The Friend [Hardcover]

Most of the chapters of this book begin with funerary monuments--of two men, or two women, who wanted to be buried together. Bray concludes that in pre-modern times, when life was lived more in public, and it was common for people to sleep in the same bed, the intimacy of friends was much greater than it is today, and was suffused with rituals, especially derived from Holy Communion. Were these relationships sexual? Probably yes, Bray concludes, but that isn't exactly the point, since that's a question we moderns are much more interested in than they were. It's more about how friendship has changed. The argument is subtle, and elegant--my one complaint is that sometimes the prose is too sinuous, when simple declaration would suffice. Some reviewers have even missed the point--they suggest that the friendships were NOT sexual, which isn't what Bray says at all. Incidentally, there's a terrific review of the book in the London Review of Books.

Reading reviews of Alan Bray's _The Friend_ by some heterosexual critics--as by a few LGB ones also, I fear--is a dumbfoundingly astonishing experience. What book were these critics reading? Have they lost their critical faculties? Bray's book is largely a response to both John Boswell's (in)famous _Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe_ (New York: Villard Books, 1994) and its too predictably feral critics. Boswell contends that the eastern "adelphopoiesis" (Greek, `making brothers') rites are same-sex marriage ceremonies, whereas his critics aver they are merely ceremonies for ritual brotherhood or friendship (strictly platonic, little "p"). Addressing the corresponding western "ordo ad fratres faciendum" (Latin, `rite for making brothers') and the joint tombs placed primarily in churches memorializing such "brothers" or friends, Bray declares BOTH parties wrong (35-41), which is the point missed by some critics. In fact, Bray's enterprise is far more radical than Boswell's, though disguised in carefully constructed rhetoric. Whereas Boswell simply wishes to say there were ancient same-sex marriages, leaving our notions of friendship, marriage, lovers, sex, and the erotic largely intact, Bray would erase our great divide between friendship and sex--both in premodern times and today--reminding Americans, perhaps, of Walt Whitman's radical sexual politics. His rhetorical strategy is to get heterosexist readers on his side against Boswell and then hit them with the "sisterhood" between Anne Lister and Ann Walker in chapter six, by far the longest chapter in the book. Of course, to judge by the critical response, that rhetoric has been less than a stunning success. Let's have a quick look at the most relevant excerpts.

Bray clearly states that "an uncomfortable difficulty" for Boswell's critics "is the evidence for Boswell's consequent view that sworn brotherhood could be a relationship between two men or women that was (or could become) sexual," providing the brotherhood between Piers Gaveston and King Edward II as a firm example, for "it is beyond dispute that Gaveston and Edward's relationship was sexual," and "it is unlikely that Edward and Gaveston were unique in this respect" (38). Edward and Gaveston are briefly mentioned throughout the rest of the book. These comments of Bray's, it should be noted, are in keeping with similar comments I heard him make during his presentation at the conference, The Future of the Queer Past, held at the University of Chicago in September of 2000.

After this brief and clear early mention, the rhetoric takes over, and one may easily forget Bray's point, just as he planned. Bray often seems to be refuting any possibility of sex in the subsequent friendships that he considers--or debunking it, in the misleading language of the front flap of the dust jacket. Such impressions are mistaken. Bray doesn't reject previous sexual interpretations of some of these relationships because they weren't sexual; rather, he rejects specific arguments for these relationships' sexual character as logically inconclusive, leaving the sexual question in those specific cases as unanswerable based on current data and scholarship. Herein enters the "sisterhood" or "marriage" between the "spouses" Anne Lister and Ann Walker (239-83; esp., for sexuality, 267-77), and Bray's rhetorical strategy openly takes the stage. Uniquely, we have Lister's quite extensive diary, from which it is clear that her relationship with her "sister" was starkly sexual, as it was also deeply social, familial, "sisterly," and religious. Bray then uses this much more clearly understood relationship to understand brotherhood and friendship in premodern times more generally--including, it must be understood, in the cases previously encountered in his book. Some excerpting makes the point clearly enough:

"The diary arguably casts a light over this history in one important respect that has repeatedly challenged the parameters of this book. The unifying symbol across the world I have described was the body of the friend. It shaped the central chapter of this book, and the symbolism one sees there was not a metaphor. It embraced; it shared a common bed, a common table. It had a mouth, hands, arms. But did it not also have the body's genitals? Did its symbolic significance stop short there? The laughter that closed an earlier chapter suggested that it did not. Yet the sexual potential in these gestures has repeatedly come into view only to slip away again." (268)

"This is not, of course, to say that the erotic has not been part of this history. But sexuality in a more narrow sense has eluded it whenever it has come into view. With the diary of Anne Lister that problem falls away. Lister's relationship with Ann Walker was unquestionably sexual. So also had been her relationship with Mariana Lawton. [. . .] The kisses that preface Lister's Easter communion with Walker, `Three kisses--better to her than to me,' were indeed sexual kisses." (268-69)

"Does this evidence provide a vantage point in this respect also? [. . .] the sworn friendship one sees here between Lister and Walker did have a sexual potential--even in the most narrow genital sense. If Lister is representative of this history, does her diary address these unanswered questions? [. . .] Within this history, would a sexual POTENTIAL have stood in the way of the confirmation of a sworn friendship in the Eucharist? The answer must be that it would not, in that it evidently did not do so here. Nothing that I have left to say will detract from that conclusion. [. . .] How much does that answer tell one? I have written this book for those interlocutors who are willing to ask that question." (269)

Note, in those last two sentences, what the purpose of Bray's book actually is. Sneaky devil! Finally, Bray effaces the line between sex and friendship:

"The question I raise instead is whether these passages, without their conservative religious frame, occlude the ethical uncertainty that ALL friendship was perceived to have within this moral tradition. The wider point, of course, is whether their effect also occludes that ethical uncertainty today." (321, from the afterword)

How could such a modestly subtle rhetorical strategy go unnoticed by some critics? Apparently, in a heterosexist and homophobic age, even modest subtlety amounts to little more than the effacement and obliteration of the homoerotic--whether that heterosexism and homophobia be of the regular or internalized varieties. Make no mistake, however, Bray's seemingly stodgy and mild-mannered book is far more radical than anything Boswell ever proposed on the subject. So grab a friend and storm the ramparts!

Alan Bray's "The Friend" is a fine and nuanced and elegant work from a writer who died too young. Bray's work on homosexuality in Renaissance England gave him a secure place in the gay studies field, but "The Friend" is something more. Bray expands a consideration of intimate relationships-- largely English, largely late-medieval and early modern --to consider not just whether such relationships were sexual (an issue he regards as not truly relevant to his main argument) but how friendships were used and seen in a political world still based on clientage, kinship, and private loyalties. What did it mean to be the proclaimed friend of a 16th-century magnate? What loyalties did two friends owe one another in business or public life? What were the badges of friendship? Of what did intimacy consist, and what things were "private" in our own sense? Bray is a consummate scholar and a fine writer--- and "The Friend" is a book that offers up a fascinating picture of the meaning of public and private loyalties in the late-medieval and early modern world.