to them.
This is an understandable tension with a real grounding in historiography, but it’s a tension that seems to be invisible to many, and so new forms of erasure and exclusion are perpetuated. There is a need to be more aware of this, and to allow aromantic and asexual perspectives to inform and deepen our exploration of these sources. In compensating for homophobic “Just Friends” narratives, we should be wary of reinforcing them by suggesting that there is, indeed, anything “Just” about “Friends”. Maybe friendship can be as transgressive, transformative, countercultural, physical, intense, and, yes, queer, as relationships more easily labelled as romance; maybe it can challenge hierarchies of gender and sexuality, push back against oppressive norms, and represent radical ways of life that should be celebrated as the queer histories that they are.
Maybe, sometimes, when historical figures label their most intimate and significant lifelong relationships as friendship, we should believe them — and see what new opportunities that offers for our understanding of the queer past.
