Bill Weintraub

Re: the love-making of equals, the dignified and heroic existence

7-30-2002

This is a really terrific post from our warrior brother Timo in Finland, who has nothing to apologize for, and I want to comment about a few things he says.

First of all, like Warrior Patrick, he makes the connection among equality, combat sports, and frot.

We can't be sure why that connection is there, though we can guess that men who seek an *equal* contest with other men will also seek equality in sex with the men they love.

Then Timo makes a subtle but very important point about how one concept of homosexuality -- which is based on penetration and power and epitomized by the Biblical story of Sodom, in which a mob demands the right to rape other men, strangers who've sought refuge and safety -- obscures another tradition of homosex, that of the male-love-pact/pack, which is at least as old as the first men, who were hunter-gatherers, and in which men who are equals rub cocks.

Once again, Timo's point is subtle, but very important, because it fits in with observations by scholars like Joseph Campbell, who point out that traditions of freedom and equality tend to be found in societies like our own, which are direct descendants of hunter-gatherer cultures, whereas more autocratic traditions arose among the agricultural cultures of the ancient Near East -- societies which were far more hierarchic and dependent upon caste to maintain order.

Timo is saying, then, as I have, that Frot is associated with freedom, sodomy with tyranny. And that's why sodomy -- anal penetration -- requires a big social structure to prop it up, while Frot is rediscovered and re-invented by individuals on their own through the ages.

So Timo says, the obscuring of our ancient Frot roots forces men who love men to be actors in the nightmare of our collective unconscious, in which sex is equated with penetration, pain, oppression, domination, and power.

Lastly, Timo talks about the Greeks who, though they did not differentiate between men who loved men and men who loved women as we (mistakenly) do, believed that same-sex love was superior to and more ennobling than heterosexual love.

An idea also found in the Biblical story of Jonathan, whose love for David, we are told, surpassed the love of women.

So Timo concludes, as did the Greeks and other ancient peoples, that masculine + masculine = more masculine, and that two men united sexually *as men* augment each other's masculinity.

And that's exactly right.