ABSTRACT
in an essay on James Fenimore Cooper published in Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), D. H. Lawrence formally recognized a special love between men. Lawrence claimed that the friendship between Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook constituted a “new human relationship”—one that was “deeper than fatherhood, deeper than marriage,” “deeper than the deeps of sex,” as he enthused. 1 Beginning in the 1950s, Leslie A. Fiedler, who was indebted to Lawrence, wrote about the pervasiveness of male same-sex relationships in Western American literature. However, while seeming to celebrate the homosocial and homoerotic, Fiedler inadvertendy revealed his own homophobia. By defining frontier alliances between white men and Indians such as Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook—between “civilization” and “savagery”—as “sexless and holy” relationships, Fiedler stigmatized unions that were not strictly celibate. 2 If platonic friendships were examples of “innocent homosexuality,” as Fiedler maintained, then sexually consummated relationships must be guilt-ridden, impure, and debased by comparison. 3
