ABSTRACT
In her study of "male homosocial desire" in English literature, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argues that, in an erotic triangle, through their competition for, their "traffic in," a shared female object of desire, two male rivals bond "homosocially," establishing and ensuring "the structures for maintaining and transmitting patriarchal power.,,1 Sedgwick's paradigm, however, depends on the repression of the homosexual into the homosocial. The "closet cases" Sedgwick examines appear as the misogynists they are because they are unable to let go of the letter, if not the spirit, of heterosexual desire. Sedgwick's model works admirably in her study of these texts, because it is heterosexually, if homosocially, oriented (that is, it still centers on the boy-meets-girl plot, even if to deconstruct it). But what happens when the boys get together without the girl? What might their triangle look like? What concerns me in this discussion is a paradigm applicable to texts in which the homosexual-as opposed to the homosocial-content of the rivalry is more explicit.
