ABSTRACT
The dialectics of friendship. The tide of this collection gives people aid, in thinking about male friendship, and helps emphasize that friendship between men is both changeable and also a form of work. Friendship, male friendship, cannot be so weak as to be unable to admit to weakness. It must be based on an ‘adult’ admission that the world is various and strange, and that fantasies of omnipotence, so strong for children, make friendship an impossibility. The world of Edward Carpenter, the world of Walt Whitman or J. A. Symonds, is a world of male friendship that does not present itself as the conundrum that it can be for heterosexual men. The foundations for long friendship between homosexual men might – indeed must – be based on the same abnegation of the fantasy of self-sufficiency, and the same discovery of a weakness that is not exploitative, as any other kind of friendship.
