SONG FOR A FUTURE GENERATION<\/a><\/strong>: OK, my thoughts on many different issues raised in response to my \u201cRomoeroticism\u201d<\/a> piece.<\/p>\n \u201cBeauty is an encroachment upon autonomy.\u201d (C. Paglia)<\/strong>: It\u2019s been instructive to me that 90% of the comments I\u2019ve received on the piece have been about this idea of vowed same-sex friendship, since, to be perfectly honest, that was a last-minute addition! And perhaps an ill-timed one, see below. I do have a lot to say about vowed friendship.<\/p>\n But maybe the other elements of my \u201cRomoeroticism\u201d piece are more fruitful, even though I have less to say about them. I think there\u2019s an immense amount of work yet to be done on how Catholicism\u2019s insistence on sexual difference may make the Church more <\/em>attractive to gay people; I think Miss Ogilvy is right to suggest that talking about \u201cgay as a genre<\/a>\u201d would illuminate in some way the difficulties of our current cultural moment and the possibilities for transcending them. And yet I have nothing left to say about that! HELP ME OUT, PEOPLE. Yes?<\/p>\n You can go your own way\u2026:<\/strong> And, although in what follows I will be primarily talking about vowed friendships, I\u2019d also challenge us to consider how we can foster friendships and extended forms of kinship outside of the formal vow. Can we make it culturally normal to take a leave from work because your friend needs you? Can we honor and respect godsiblinghood in the public sphere, giving that relationship the kind of weight and acknowledgment we give to blood kinship? <\/p>\n In Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, And Good for America<\/em>, Jonathan Rauch lists off a bunch of cultural markers of the importance of marriage: When you\u2019re married, people ask after your spouse, and you\u2019re expected to know how your spouse is doing. Your family treats your spouse as part of their family: holiday photos, concerned questions, understanding that your obligations to the spouse and her family may conflict with your obligations to your family of origin. Your boss and your coworkers understand that the pictures on your desk represent ties of love and obligation, as deep as any human ties we know. Breaking up with your spouse is a tragedy, a publicly-acknowledged heartbreak. You\u2019re not expected to mourn that loss alone, just as you\u2019re not expected to bear the burdens of caring for and serving your spouse with no social support.<\/p>\n The thing is\u2026 these markers of kinship were not always restricted to marriage. (And, as I said before, in some communities in America today<\/a> they are still not all <\/em>restricted to marriage.) If marriage is the only form of kinship we recognize, all other loves will be treated as lesser<\/a>, as purely private. When only marriage counts, should we be surprised that marriage is overburdened? Should we be surprised that Americans report far fewer close relationships than in the past? You get more of what you honor; we\u2019ve withdrawn from any form of public honor for nonmarital chosen kinship.<\/p>\n Forget the vow thing for a moment and ask yourself whether there are things you can change in your own life\u2013in your role as boss or coworker, in the questions you ask your children, in the invitations you extend for family gatherings, in the degree to which you are willing to sacrifice pride or time or money for another person\u2013which would support and strengthen your own friendships and those of the people you love. If you can think of any way to make devoted friendship more normal\u2026 maybe do that thing, you know? Even if you disagree with me on everything <\/em>else.<\/p>\n \u201cSteady, Eddie\u2026\u201d<\/strong>: But now, vows, since I do actually want to talk about them!<\/p>\n I think I messed up, in writing about this concept first for a piece about Gay Catholic Whatnot. In my own personal head, this was never an exclusively gay concept, though I think it should be obvious why it would be especially interesting to gay Catholics. But I thought at least as much about the many elderly women who make their homes, in their widowhood, with their best friends. A lot of families have these friendship pairs; a lot of families continue to care for the woman who is unrelated by blood, even after her blood-relation best friend dies. These are the \u201cAunties\u201d who aren\u2019t really Grandma\u2019s sister. A formal vow might not matter to most of them; to some, however, it might seem as beautiful an acknowledgment of lifelong loyalty as it does to me.<\/p>\n Then there are veterans<\/a>; then there are \u201cstraight\u201d men who have virtually no way of articulating love for another man. I know that straight guys aren\u2019t allowed to talk about beauty and gay stuff like that!\u2013but maybe that\u2019s also something we can change in our culture. It certainly isn\u2019t a good <\/em>feature of contemporary American life.<\/p>\n One thing I really like about the possibility of renewing this tradition is precisely that it would offer so much solidarity, so much common recognition<\/em>, between disparate groups. I won\u2019t denigrate my own concerns: Even if vowed friendship comes to be a \u201cchaste gay thing,\u201d it will still be shockingly beautiful and entirely worthy of honor. But I hope these vows actually offer an expansion of our vocabulary of love and kinship for everyone.<\/p>\n If I am astonishingly lucky, and this form of kinship is in fact renewed, I strongly suspect it will take several different forms. I would argue that the basics should still involve the Eucharist, a pledge of mutual loyalty and loving care, a promise to care for one another\u2019s families, and a promise that the longest-surviving friend will arrange for Masses to be said for the souls of both friends. (Friendship always exists in the shadow of death, because it does not produce children. That\u2019s one reason the art of friendship is death-haunted from Augustine to the Weakerthans<\/a>. And it\u2019s one reason that some form of fruitfulness and union beyond death should be a part of vowed friendship.) But other features of traditional friendship vows, such as living together, will vary. I wouldn\u2019t necessarily be surprised if men\u2019s friendships end up with somewhat different norms than women\u2019s, though I couldn\u2019t predict how, and I\u2019d also be relatively unsurprised if they end up looking basically the same.<\/p>\n I know I keep saying this, but again I want to emphasize that this is lab research in theology: As with any tradition, you can\u2019t control it; you can only attempt, with rhetoric and the example of your life, to guide the river. I don\u2019t know how friendship will look in a hundred years, or even how it should look. I can rule things out, but I can\u2019t set up an ideal model. All I can do is suggest things we might try.<\/p>\n Thorns of the Mystical Rose<\/strong>: I do want to address one strain of argumentation I\u2019ve noticed, which is basically to point out ways in which intense, devoted friendships (whether vowed or not) can be dangerous if you are attracted to your friend but cannot marry her. Because yeah: That\u2019s a danger. There are many friendships in which the best response is greater distance, a cooling-off.<\/p>\n But I absolutely do not believe that is true of all such relationships. Here are three angles of approach to that question (and I know I\u2019m not disposing of every possible argument here, but I hope I\u2019m at least giving food for thought):<\/p>\n 1) All manner of pious practices can be misused, can become covers for sin. And yet at the Easter Mass I still got a plenary indulgence, you know? Cat\u2019licks are always <\/em>arguing that danger is not an argument against beautiful devotion\u2013that the misuse doesn\u2019t crowd out the use. <\/p>\n 2) I am quite sure that a friendship vowed and sealed publicly in the Eucharist, in front of family and friends who know that these two friends have pledged fidelity not only to one another but to the Gospel and to Jesus Christ, is more likely to be chaste than a friendship which is purely private, often treated by others as trivial, and granted no religious significance. <\/p>\n