Recently, Lawrence, who wrote in honor of my cousin/lover/frot brother, sent me an email describing what sounds like an idyllic life he lives with his three sons in a rural area of a Bible-Belt state.

As you may remember from Lawrence's post -- and if you haven't read it, please read it now -- in adolescence he had a very intense wrestling and Frot relationship with his cousin Gary.

Which had progressed naturally from doing chores together shirtless, to fist fights, to wrestling, to Frot.

The two were discovered, and their lives and love ripped apart, by their parents.

Deprived of "his cousin, his lover, his frot brother," Lawrence then tried "coming out" into analism, but soon discovered that such a life wasn't for him.

Despairing of ever finding a relationship like he'd had with Gary, Lawrence went back in the closet, joined the military, and some years later married a woman, with whom he had three sons.

After sixteen years of marriage, his wife left him, and gave him custody of the three boys.

Thus de facto creating, a homosocial -- that is, single-sex -- group, consisting of Lawrence and his three sons.

As Lawrence describes it, over time, that group has been enlarged by the addition of his eldest son's best friend, who has been to some degree adopted by the family and lives with them.

And, a number of other boys, attracted to the strong masculine atmosphere of Lawrence's home, hang out there both during the week and particularly on the weekends.

Lawrence says these are always "problem kids" who his two oldest sons "insist on providing a home for."

Here's how he describes the process:

My eldest son has some uncanny ability I've come to trust and listen to (because my own ability has proven limited) to know the pure hearted young men from the not-so pure. Most of (maybe not all) have turned out to good and decent young men. Their parents just don't seem to know it. Some of them just want to be heard and are known to follow me around the house as I do my chores, talk talk talking. Some just need a decent meal. Some ask surprisingly mature and deep questions. Many love to help with the kitchen duties and the gardening. Few balk at me assigning tasks to them. And all just appear to need the comradeship of each other. My eldest son seems to be a natural leader, a no nonsense, no drama kind of tough young man and boys tend to heed his every word (especially his two younger brothers when they think they might be in trouble for something). My eldest jokes that his friends come out to see me, not him. We do offer them a well-rounded,settled home life; at once respectful and still rowdy. These boys run wild at times out here, swimming naked at the creek, hunting squirrels, tipping cows and whatnot. Yet all know to pitch in when needed. A few parents have told me that my sons have been good influences on their son, who has been more respectful at home. One father has accused me of kidnapping his son and practically brainwashing him.

Sounds great, doesn't it?

The boys have even put together their own rugby team.

Lawrence then adds:

It was pointed out to me a second time yesterday by a second [Man2Man Alliance] friend that what we seem to have on this ten acres is a modern day agogé.

Is that correct?

Is what Lawrence describes "a modern day agogé"?

No.

I can understand why Lawrence and his friends would want to think of it that way, but they're leaving out the socially-structured and societally-supported same-sex relationships of the agogé, they're leaving out the warrior training of the agogé, and they're leaving out the sacred aspect of the agogé.

That's a lot to not have, and still call it "agogé."

And it's particularly striking that Lawrence compares his life with his sons in the American Bible Belt, to the Spartan agogé, even though his life, and that of his sons, in the Bible Belt is lacking that one attribute which for us, an alleged minority of Men who Love Men, denigrated and often despised, must be the agogé's most salient feature:

its socially-supported and societally-sanctioned same-sex relationships.

From what Lawrence has told me, his sons don't have that.

So they don't have an agogé.

I'll get to what Lawrence and his sons do have in Part II of this post.

But, for now, in Part I, which I've titled "The Ways of Naked Valour," I want to look more closely at the agogé itself.

Because if we're going to talk about having an agogé, we have to understand what it actually was and is.

The interior of this drinking cup portrays Spartan Warriors.

They're nude.

They're muscular.

With the powerful legs and buttocks and deep chests of wrestlers.

They're strong young Men.

Their hair is elaborately dressed.

And they're joyful.

They're carrying a body, either of a comrade who's fallen honorably and gloriously in battle;

or of an enemy whom they've killed.

Either way, they're happy and triumphant.

Their spears are positioned in such a way as to suggest that they're extensions of their phalluses;

reminding us of the Spartan poet Terpander's lines about Sparta:

The spear-points of young men blossom there
And Justice is done in open air
The stuff of gallant enterprise.

The spear-points of these young men have blossomed.

And at their feet are depicted two fighting cocks, facing each other, pugnacious and ready for combat.

Cock combat.

That's Sparta.

And these Men are the products of the agogé:

A system of Warrior training;

which honored and exalted the bonds between Men;

and which treated both male attraction and male aggression -- as sacred.

Let's take a look at all three of these attributes, starting with Warrior training, which is perhaps easiest for us to understand.

According to the ancients, the Warrior training of the agogé was rigorous and severe, and produced strong, disciplined, and literally laconic Warriors, the sort of Men who could calmly comb out their hair knowing they were about to go into and die in battle against the Persians.

Details about the actual training are scarce, and that's because the Spartans were secretive and other than the odd anecdote here and there, which the Spartans -- probably the ephors -- wanted known, NO ONE talked --

which tells you something about how successful the training was.

Here's one of the few snippets of information we do have, this from Plutarch writing ca 100 AD, who says the boys, having been taken from their mothers at the age of seven and made to live in all-male groups where they were trained in the arts of war and survival, were taught

to endure pain and conquer in battle. To this end, as they grew in years, their discipline was proportionately increased; their heads were close-clipped, they were accustomed to go barefoot, and for the most part to play naked.

After they were twelve years old, they were no longer allowed to wear any undergarment; they had one coat to serve them a year; their bodies were hard and dry, with but little acquaintance of baths and unguents; these human indulgences they were allowed only on some particular days in the year. They lodged together in little bands upon beds made of rushes that grew by the banks of the river Eurotas, which they were to break off with their hands without a knife; if it were winter, they mingled some thistle down with their rushes, which it was thought had the property of giving warmth. By the time they were come to this age there was not any of the more hopeful boys who had not a lover to bear him company.

So, the training consisted of a series of exercises which increased both in discipline and in privation as the boys grew older.

Now, as the discipline and privation increased, and as the youth became more adept in the arts of both war and survival, it was expected that he would, in time, have "a lover" -- that is a male lover -- "to bear him company."

Is there a relationship between the progressively more difficult exercises and the progressively more severe privations endured by the youth -- and the gaining of a Manly bond?

Yes.

Properly done, privation -- and indeed suffering -- increases the bonds between Men.

While luxury and affluence weaken those bonds.

Of that, there can be no doubt.

Yet this is a difficult lesson for those of us who live in an affluent society, and who measure our self-worth in terms of material possessions and physical comfort, to learn.

But it is nonetheless true.

Affluence is not an unalloyed boon.

For example, it's now been demonstrated that affluence actually increases the rate of spread of HIV / AIDS in most populations.

While war and civil unrest, do NOT increase that spread.

To us, such findings are counter-intuitive.

To the Spartans, they would not have been, since they had made their society -- and indeed their lives -- a study in the uses of adversity.

Remember, in that regard, what Leonidas said when he was asked if he had a plan in marching to Thermopylae.

"In theory, No," he replied.

"But in fact, I plan to die for the Greeks."

Heroic?

Noble?

Sure.

But it was also practical, a plan conceived by a Man schooled, once again, in the uses of adversity, in a way which the Persians could NEVER understand.

Which leads to our next point, which is, obviously, that the training the boys enjoyed was not only physical.

It was also psychological and, for lack of a better word, spiritual.

Remember this poem, which I've cited before, from the Spartan poet Tyrtaeus, ca 650 BC:

You are the unconquered blood of Herakles.
So be brave, fear not the number of your enemy
Stand straight in the front rank with your shield before you
and see your life as your enemy; the darkness of
death should be welcome as the light of the sun.

Men who'd been taught, since childhood, that they were the unconquered blood of Herakles, and that the darkness of death should be welcome as the light of the sun -- would obviously be formidable foes to face in battle.

Which is why, very often, just the sight of a Spartan army was enough to make the other side abandon the field.

We hear of boys who were beaten to death without crying out;

and of another boy whose guts were eaten out by a fox concealed beneath his cloak.

He didn't cry out either.

Outlandish?

Perhaps.

But having been taught "to endure pain and to conquer" -- and having been taught that they were the *unconquered* blood of Herakles; and that the darkness of death was to be welcomed --

they had the ability to put what we might call Honor -- before Life itself.

Which is another use of adversity.

"Never retreat, never surrender," after all, was the Spartan creed -- taught in the agogé.

And when the Spartans commanded the other Greeks in the decisive showdown with the Persians at Platea, they made them take a formal oath:

I shall fight to the death; I shall put freedom before life.

The Spartans had the moral force to compel their fellows to take that oath;

because Leonidas and the Three Hundred had done just that at Thermopylae.

They had fought to the death.

They had put freedom before life.

Leonidas had a plan.

The result of lessons learned in the agogé.

Those lessons saved all of Greece, and with Greece, the nascent freedom and rationality -- of the civilization of the West.

When Xerxes wrote to Leonidas: "It is possible for you not to fight the gods but to side with me and be monarch of Greece," he wrote back: "If you understood what is honorable in life, you would avoid lusting after what belongs to others. For me, it is better to die for Greece, than to be monarch of the people of my race."

~ Plutarch, Sayings of the Spartans

Core to the agogé was a system of same-sex pair bonding which was designed, as the Britannica says, to keep the "hoplite bonds at a level of ferocious intensity."

Notice that I said "a *system* of same-sex pair bonding."

It wasn't haphazard.

The pair-bonding was socially-sanctioned and intentional.

And supported not only by the culture of Sparta, but by the larger culture of Greece itself.

Clearly, Lawrence's sons aren't experiencing anything like that.

They live in a thoroughly heterosexualized and anti-MAN society, and if they're going to public school and / or church, they've been and are being indoctrinated into that society each and every day of their lives.

That didn't happen to Spartan boys.

There was no heterosexualization.

Spartan youths spent virtually all their time with other youths and Men.

In a society which ardently supported and celebrated Men, Manhood, and Masculinity.

24/7/365

Throughout their lives.

For example, following the youthful years of training in the agoge, Spartan Warriors were inducted into an all-male eating club -- a mess -- the Spartan term for it was Phidition -- which became their most significant adult association.

Here's classicist W. G. Forrest as I quoted him in the 300 message thread:

The Spartan did not work -- he trained, with the men of his mess; he fought, with the men of his mess; or he was idle, again for the most part, one would imagine, with the men of his mess.

That's a homosocial society.

And it's a society which made a direct association between male nudity, particularly male nudity in strenuous and communal male pursuits like athletics and war -- and Virtue / Valour.

The Latin phrase is "in corpore virtus"

"Virtus" = Virtue = Valour = Manhood / both psychic manhood and physical manhood

And male nudity is a constant;

in the case of Sparta, a constant which was inculcated from childhood on, when the boys "were accustomed to go barefoot, and for the most part to play naked."

Nudity.

Male nudity, which is both democratic and celebratory of the individual male and his Manhood, was part of the warp and woof not just of Spartan, but of all Greco-Roman civilization.

That's what I tried to get across in the various Statius articles, starting with And now a few words from Publius Papinius Statius and continuing through The Comradeship of Wounds, sweat the sacrament of naked valour, and his valour plain to see.

Statuis is a Roman author, but he's telling a Greek tale, based upon a Greek epic which has been lost to us, but which it's safe to assume he had in front of him as he wrote.

And if you read Latin, or can just make it through the cognates, you can see how strong, powerful, and consistent the language is.

For example:

What British classicist A. D. Melville translates as "and the dust is hot with men's raw sweat" is, in the original,

crudusque virum sudoribus ardet pulvis

crudus = crude or raw

que = and

virum = of Men

sudoribus = sweat

ardet = makes hot

pulvis = dust -- as in pulverized dirt

so "crudusque virum sudoribus ardet pulvis = "and raw sweat of men makes hot the dust"

That sweat of course is pouring off the nude bodies of Men in conflict.

So the phrase is a vivid image of ManFight in ManSpace -- the pulverized, sweat-soaked soil of the palaistra and arena.

Then there's "nudamque lacessere pugnam"

which means "and incites / challenges / provokes to nude fight"

nude combat

pugnam nudam

Statius has no question -- this is what guys do -- they strip and fight.

There's no effeminized bullshit.

You don't have to justify it -- you just do it.

You strip and fight.

And the way it's written suggests that the stripping is part of the incitement.

Part of the challenge.

And there's a Latin phrase which Statius uses to describe the process of getting rid of the cloak or tunic which was usually the combatants' only article of clothing:

exsertare umeros = freeing the shoulders

Remember in that regard that as part of their training, the young men of Sparta, who too possessed only one article of clothing -- a cloak, which was easily discarded -- were divided into two "teams," which, according to Xenophon, "fell to fighting" whenever they encountered each other.

They were constantly encouraged to fight.

And that fighting, says Statius, was a crucial part of their instruction in:

"nudaeque modis virtutis"

nudae = nude

modis = ways

virtutis = Valour / Virtue

"and ways of naked valour"

The Ways of Naked Valour.

That Naked Valour, in turn, could and did lead to LOVE between MEN.

So: when King Adrastus interrupts the nude and gory fight between Polynices and Tydeus, he says, "Your present rage perhaps foretokens future love."

And indeed, the word used by Statius is -- AMOR -- LOVE.

Throughout the epic, when Statius refers to the relationship between Polynices and Tydeus, he uses the word "amor" -- over and over again.

For example, when, in Book II, Melville says of Tydeus and Polynices, "So strong the love that bound them since they fought" -- the Latin reads:

"tantus post iurgia mentes vinxit AMOR"

"so strong since their brawl the LOVE which binds them"

And, when Polynices falls nude (nudus) on Tydeus' dead body, and tearfully speaks of "and our brief rage, the pledge of long affection," the Latin reads

"et longi pignus amoris ira brevis" = and brief rage, the pledge of long LOVE.

Indeed, the word "pignus" -- "pledge" -- is often used to refer to a pledge of LOVE.

So: the ancients understood -- and certainly the Spartans understood -- how Rage could lead to Love:

"Your present rage perhaps foretokens future Love."

"So strong the Love that bound them since they fought."

"Our brief rage, the pledge of long Love."

Moreover, and again, this love -- this Manly Love between Masculine Men -- takes place in the context of a homosocial society.

Statius makes clear for example that while the youths fight and wrestle nude in the raw sweat and hot dust of the arena, they're being watched by other Men --

while their mothers wait OUTSIDE to congratulate the victor.

Again, that's a homosocial society.

A pre-heterosexualized society.

The meaning of the fight changes depending upon whether it takes place in a homosocial or heterosocial environment.

The conduct of the fighters changes depending upon whether they fight in a homosocial or heterosocial environment.

These are basic and home truths.

As is the idea of "Naked Valour."

Let's be clear about this:

Naked Valour was a reality in the lives of the Greeks, and still, though to a lesser extent, the lives of the Romans.

The Greeks competed athletically in the nude

and even fought in battle nude.

While Greco-Roman athletes in the combat sports of wrestling, boxing, and pankration, still fought nude.

That's naked valour.

When I was researching various translations of Statius, I found a reader review of one translation which referred to the "homoeroticism" which runs through the epic.

But to the Romans, "naked valour" was not "homoerotic," or even erotic in the sense that it is to us.

Public nudity and in particular nudity in athletics is strenuously suppressed in our society.

So we find references to such nudity "homoerotic."

To the Greeks, nudity simply was.

Of course, they knew too that there was a sexual element to fights and to affection, intimacy, and love -- amor -- between Men.

But again, that was just part of life.

It wasn't suppressed -- so it didn't have to be brought to light.

Let's repeat that:

Since it wasn't suppressed, it didn't have to be brought to light.

Again, it simply was.

So:

Fierce and ferocious same-sex bonds, Warrior bonds, were a desired and *intended* result of the agogé.

Classicist Michael Grant:

This was the complex of communal, totalitarian, socio-military institutions (associated with the name of the perhaps mythical lawgiver Lycurgus) which gave the Spartans their subsequent austere reputation. Examined soon after birth, all Spartan infants, if weak or deformed, were thrown over a cliff and killed. Those [males] who survived, at the age of seven or eight, were removed from their families and drafted into a 'herd' [known as the herd of the bull calves], under the control of a senior Spartiate [full-fledged Spartan citizen]. And for the next two decades they worked their way through a brutalizing series of state-oriented training programmes. During the course of this period, at the age of about twenty, they became eligible for one of the Spartan messes or dining clubs, each of which possessed about fifteen members. Their food was awful, but each member had to pay a mess-bill; and failure to pay -- or, for that matter, to endure the severities of the training curriculum -- resulted in deprivation of Spartiate status.

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Spartan Hoplites

When these young men joined the Assembly, at the age of thirty, they had become ruthless, taciturn and unquestioning. Their predominant ethos was homosexual, but they were expected to marry in order to produce children. Their brides had to undergo a macabre wedding ceremony. Subsequently, however, the barrack-room existence to which their husbands were tied left these women a good deal to themselves. Moreover, their biological role as bearers of Sparta's children did not go unrecognized, so that they enjoyed unusual day-by-day and legal freedom. ...

[emphasis mine]

So: Grant says "Their predominant ethos was homosexual."

Of course we would put the word "homosexual" in quotes, since the Greeks didn't have that word nor did they think in terms of "homosexuality" or of people being "homosexual."

Moreover, such an "ethos" was not limited to the agogé.

Nor to Sparta.

"Homosexuality," as our benighted age refers to the Love of Man for Man, was characteristic of ALL of Greek society.

Here's the Oxford Classical Dictionary (1996 edition) discussing Greece in the Archaic and Classical period -- 776 to 323 BC:

early Greek society quickly acquired distinctive features and institutions ... Among these were athletics and religiously based athletic events like the Oylmpian Games; the palestra, which provided training for both athletics and its elder brother, warfare; the symposium [or all-male mess], at which aristocratic values were inculcated; and homosexuality, which was related to all the other phenomena just mentioned.

Now, we can quibble with Oxford on some of this.

For example, as Grant points out, male nudity was another distinctive aspect of Greek culture, and prominent in athletics, the palestra, warfare, and in everyday life.

Clearly that nudity too was related to "homosexuality."

And where Oxford says the all-male messes inculcated aristocratic values, I would say Warrior values.

Warriors

But -- those are quibbles.

I'm quoting Oxford and Grant et alia because I want you to understand that when I emphasize the importance of nudity, athleticism, and same-sex eros among the Greek Warrior class, I'm not way out in left field.

The authors of the Oxford Classical Dictionary and other classicists completely support what I'm saying.

So -- absent those fierce and SOCIETALLY SUPPORTED same-sex bonds -- you don't have an agogé.

What you have rather is a, per Frances, Disneyfied version of the agogé.

Which is no agogé at all.

The agogé was about Naked Valour.

The Naked Valour of Fighters.

The Naked Valour of Men at Arms.

The Naked Valour of Men who Loved each other openly and honestly.

And who put that Love before Life itself.

The life of a Spartan youth, as well as that of an adult Spartan, was suffused with spirit -- Warrior Spirit.

A sense of the sacred which informed his experience both of male-male aggression; and of male-male attraction.

For example, male figures with strong same-sex associations, like Achilles, Apollo, Kastor and Polydeukes, Herakles, and Hyakinthus were worshipped.

As gods.

One of the most important festivals was the Hyakinthia.

Hyakinthus' only claim to fame was that he was a Spartan prince who was beloved of Apollo.

That's what that festival was about.

There's nothing like that in American life, and certainly not in the lives of Lawrence's sons.

Think about it.

Imagine that one of our most important religious holidays was devoted to Jesus' male lover.

Or John the Baptist's male lover.

Or to David and Jonathan.

Obviously, we have nothing like that.

But if we'd had something like that, Lawrence and Gary wouldn't have been ripped apart.

Another *very* important Spartan holiday was called the Festival of the Naked Youths.

the pyrrhic dance

In which the naked youths danced in public.

These dances, like the Pyrrhic Dance, named for Achilles' son, would have been stylized military moves, like "kata" in contemporary martial arts.

Such dances and festivals appear to have been common among European warrior tribes, because we know of them among the Greeks, and among the Italic peoples, and among the Teutons -- Tacitus describes naked dancing at sword and spear point among the German barbarians.

Xenophon, an exiled Athenian military man who fought with and lived among the Spartans, remarks that a Spartan friend "never missed" a Festival of the Naked Youths.

Sort of like saying your favorite uncle never missed Thanksgiving.

An important holiday.

So this is a very different mind-set than ours today, in which the body and the male body in particular is considered dirty and unclean and sinful.

And high school athletes are afraid to shower together after practice.

In addition, as I've pointed out before, boys and Men prayed to heroes and other sacred figures associated with fighting -- before fighting themselves:

On the road which leads northwards from Sparta stands a sanctuary built for Achilles by Prax, his great-grandson, which is closed to the general public;

but the boys who are required to fight in a near-by plane-tree grove enter and sacrifice to him beforehand.

~ Pausanias via Graves, The Greek Myths, 164.p.

So the boys sacrificed to Achilles before fighting.

In our society, fighting is marginalized.

In Sparta, and throughout the ancient world, fighting was sacralized -- made sacred.

Let's talk about this further.

"nudaeque modis virtutis"

The Ways of Naked Valour

Those Ways -- those Warrior Ways -- and we have said that the The Way of the Warrior is the Way of Salvation -- were taught at the palestra -- the Fight School.

Which Statius refers to as the "sacras palestras" -- the consecrated or holy or sacred Fight School.

What made it sacred?

The presence of the gods.

In every fight school there was a herm:

A symbol of the Greek god Hermes -- Roman god Mercury -- with an erection.

A Phallus.

Sacred.

A sacred image of Man's creative power.

So Hermes / Mercury -- who's known as the god of Arcady -- is present as the Men train -- in ManFight.

Which is why Statius says, of the Spartans,

The god of Arcady [Hermes / Mercury]
Himself had reared them in the dusty ring
And trained them in the ways of angry war
And naked valour...

The god is present in every palaistra -- because there's a herm in every palestra.

And that god has reared the Spartan youths -- the youths of the agogé -- in the dusty ring and trained them in the ways of angry war and naked valour.

The god *himself* has done that.

The image above is Greek.

This is a Roman image:

Palaistra: Herm on the left, Victorius Boxer on the right
Note the symmetry of the genitals

So the palaistra is made sacred -- sacras palestras -- by the presence of the god -- symbolized by his herm.

His erect image.

If you find fighting erotic, then you need to understand that the entire Greco-Roman world agreed with you, and said so by placing an image, a sacred image, of the erect god in EVERY Fight School.

Which was then a Sacred Fight School.

Sacras Palestras

Do you get it?

Do you understand?

I said above that male nudity wasn't erotic to the Greeks in the way it is to us, because it wasn't suppressed.

The same is true here.

The intrinsically phallic nature of ManFight wasn't suppressed.

So it didn't have to be brought to light.

It simply was.

The herm was there for everyone to see.

Look again at this image:

Palaistra: Herm on the left, Victorius Boxer on the right
Note the symmetry of the genitals

The god has genitals.

The man has genitals.

The god is "ithyphallic" -- he has an erection.

The man does not.

Because for the man to have an erection would indicate a loss of self-control.

So the god has an erection for him.

The god stands for and personifies the power of Eros in the fight.

While the man himself stands erect.

The victor stands erect.

Naked Valour in the Naked Fight.

And often the victor's depicted, as he is here, standing upright or erect -- the Latin word is erectus -- while looking serenely down upon the body of his defeated opponent.

Victorious Boxer with Herm

Naked Valour in the Naked Fight.

Helmet found at Dodona

It was a fact of life.

Now, there's another god, a specifically Spartan god of the palaistra, and that's Polydeuces, the Roman Pollux.

Pollux

Pollux, brother to Kastor, the sons of, at once, the Spartan King Tyndareus -- and of God -- Zeus.

Thus, the Dioskouri -- the sons of God.

Polydeukes / Pollux -- the son of God -- was also the greatest boxer of the ancient world.

When, on its way to Thebes, the army of Polynices and Tydeus stops to inaugurate the sacred Nemean games, Statius describes a boxing match between the Spartan Alcadamas and the Argive Capaneus.

And he notes that in the Spartan Palaistra, Alcadamas was taught by "ipse deus" -- the god himself -- Pollux.

Who, when he was pleased with his pupil, would "exultans nudumque in pectora pressit" -- exultant, press his student's naked body to his chest.

Pollux presses his mortal student's nakedly valorous body to his godly chest.

So this is another instance, in Spartan legend, or if you will, hagiography, of nude sport shared between a god and a mortal -- leading to love.

As I related in The Mingling of Their Bones, Apollo and Hyakinthus shared the discus.

They stripped, they oiled their bodies, and threw the discus.

This association between a Spartan prince, the god Apollo, and the discus, was so strong, that the Romans often referred to the discus throw as "Oebalian" -- Oebalus being a Spartan king and, in some geneaologies, the father of Hyakinthus.

While Pollux and Alcadamas shared boxing.

Pollux instructed Alcadamas in boxing, and, exulting in his pupil's skill, would hug Alcadamas' strong, mortal, and nude body to his divine and blessed naked chest.

Imagine that.

A Spartan boy learning to fight would have, as part of his training, a sacred sense of his art being blessed by both the god of Arcady, the erect god, and by the son of Zeus, Pollux, a Spartan prince, who became a god by virtue not just of birth, but also of devotion -- to his brother.

That is sacralization.

Herakles, the greatest of the mythic wrestlers, was another semi-divine being who became a god.

And the Spartans were the unconquered blood of Herakles.

That too is sacralization.

And mythic identification -- which we've talked about as animating both the Warrior Bond and the Deificiation of Antinous.

Both male-male attraction, then, as well as male-male aggression, were seen by the Spartans -- and the other Greeks -- as sacred.

And were celebrated as such.

Victorious Boxer with Herm

So:

Absent those three elements -- Warrior training; societally-sanctioned same-sex relationships; and, the sacralization of those relationships -- you don't have an agogé.

Lawrence:

Granted no one is being trained and toughened to be fighting warriors. Still I've witnessed these boys change into young men who value their friendships with one another and appear to have learned a thing or two about honor and valor. They've learned that to be honest with me is the best policy. They've learned they have the power to steer their buddies free of drugs and alcohol. At last years' Fourth of July party I got to swell up with pride as I saw my eldest direct two young girls and a young man off the property, telling them "I have little brothers here at this party. You can't bring that stuff here."

Okay, and that's all to the good.

However:

"Granted no one is being trained and toughened to be fighting warriors. Still I've witnessed these boys change into young men who value their friendships with one another and appear to have learned a thing or two about honor and valor."

Honor is fine.

But, and not to take anything away from Lawrence's sons, to the ancients, Valour was earned in combat.

One-on-one combat.

Either in the raw sweat and dusty ring of the palestra -- or in war.

That's why, as we've seen, Statius says of the Spartan warriors

The god of Arcady [Hermes / Mercury]
Himself had reared them in the dusty ring
And trained them in the ways of angry war
And naked valour; hence their high resolve
And sweat the sacrament of glorious death.

That by the way is Melville's translation -- ca 1992.

Statius is a poet, and his language is not always easy.

But remember what I said in my reply to Warrior Justin's The Discovery of Frot:

that a couple millenia after Statius, another poet, Edgar Allan Poe, declared that

the poetic instinct will lead undeviatingly to truth

So: the Latin reads

deus ipse viros in pulvere crudo
Arcas alit nudaeque modos virtutis et iras
ingenerat ; vigor inde animis et mortis honorae
dulce sacrum.

Mozley, translating in 1928, gets this:

The Arcadian god himself trains them in the dust of combat, and implants in them the ways of naked valour and warlike temper; hence dauntless courage and the welcome consecration of a glorious death.

Well, Mozley and Melville mainly agree:

The Arcadian god himself has, in the raw dust of the palestra, trained the Spartans and thus -- "ingenerat" -- generated within them the ways of naked valour and angry war;

hence their courageous force and the sweet consecration of an honorable death.

And just note for a moment the word "ingenerat," which is related both to "genius" -- the spirit of the male's procreative power -- and to genital.

The genitals are the generators of erotic energy.

The genitals are also the symbols of male creative power.

And the genitals are what makes the male fight.

They're the generators of aggressive energy as well as erotic energy.

The genitals are the generators of Male aggressive energy.

The genitals are the generators of Male erotic energy.

Which comes back to Poe's idea of symmetry:

Aggression

Attraction

Male - Male

Statius by the way often uses metaphors involving animals, such as lions and wolves, but the most frequent animal metaphors by far in his version of the epic are those involving bulls.

And I think that's clearly because the genitals, and in particular the testicles, are so prominent on bulls.

Often, in Statius, the bulls are combatants.

For example, in the wrestling match between Tydeus and Agylleus, Statius compares the two men to bulls:

At times they hung there locked
In a long clinch, then broke the fingers' grasp,
As savage as the leaders of the herd,
Two bulls in ghastly battle.

But sometimes the bulls are bonded -- like stallions.

For example, in this passage, Statius compares Polynices, who's just lost Tydeus in battle, to a bull who's lost his companion:

So, when the colleague of his toil is lost,
A bull in numb despair leaves in mid-field
The furrow he's begun; the yoke's awry,
As one end on his drooping neck he bears
And one the ploughman shoulders, pouring tears.

It's very striking, because two thousand years before Bruce Bagemihl describes Frot among the animals, Statius compares the terrible pain Polynices feels on losing Tydeus, to the "numb despair" of a bull who's lost his companion animal, the consort of his labors.

consorte laborum

So Statius, the poet, is conscious of the genital symmetry of aggression-attraction in other male animals -- not just in Men.

And that consciousness, which our culture has on the whole lost, is part of Greco-Roman culture.

Here for example is a vase-painting of the Greek culture-hero Theseus defeating the Bull of Marathon:

Notice how prominent the testicles are on both Theseus and the bull;

and how they mirror each other.

So that there's a symmetry between Theseus's testicles and the bull's testicles.

Here's another painting, by a different artist, of the same event:

Again, the testicles are prominent on both Man and Beast.

Because, again, the genitals are the generators of both erotic and aggressive male energy.

And they're prominent in bulls.

Which is no doubt why the Spartans called their young Warriors -- bull-calves.

Anyone who's lived rurally has seen bull-calves butting heads.

They're warriors-in-training.

Of course most people nowadays don't live rurally.

But the Spartans did.

So -- and this is important: Naked Valour -- the individual nude male's strenuous physical effort to overcome his opponent in ManFight-- engenders courage in war.

Which is Valour.

That's where Valour comes from.

Which is why Naked Wrestler aka NW has said:

There are games.

And there's fighting.

The ancients agreed.

They had what we would call "ball games," including something which looks a lot like lacrosse.

But those games were not included in the great religious-athletic festivals so important to the Greeks -- and the Romans.

What mattered in those games was one-on-one competition.

And particularly boxing, wrestling, and pankration.

Remember that war in the ancient world, and particularly hoplite warfare, which is where much of the ideals of archaic and classical Greece originated, was not a matter of picking up an automatic weapon and firing hundreds of bullets.

It was rather fought face-to-face and chest-to-chest.

Here's a poem by Tyrtaeus which describes hoplite warfare:

Let each man hold, standing firm, both feet planted on the ground,
biting his lip with his teeth, covering with the belly of his broad
shield his thighs and legs, his chest and shoulders . . let each man,
Closing with the enemy, fighting hand-to-hand with long spear or
sword, wound and take him; and setting foot against foot, and resting
shield against shield, crest against crest, helmet against helmet
let him fight his man chest to chest, grasping the hilt of his sword
or of his long spear.

For the man is not brave in war, unless he endure seeing the bloody
slaughter, and standing close reach out for the foe. This is excellence, this is the
best and loveliest prize for the young man to win. A common good this,
for the whole city and all the people, when a man holds, firm-set among the
fighters, unflinchingly.....

For it is a fine thing for a brave man to die, falling among the front-fighters,
fighting for his fatherland.....

Now:

Most people today no longer believe "it's a fine thing for a brave man to die, falling among the front-fighters, fighting for his fatherland."

And that's a problem.

Because it leaves the fighting of war to mercenaries.

Which, as readers of this board know, is not a great idea.

Interestingly, however, I was reading a NY Times article on the Blackwater mercenaries in Iraq, many of whom are, apparently, young Marines "of former service," as Patrick would put it, and I came across this paragraph:

Inside the Blackwater camp, a crisp American flag is carefully raised and lowered each day in Baghdad's dusty heat. In the closely stacked gray metal trailers that serve as living quarters, employees have 8-by-12-foot rooms and shared bathrooms. Recreation time is limited, and the employees eat among themselves. Many of the younger guards sunbathe on their trailer roofs -- a few regularly did so in the nude, until female helicopter pilots flew overhead, saw them and complained.

So what we have here is Men-at-War reverting to nudity.

And then along comes a heterosexualized force -- in this case, female helicopter pilots -- who object to the male nudity.

Please note that I'm not saying that women should not be allowed to fly helicopters.

But it's another question as to whether women -- or anyone else -- should be allowed to prevent men from sunbathing nude.

Because their objection after all is the expression of a puritan impulse, and a puritan impulse alone.

The Men "sunbathing" nude on that roof are experiencing an ancient male way of being -- of being Men with Men.

As we've seen in the photos from WW II.

Guys at war will get naked with each other.

Their nudity is a result of the shared privation and danger, and an expression of the consequent affection, intimacy, and yes, Love, which they feel towards their fellows.

So it's one thing to have, as a result of a heterosexualization, female helicopter pilots.

It's another to allow those female pilots to destroy a Male Ritual and Right which is doing them absolutely NO harm.

And which is actually strengthening the Warrior bond.

NAKED VALOUR.

Valour is an expression of male combat.

Nude male combat.

Whether it be combat sport -- or deadly combat.

That's what Valour is.

Of course we can ignore that.

And can say that people on reality TV or whatever show valour.

But it's a mistake to do that.

Valour is about combat.

Valour is about combat between Men in a society which recognizes not just the possibility but the probability of Love between Men.

Or, if you wish, we can think of Valour as a form of Male Virtue which is most fully realized in a society which is, per Poe, symmetrical:

A society which recognizes both rage and love between Men, and which acknowledges, as King Adrastus does, that Men may experience a passage through rage to Love.

And to take this idea of symmetry just a bit further:

In our heterosexualized society, we're told (in the words of a song popular in my youth) that "love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage."

In point of fact, in the horse-and-buggy era, most marriages were arranged.

But no matter -- in our era they're not arranged.

Or at least don't appear to be.

But in a homosocial society, Warrior Training -- training in the aggressive ways of Naked Valour -- and Warrior Love -- manifested erotically in the Nakedly Valorous and aggressively affiliative act of Frot -- go together like -- well, maybe, two bonded bulls.

Or two bonded stallions.

In what is an organic process.

As my foreign friend has said, stallions who grow up together and bond become inseparable and, from a human point of view, impossible to control.

They're FREE.

As are two bonded Warriors.

They're Free Men, who've *chosen* to be together.

No buggy, no harness, no yoke needed.

Warrior training -- in the ways of Naked Valour -- and Warrior Love -- which again is the aggressively affiliative and intimate expression of Valorous Men -- offer Men FREEDOM.

That's the appeal.

The Men are no longer constrained by society's definition of masculinity.

They are instead Free to be their natural and authentic selves.

Free to Fight and Free to Love.

Lawrence and Gary were free to fight and free to love.

They were, from the point of view of the adults, out of control.

So those freedoms -- and their love -- was ripped from them.

To devastating result.

And, having said that, a little conceptual sidebar might be in order:

Both Lawrence, and Luke Shelton, had their adolescent loves destroyed by their parents.

Both Lawrence and Luke blamed themselves.

And in particular both blamed themselves severely for not having done more, as teenagers, to regain their adolescent loves.

I've told them that what happened wasn't their fault and that they can stop blaming themselves.

But -- if we're discussing the agogé, the question must be asked -- would this have happened to a Spartan teenager?

No -- because there was no societal or cultural or religious objection to such love.

But if, for some other reason, someone had messed with a Spartan youth's love, could the Spartan have done more about it than the Americans?

Yes.

Because the Spartan had been taught "to endure pain and conquer in battle."

That was his habit of mind.

Not true for our Americans.

Luke in particular was very depedent upon his affluent family, who basically dictated his life to him.

Nothing in the way he'd been raised would have given him the tools to leave his family and go off on his own to find Stephen.

I don't know if that's true of Lawrence, but probably, since teens in our society are usually quite dependent on their families.

Which means, that a Spartan youth, who'd been taught all his life that love between males was desirable, and who'd been taught about the sacred and mythic antecedents of such love, and who as well had been taught to endure privation, to survive, and to conquer -- would have been far better equipped to deal with the sort of adversity which Lawrence and Luke suffered.

And that is just the fact.

So, what's missing from Lawrence's description of his life with his sons, among other attributes of the agogé, is any institutionalized or structured SUPPORT for same-sex relationships.

It's not there.

Yet it's vital.

And this is something I see very often in what our guys say to me.

They've been without supports for true and natural same-sex love all their lives, and so take it for granted that such have not, need not, and never will exist.

And implicit in their acquiesence to that state of affairs, is the notion that the Love of Man for Man is inferior to the love of man for woman.

Which is wrong.

You must rid yourselves of that assumption.

Because historically and cross-culturally, what human beings have believed is that the Love of Man for Man is higher and nobler than that of man for woman.

In our modern era, we may not agree.

But we must at least acknowledge, that the Love of Man for Man is every bit the equal of that of man for woman.

And equally important.

If Men are to be Men.

My foreign friend:

male sexual desire for men cannot be tied down to a minority group. Rather it is a universal male phenomenon, especially strong amongst masculine identified men

"male sexual desire for men [is] a universal male phenomenon, especially strong amongst masculine identified men"

The agogé recognized and supported that.

That's not happening among Lawrence and his sons.

Yet it must happen and it must be explicit.

Plutarch says,

By the time they were come to this age [twelve] there was not any of the more hopeful boys who had not a lover to bear him company.

That's explicit because Plutarch makes it explicit.

Which it how it was and how it has to be.

Human beings can survive in the shadows.

But they can't LIVE in the shadows.

And MEN have to LIVE.

If Lawrence and his sons don't have an agogé, what do they have, and why does it function as well as it does?

Answer: What they have is an *approximation* of the sort of all-male group which my foreign friend has described, in Natural Masculinity and Phallic Bonding, as essential for boys to become Men:

Masculine male groups and bonds play an extremely important role in the development of physical, mental, emotional and social aspects of natural masculinity. As such they are an important part of the positive environment that all masculine identified boys should have. An otherwise masculine identified man who is deprived of membership in a masculine male group / bond during his growing years will be less than 1/4th naturally masculine than if he had such an opportunity. Masculine identified boys have a natural tendency to seek to join male-only groups, and it's their natural right.

The masculinity of men flows from their group. It's like their natural masculinity combines and gets manifold when masculine identified men unite. The camaraderie, mutual understanding, support, playing together, learning the ways of the world as a male, dealing with roughs and toughs of life together --- they all help to develop the natural masculinity that exists within him.

So what Lawrence is seeing, and his sons experiencing, are the beneficial effects of a properly structured all-male group.

That's not the same as the agogé.

Once again, "a properly structured all-male group" and the agogé may have shared elements, but they're not the same thing.

Furthermore, when my foreign friend, says, in that passage, "Masculine male groups and bonds play an extremely important role in the development of physical, mental, emotional and social aspects of natural masculinity" --

please note that he says "in the development of ... *natural* masculinity."

Natural Masculinity.

The two core elements of natural masculinity are male-male aggression and male-male attraction / affection / intimacy.

Yet in Lawrence's homosocial group, there's no support for same-sex relationships.

And that there has to be.

Which is why I said that what Lawrence and his sons have "is an *approximation* of the sort of all-male group which my foreign friend has described as essential for boys to become Men."

Because -- and please try to understand this -- males cannot be fully Men -- until they've known the Love of Man.

That's just how it is.

As my foreign friend has said,

same-sex needs are the basis of a man's natural positive masculinity

And of course those needs have to be met.

How?

Promiscuously?

No.

Again, as my foreign friend has pointed out, masculine-identified Men who are NATURALLY MASCULINE may be to some degree promiscuous with women;

but they seek out ONE other Masculine Man with whom to bond sexually.

"masculine-identified men are promiscuous with regard to women, but monogamous vis a vis men"

The Naturally Masculine Man is NOT promiscuous with his fellows.

He is Faithful.

So, and let's do it in caps:

SAME-SEX NEEDS ARE THE BASIS OF A MAN'S NATURAL POSITIVE MASCULINITY.

And again, that Lawrence and his friends from this site are comparing his home life to the agogé, despite their being no support for same-sex relationships, tells me how oppressed they've been by our heterosexualized system.

Moreover, Lawrence and his friends ignore the absence of support for same-sex love despite the *central* importance such a love had and continues to have in Lawrence's own life.

So, though Lawrence's life with his sons does sound idyllic, it's my job to point out to Lawrence and his friends that they don't have the or an agogé.

And that until the issues around what constitutes True and Natural Masculinity are faced up to and dealt with by society or at least some portion of it -- NO ONE will have an agogé.

Lawrence:

I relate this to make a quick point. Given the place and the opportunity, an agogé is a natural occurrence.

"an agogé is a natural occurrence"

This is the crux of the matter, and it lies in the word "natural."

What I've tried very hard to do for you in my writings on this site is differentiate between Natural Masculinity -- as just defined -- and social or cultural masculinity, which I refer to as pseudo-masculinity.

We can think of pseudo-masculinity as being Coors beer or Dodge trucks, but in our era, our heterosexualized era, the defining characteristic of pseudo-masculinity is this:

Pseudo-masculinity is exclusively heterosexual.

"Real men" only have sex with women.

"Real men" never have sex with, they never feel desire towards, and they certainly never fall in love with, other Men.

That's pseudo-masculinity, it's a definition of masculinity which is culturally enforced, and it's a lie.

And we know it's a lie because of this Golden Rule:

In societies which lack a divine prohibition against same-sex eros, Men have sex with Men and Men Love Men -- openly and more-or-less universally.

Again, in societies which are un-encumbered by an allegedly divine prohibition against same-sex love, Men not only have sex with other Men, but they fall in love with and establish awesomely tight bonds with other Men -- all the time.

Like my foreign friend says,

"male sexual desire for men [is] a universal male phenomenon, especially strong amongst masculine identified men";

and,

"masculine-identified men are monogamous vis a vis men"

Take away the divine prohibition, and, clearly, you go a long ways toward freeing Men to love their fellows.

And to love them Faithfully, Nobly, and Heroically.

So:

"male sexual desire for men [is] a universal male phenomenon, especially strong amongst masculine identified men"

Absent a divine prohibition, or other cultural norms, such as "real men don't love other men" -- that universal desire becomes obvious.

And manifest.

However, that's not all there is to an agogé.

Lawrence and his sons are unusual in that they constitute a familial homosocial group.

Lawrence has no daughters, and his wife left the family.

So home is all guys.

That's normally not the case.

Which is why no doubt the Spartans took boys from their mothers, and placed them in "herds of bull-calves."

To establish a homosocial group.

Now, we don't know how much contact the boys had with their mothers -- or sisters or other women -- while in those groups.

But clearly the intent was to make the all-male group the focus of the boys' lives.

Why?

It could be because the ancients -- in this case the Greeks and the Romans -- believed that too much contact with women made a male "mollis" -- soft and effeminate.

But, we have to point out, Spartan women were not particularly "soft."

They were encouraged, like the men, to be athletic and to excercise in the nude.

And though, so far as we know, they didn't fight in battle, in attitude they were every bit as bellicose as the men.

"Come back with your shield or on it!" said the Spartan mother to her son.

Yet the Spartans still put their boys into homosocial groups.

Because they understood what my foreign friend has said and which I repeat again:

Masculine male groups and bonds play an extremely important role in the development of physical, mental, emotional and social aspects of natural masculinity. As such they are an important part of the positive environment that all masculine identified boys should have. An otherwise masculine identified man who is deprived of membership in a masculine male group / bond during his growing years will be less than 1/4th naturally masculine than if he had such an opportunity. Masculine identified boys have a natural tendency to seek to join male-only groups, and it's their natural right.

The masculinity of men flows from their group. It's like their natural masculinity combines and gets manifold when masculine identified men unite. The camaraderie, mutual understanding, support, playing together, learning the ways of the world as a male, dealing with roughs and toughs of life together --- they all help to develop the natural masculinity that exists within him.

"Masculine identified boys have a natural tendency to seek to join male-only groups, and it's their natural right."

Why?

Because:

"The masculinity of men flows from their group. It's like their natural masculinity combines and gets manifold when masculine identified men unite. The camaraderie, mutual understanding, support, playing together, learning the ways of the world as a male, dealing with roughs and toughs of life together --- they all help to develop the natural masculinity that exists within him."

That's why the Spartans did it.

To be sure that the boys' natural masculinity would develop -- naturally.

But the agogé wasn't just the all-male group.

It was a system of training, of privation, and of explicit support for same-sex eros -- love -- which resulted in Warrior bonds "of ferocious intensity."

That's what the Spartans were after -- and that's what they achieved.

Do you need an agogé to have same-sex bonds?

No.

Lawrence and Gary, like Luke and Stephen, developed such bonds without an agogé.

But they were vulnerable -- very vulnerable.

And when attacked by "religiously" motivated parents -- they were destroyed.

Destroying a Spartan was a lot harder.

It took all the armed might of Persia to destroy the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae.

Which is something to think about.

Some months ago a young man -- or at least he said he was young -- wrote me to say that he didn't think our movement could succeed without a cataclysm "like another world war," which would divorce "suburban men away from their wives and mothers."

I was amused by that.

For those of you who are wondering, the truth is you don't need cataclysm for consciousness change.

Consciousness evolves and changes all the time -- with or without cataclysm.

However, to paraphrase the not-quite-late but still unlamented Donald Rumsfeld, "Cataclysm happens."

That's something you can count on.

That's one thing you can be sure of.

This young man is afraid to join the Alliance.

He thinks it will make him unpopular or some silliness like that.

He'd rather "compromise" now and then wait twenty years and write me when he's lost his hair and/or gone gray and has lots of wrinkles and at least the beginning of a paunch and beg me to help him find a "Frot buddy."

Who looks exactly like the guy he was in love with when they were both sixteen.

Dumb.

Under the present set-up, as Frances said to me, Men get crushed anyway.

The one chance our young man has of not getting crushed -- is joining the Alliance.

But still he hesitates.

He's one of those I'm-going-to-donate-soon bullshit artists.

Except he's not fooling me or anyone else.

Like I say, Dumb.

Because --

He could be a Bull.

Instead he's a bullshitter.

Instead of using the great and God-given gift of his balls, his Manhood -- he's relying on his asshole to get by in this life.

And he's getting nowhere.

The question is always -- How have you lived, how have you comported yourself?

You may get crushed -- people do get crushed despite their best efforts.

But that's when you need your Warrior brothers.

Because cataclysm happens.

Something the Spartans well understood.

Both their experience and their understanding of life was a lot more -- shall we say, explicit -- than our own.

Frances:

I think the ancients would look at our world with real wonder at how ignorant we are of nature, including our own.

Yes, they would.

That's correct.

The Spartans didn't wear the sort of self-imposed and hypocritical blinders we do.

Which is why, and through the agogé, the Spartans created a Warrior State which was able to withstand the challenges posed first by Persia and then by Athens, both of them dynamic, rich, and powerful -- indeed, cataclysmic -- empires.

Both of which established tyrannies at home and abroad.

And when Sparta was eventually defeated, though not conquered, by Thebes, that defeat came at least as much from within -- that is, from an abandoment of the pure eunomia -- as from without.

Besides which, the Thebans had emulated Sparta in many ways, not least in the creation of the Sacred Band -- a cadre of erotically-bonded Warriors.

The Sacred Band is what broke the Spartan line at Leuctra.

Leading some to remark, and Plutarch to record, that afterwards the Thebans had the air of schoolboys who had beaten their masters.

Do you understand?

When it came to erotic bonds between Warriors -- the Spartans were the masters.

They were the masters of the ways of Naked Valour.

They were the masters of the ways of Natural Masculinity.

But it took some work.

And some thought.

And some effort.

Lawrence:

Given the place and the opportunity, an agogé is a natural occurrence.

Unfortunately, that's not correct.

The agogé is natural in that it speaks to the Natural Masculinity within every man.

But it's not just place and opportunity.

To have an agogé, there cannot be, due to societal assumptions, any interference with the development of the male's Natural Masculinity.

Which includes his attraction to other males, which is NOT the property of some minority group, but rather the birthright of ALL MEN.

Once again, because you need to hear his words more than once, my foreign friend:

male sexual desire for men cannot be tied down to a minority group. Rather it is a universal male phenomenon, especially strong amongst masculine identified men

So -- I would say that "Given the place and the opportunity, males will naturally help other males to become Men."

Clearly, some elements of the agogé are universal.

Classicist W. G. Forrest, who disliked the Spartans, made that point when he said, in 1968, that some elements of the agogé are found in other, as he put it, "backward warrior tribes today."

The age-groups, the communal life, the initiation ceremonies, all had been handed down through generations as have similar institutions among the Masai in Kenya, the Zulus, or the Red Indians.

And of course, ignoring Forrest's racist contempt for so-called primitive cultures, from which he and we could learn much, there are commonalities.

But -- just because some of the elements of the agogé are present -- doesn't mean it's the agogé.

Yes, males will naturally form Warrior groups -- no question of that.

But, as we can see from gangs in our contemporary American inner cities and prisons, those groups can be highly dysfunctional.

And driven not by Natural Masculinity, but by social masculinity -- what I call pseudo-masculinity.

Fact is, social or pseudo-masculinity in our society is a heterosexualized construct or idea of masculinity.

It is not True or Natural Masculinity.

And yes, males will have sex with males -- as Lawrence and Gary did.

But the social construction put upon that sex matters.

Let's repeat that in caps:

THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION PUT UPON THAT SEX MATTERS.

As Lawrence well knows.

Further, the form that the sex takes, as I explain in my reply to NW's latest post -- our American forced Hetero-sexualized society --

depends upon the social construction.

A very important point, and one I hope all of you will come to understand and appreciate.

In the case of Lawrence and Gary, the *form* of the sex between them was never socially constructed -- and for that they were very lucky;

BUT -- at the end, the FACT of the sex between Lawrence and Gary was socially constructed --

and to their very great detriment.

Social construction matters.

A lot.

To repeat what I said before:

To have an agogé, there cannot be, due to societal assumptions or social constructions, any interference with the development of the male's Natural Masculinity.

Naked Valour.

Natural Masculinity.

The conditions must be created in which they'll flourish.

Lawrence:

I was thinking of it as a complicated systems of rigorous education and planning. But it mostly appears to be a set of loose boundaries to hold in what young men will gravitate to naturally and build up on their own, given a bit of instruction, advice and freedom.

Let's take a look.

"I was thinking of it as a complicated systems of rigorous education and planning."

The Spartans claimed it was rigorous.

The ancients believed it was rigorous.

How rigorous it was compared to life for kids today -- I don't know.

Probably -- very rigorous.

Extremely rigorous.

Because after all, the survival of the citizens of Sparta and of the Spartan state depended upon the rigors of the agogé.

"But it mostly appears to be a set of loose boundaries to hold in what young men will gravitate to naturally and build up on their own"

Okay.

the "what young men will gravitate to naturally" part is correct.

"and build up on their own,"

Yes, some of that too is true.

"given a bit of instruction, advice and freedom."

But the instruction and advice and *structure* are important.

VERY important.

Adult Male Spartans -- the Spartiatai -- the Homoioi -- the Equals -- were greatly involved with the agogé.

In effect, a Spartan boy had many fathers -- who watched over what was going on.

Any Spartiate could, for example, interrupt a fight.

And may the gods have pity on those who wouldn't stop fighting when a Spartiate told them to.

Similarly, the bull-calves were invited and expected to participate in the Men's messes.

To be engaged with them conversationally at those messes.

To be tested amd taught by them there.

In addition, at least one of the ephors was in charge of the agogé in any given year.

Ephor means both "overseer" and "guardian."

That's what the ephors did.

They were the guardians and overseers of the agogé and the eunomia.

Yes, there was a youth, called the Leader of the Bull-Calves, whom we may wish to think of as Lawrence's eldest, but that youth was being overseen by at least one ephor specifically, and then the rest of the Spartiates.

The Warriorhood - as Redd would put it.

That Lawrence's sons are as well-adjusted as they are is due I would suspect to an interaction between them and the boundaries Lawrence sets and the example Lawrence gives -- and their all-male group.

So, Lawrence has been giving them instruction and advice -- and has, presumably, structured their freedom as well.

In addition, there was the impact of Lawrence's wife leaving the family, which may have made the boys more self-reliant too.

Remember: the Spartans used a system of privation to toughen the youths.

And privation also heightens the bonds between Men.

Finally, Lawrence said this:

Two things I now know that I did not a short month ago before finding the Man2Man Alliance:

1) Frot is a natural occurrence. A natural progression. Frot is in Everyman's Design. In his Code. In his Instincts. Deny your Design at your own peril.

2) Like Frot, a Warrior Community is a natural. Assemble a collection of young men in an outdoor setting with Elders as advisors and teachers -- and an agogé, a Warrior Community rises up naturally, instinctually. Just try to defy it!

Let's take a look:

1) Frot is a natural occurrence. A natural progression. Frot is in Everyman's Design. In his Code. In his Instincts. Deny your Design at your own peril.

Right.

There's no question that Frot is a natural occurrence and a natural progression.

An occurrence and progression which Lawrence and Gary and many other Men of the Alliance have experienced.

BUT --

that occurrence can be stopped and that progression destroyed by social constructs -- like analism.

That's what's happening today.

Kids are now "coming out" -- that is, self-identifying as "gay" -- at an average age of 13.5 years.

Those kids go on the net, google "gay," and what they see is buttfuck.

What they hear is tops and bottoms.

If they have sex ed at school, chances are they "learn" about "oral, vaginal, and anal intercourse" -- and condoms.

This is a huge problem.

I encounter many young people who have no idea that Men can make Love cock2cock.

They just don't know it.

Because before that natural occurrence and natural progression has had a chance, it's been interrupted by analism.

So what Lawrence is saying is correct -- in a state of Nature.

But we're not living in state of Nature.

We live rather in a state of human struggle.

Lawrence is also correct to say "Deny your Design at your own peril."

That's what the "gay" community has done.

And the toll has been terrible.

Yet the culture which brought about that toll becomes every day -- stronger.

That's our reality.

Lawrence:

2) Like Frot, a Warrior Community is a natural. Assemble a collection of young men in an outdoor setting with Elders as advisors and teachers -- and an agogé, a Warrior Community rises up naturally, instinctually. Just try to defy it!

Those are great and fighting words, but the fact is, you have to have elders to provide the structure.

We posit -- correctly -- that there's a limit to the cultural construction of masculinity.

That there exists, independent of culture, a Natural Masculinity demarked by male-male aggression and male-male attraction.

Because these are universals among Men.

BUT -- that True and Natural Masculinity is constantly under attack by cultural aka social aka pseudo-masculinity.

Which seeks to construct the male in its image.

For purposes of power and social control.

So -- for Natural Masculinity to flourish, all-male groups, groups which have been relieved of their pseudo-masculine prejudices, must be brought into being and used to nurture the Natural Masculinity of Men.

That's what the Spartans did.

That's what the agogé did.

It trained Men in the ways of Naked Valour, and so nurtured their Natural Masculinity.

And it will again.

Let's end with a few more pics.

Here are some Spartan so-called kings (on the left) and a Spartan hoplite -- in an artist's conception.

Notice the nudity; and the highly decorated shields and helmets.

The artist's conception is based on sculptures and vase paintings like these:

This Spartan Hoplite Warrior wears a helmet, bell-shaped cuirass, and greaves on his lower legs, and has his genitals proudly displayed.

While these Lakonian Warriors are nude except for helmets and greaves; notice that the helmets of the Warriors on the right match the helmet of the Warrior on the right in the artist's conception.

And then we come to a modern-day Warrior.

Notice his Spartan facial hair:

Finally, there's this sculpture, which may represent Tydeus' son Diomedes, or perhaps Achilles.

The testicles are to scale and prominent -- as they would be on a living human being.

And they're proudly displayed.

The testicles are what make this Man Fight.

And Love.

Which the Greeks understood.

They encapsulate the two most basic attributes of his Natural Masculinity.

Which the Greeks also understood.

The agogé was constructed to enable Men to do both:

to Fight their fellows; and

to Love their fellows.

In a manner which made both acts sacred.

If we are to restore the agogé -- we must do the same.

As Lawrence said in his email:

A Warrior Community. Society done right. Sanity restored. Salvation offered.

That's right.

A True Warrior Community will be

Society done right.

Sanity restored.

Salvation offered.

Salvation attained.

Thank you Lawrence.

You're a true Warrior.

Bill Weintraub

November 7, 2007

© All material Copyright 2007 by Bill Weintraub. All rights reserved.

Robert Loring

Re: agogé The Spear-Points of Young Men Blossom There

11-8-2007

All I can say about this post, Bill, is WOW! It is absolutely excellent and very well done. I agree with you that in our heterosexualized society all we have is a pseudo-masculinity and in such a society it is not possible to have an agogé since our society does not sanction M2M sex or relationships. Hopefully, one day that will change but probably in a society that will succeed our present one. I really do not see it happening in our present homophobic, unnatural=natural society today.

One thing that stands out, among many others, in your post is that you stated a man needs his warrior brothers when he is crushed and you are absolutely right. In fact, most men who come to this site come here crushed because they lost something they truly loved when they were young (ie: their frot buddy). That's why I've commented before that so many men today are already defeated in their own minds and they can thank society for that defeat.

Bill Weintraub

Re: agogé The Spear-Points of Young Men Blossom There

12-12-2007

Thank you Robert.

Guys, I'm sorry this reply has been so long delayed; but Patrick is very ill.

Partly as a consequence of being delayed, it's a long reply.

And it's somewhat rambling.

But I hope you'll read through it.

And to help, I've put up headers throughout the reply.

A large part of my purpose in writing this reply was and is to sustain hope among you.

You must have hope and you must have dreams.

Without hope and without dreams -- Men cannot live.

So -- one of the things we talk about in this reply is a Warrior Community.

This is an idea which is still in its infancy.

But there's sufficient interest that I want to keep it before the Alliance.

That said, a Warrior Community may not be right for you personally.

I want to emphasize that there are other options, options we've talked about for years and which we'll continue to pursue --

Including Regional Chapters, which you really should be doing.

But a Community is also something we need to think about.

Because you have to understand what Men once had; and what YOU can have again.

You have to understand what's been taken from you; and what's YOURS to reclaim.

You must understand those things.

And think about them.

And, yes, dream about them.

Today, I heard a sad story from NW.

And that story is one of the reasons I'm going forward with this reply, even though with Patrick so sick working on it has been a tremendous effort.

This is the story:

A few days ago a friend of NW's was killed in an automobile accident.

We'll call him Jim.

Jim was a gay-identified man.

Jim, who was in his 30s, and had therefore come out into his city's analist subculture at its peak, was nevertheless very curious about wrestling and mixed martial arts.

And that's how NW and Jim met -- through that interest.

Here's what NW said about Jim:

Jim and I had spent the night together just a few weeks ago.

Jim was not some phony fake macho guy. He was REALLY interested in learning wrestling for the man2man body contact and feel of aggression of the activity.

I showed him some frot in bed including the guard position used in modern MMA submission fights and submission grappling. And I demonstrated some wrestling rides and holds for "controlling your man" while in the top position. I always try to make introductory learning fun for a new never-experienced-aggression-before-male like him.

I told him that this totally naked wrestling was what our ancestors did up until the advent of Christianity.

I explained to him--and I think he totally understood--that the "gay community" aspect of anal intercourse was totally out of sync as well as physiologically wrong and Psychologically wrong. And that it was in contrast to normal male aggression and intimacy.

He listened to it all with fascination, concentration and intensity. He had the intelligence---to be a wrestler. He wanted so much to cross that line into complete maleness.

Right in bed I showed him some grape-vines, butt rides, and butt drags like we called them in wrestling practices. I reached in for his ball sack from the back and said this is officially called a butt drag, but all wrestlers eventually learn to think of it as a ball grab (even if they can't talk about it). I said, "Don't do it too much to the man or the guy might stand up and sock you in the face for it, or he might insist on going home with you after the match." He laughed.

(You see the Turks, doing olive oil wrestling, grab balls all the time. And males learn to do it in this sport to "hurt" their opponent a little bit, WITHOUT injuring each other's Man-hood. It's ALL about control, technique and the lack of fear to engage another male, to engage another male in anything.

Men learn from this full body contact aggression to respect each other with care, RIGHT DOWN TO THEIR BALLS.)

Jim listened to every word of it. He was fascinated with the whole aspect of mingling intimacy and aggression into one. He, like most males in America today, had been deprived of that necessary and beautiful component of Man-hood.

BTW I'm buying some 10x10 wrestling mats today to add to the ones I have. I need to start a little wrestling club....for guys like him.

So -- what have we got?

A guy named Jim who was gay-identified but Masculine.

And who "was fascinated with the whole aspect of mingling intimacy and aggression into one."

But who didn't know how to do it.

Because: "He, like most males in America today, had been deprived of that necessary and beautiful component of Man-hood."

Nonetheless, says NW, Jim "wanted so much to cross that line into complete maleness."

That's what EVERY MALE WANTS.

And that's why -- We will continue this Fight.

And why -- We will Win.

But -- it's too late for Jim.

He's dead.

And all he knew of Men Loving Men while he was alive -- was analism.

Which is no love at all.

Jim was supposed to go to his first UFC-style fight in just a few days.

Won't happen now.

You need to understand that.

Life is fleeting.

And dillying and dallying -- gets you nowhere.

So: this reply is for Jim -- and all the Men like him.

Who are "fascinated with the whole aspect of mingling intimacy and aggression into one."

Who have "been deprived of that necessary and beautiful component of Manhood."

And who want "so much to cross that line into complete maleness."

"Intimacy and aggression" says NW.

Later in this post NW talks about the "Intimacy of Aggression."

For MEN, there are two core Male Intimacies: the Intimacy of Aggression and the Intimacy of Affection.

Aggressive Intimacy and Affectional Intimacy.

MEN need BOTH.

The agogé understood that -- and gave them both.

And so must we.

We must show Men how to have both Male Aggression and Male Affection in their lives -- together, and again.

Now, let's talk about Robert Loring, who posted the first reply to this thread.

Guys, for those of you who are new to the Alliance, Robert Loring is the author of

The Warrior God;

Brothers of the Heart;

Jesus and the Truth;

The Ultimate Defeat; and

Warrior Christendom --

among many, many very very very very very important posts and articles on this Man2Man Alliance site.

There's a list of Robert's articles following The Warrior God; please, guys, take some time to familiarize yourself with Robert's work, which is uniformly excellent and which will help you.

And, by the way, Robert first brought up the crucial concept of guys being "defeated in their own minds" in his reply to Warrior Jim's Society's Procrustean Bed -- like all Robert's replies, it's excellent, and again, important reading.

As are ALL the posts on this board.

If a post is on this board, it's because it's important.

Important as a statement of personal truth for the guy who posted;

And important because it can and will help YOU.

Yes -- YOU.

So -- read all the posts.

They're in Warriors Speak, starting here, and going forward in time.

Sure, there's a lot to read.

But that reading will help you.

More than you can imagine.

And more than anything else you'll encounter anywhere else in the culture today.

Now, I'm glad to see from the responses I've been getting to this post, that people understand what I'm saying.

I was concerned that they wouldn't.

But they do.

Let's take a look:

I -- Flesh and Spirit

As I was writing this post, I was thinking of Bill G's wonderful post of four years ago, What It Means To Be a Man;

in which he said that we here express, "The great ideals of the Homeric world, and what it means to be a man, not a poser."

"The great ideals of the Homeric world"

Very important.

Lycurgus -- the maybe-mythical-and-maybe-not Spartan Lawgiver who created the Eunomia and the agogé -- was inspired by the great ideals of the Homeric world.

How can I be so sure?

Because all of the ancient world was inspired by those ideals.

Homer was the Bible of that world.

And Plato was its philosopher.

And it is to Men like Homer and Plato that we need look.

We need to be inspired by the great ideals of the Homeric world -- just as those ideals inspired our Spartan Warrior brothers.

Who understood what it meant to be a Man -- not a poser.

In his novel Julian, Gore Vidal, attributing the words to the 4th century AD pagan philosopher Libanius, says that "Homer sang of a pristine world of flesh and spirit."

A pristine world -- uncorrupted, noble, and pure.

Of flesh and spirit.

A Homeric World.

A World of Warriors.

Achilles bandages Patroclus' wound.

Achilles slays Hector.

Priam asks Achilles for Hector's body.

Ajax returns the body of the fallen Achilles to the Greek camp.

A Warrior is mourned and remembered on an Athenian stele.

The world that you see is pristine.

In flesh and in spirit.

Clean and pure.

Uncorrupted and noble.

Heroic.

What you see are Men in their Natural State.

Natural.

A World of Naked Valour.

A State of Natural Masculinity.

Instead, the society is sanctioning a HETEROSEXUALIZED form of "sex" between Men, in which, as NW so brilliantly pointed out, one male becomes the female-male and the other the male-male;

and relationships aka marriages between males too are structured on a heterosexualized model.

"Marriage."

Now, I'm "married" to Patrick.

But we're not a male-female couple.

What we are -- are two fierce Men who Love each other.

We're not "in a marriage" in the conventional 20th / 21st century heterosexual sense.

Rather, we are bonded Warrior Brothers.

What Robert has called Cymbrogi.

Once again, our society serves the heterosexualized lie.

Heterosexuality.

A lie, a fraud.

In fact, in terms of the sheer numbers of people affected, heterosexuality is without question the greatest fraud ever perpetrated on the face of the planet.

We serve the TRUTH.

The historical and cross-cultural TRUTH about MAN-LOVING MEN.

One thing that stands out, among many others, in your post is that you stated a man needs his warrior brothers when he is crushed and you are absolutely right. In fact, most men who come to this site come here crushed because they lost something they truly loved when they were young (ie: their frot buddy). That's why I've commented before that so many men today are already defeated in their own minds and they can thank society for that defeat.

Absolutely right.

In this society, MEN get crushed.

And they get crushed when they are YOUNG, and DEFENCELESS.

Lawrence and Gary, Luke and Stephen, Robert and Ted, Randy and Gary, Studcuddler and his cousin -- and many many many others -- CRUSHED -- when young and defenceless.

And Robert is absolutely right that to lose something and someone you truly love when you are young and unable to understand what has happened -- will leave you DEFEATED IN YOUR OWN MINDS.

But suppose that when you were young, you didn't have a Frot buddy who you lost -- suppose instead that all you had was a dream.

A Warrior Dream.

A Warrior Dream of Love between MEN.

And you were told over and over and over again that that dream made you immoral, immature, diseased and sick.

Suppose you were told over and over again that you were living in a fantasy land, that your dream could never be lived, your hopes never realized, that your love could never exist.

That too would leave you defeated in your own mind.

Now:

The purpose of this site and this work is to UNDO that defeat.

And to see to it that the NEXT GENERATION of young Men are NOT defeated in that way.

We do that by serving the TRUTH.

By speaking the TRUTH.

Along those lines, here are some comments from Frances:

Your agogé piece was brilliant and beautiful. I view it as a bookend to your Escaping the Trap of Heterosexualization piece. In that piece you talked about how we got here, and touched on where to go from here. In the agogé piece, you're laying it out starkly. Here's the way. Not easy, but essential. If guys can't be empowered by the Spartan ideal I don't know what it would take, or if such males would be even worth the effort.

...

Sparta, and that ideal, really puts in your face the idea of What the Hell is Manhood? Guys need to think of that. And, when they look around them at guys in our world who live their straight, or gay, little lives they should be able to figure out that proud MAN-LOVING Spartans were the real deal. And, they fucked women occasionally, because we've got to keep going as a race. But, Spartan women weren't exactly suffering. They were among the most ardent supporters of the Spartan way of life. Little surprise there when you look at what their sisters in Athens had to put up with. And, of course they had passionate sexual same-sex relationships themselves.

...

Yes, Novus Spartia cannot wait on cataclysms for its birth. But, it probably won't be hurt by one. I read something about how the terrain of Lakonia, I guess it's called, made it very defensible. So, if you ever can buy land, I hope you keep that in mind too.

I have no doubt about making it with sustainable agriculture. ... The thing is is that all the outside supports in the world outside could crumble. Having way too many people is going to lead to war for resources and fierce competition. We're talking combat. No, I'm not a survivalist, but I think it's probably a reality waiting for us. Guys in Novus Spartia and its life-giving women will be the lucky ones.

Again, the agogé piece was very powerful, and that incitement to nude combat reminded me of Patrick "plucking" ( I think he wrote) at Paco's shirt.

Right -- here's from Patrick v Paco:

i reached over and plucked at his tank top shirt...he smiled brightly and peeled it off exposing his torso for me. he was totally ripped,... his abs, chest and shoulder muscles stood out like something from a wall chart in an anatomy class...slim, but thickly muscled.

Patrick wouldn't fight Paco if he wore a shirt.

Paco wanted to fight.

And Paco knew what Patrick wanted.

So Paco took off his shirt -- and they fought.

Neither Patrick nor Paco spoke the other's language.

But they both understood:

nudam incessare pugnam

incite to nude combat

They stripped and they fought.

And experienced yet another Masculine passage through rage to love.

Let's get back to Frances' main points.

I view [this post] as a bookend to your Escaping the Trap of Heterosexualization piece. In that piece you talked about how we got here, and touched on where to go from here. In the agogé piece, you're laying it out starkly. Here's the way. Not easy, but essential. If guys can't be empowered by the Spartan ideal I don't know what it would take, or if such males would be even worth the effort.

Right.

Heterosexualization has gotten us where we are.

It's a trap.

For Men -- and for Women.

We have to escape that trap.

To do that, we have to look at what's worked in the past.

The agogé worked.

It created the conditions in which Men's Natural Masculinty could and did flourish.

agogé

It's the way.

Frances:

Sparta, and that ideal, really puts in your face the idea of What the Hell is Manhood? Guys need to think of that. And, when they look around them at guys in our world who live their straight, or gay, little lives they should be able to figure out that proud MAN-LOVING Spartans were the real deal. And, they fucked women occasionally, because we've got to keep going as a race. But, Spartan women weren't exactly suffering. They were among the most ardent supporters of the Spartan way of life. Little surprise there when you look at what their sisters in Athens had to put up with. And, of course they had passionate sexual same-sex relationships themselves.

Right.

Sparta freed Men to be Men and Women to be Women.

Today no one is free.

Instead, what people have today are "little lives."

Built on consumerism.

And nothing else.

"Proud MAN-LOVING Spartans were the real deal."

Right.

The real deal.

Not posers.

These MAN-LOVING MEN had a Warrior Ideal of loyalty to each other and to Sparta; and of service to the Spartan Warrior State.

And, when necessary, those same MAN-LOVING MEN would sacrifice themselves for all of Greece -- which is to say, for the Free World as it existed in their time.

So their vision was far bigger than just Sparta.

And towards the end, just before the Roman conquest, they sought to extend that vision to all of Greece.

I've tried to get you guys to do Regional Chapters.

So that you wouldn't forever be defeated in your own minds.

You don't want to do them.

I could say, as I have, that that's your loss.

But the fact is -- we have to do something.

Guys find -- "stumble upon" is the usual term -- the site, and they're full of enthusiasm.

They think they've finally found a community, a home.

Well, it may be, but it's an internet community.

Very limited.

Robert says that the vast majority of you have been defeated in your own minds --

and that you can thank society for that defeat.

That's correct.

The cultural forces which weigh upon and CRUSH you -- to use Robert's word -- are immense.

And absent real-world support, it's very difficult for you to resist them.

And very difficult for you to truly change.

Again, Robert uses the word "crushed."

And that's right.

You're battered over and over and over again by those societal forces of heterosexualization and sexual orientation.

You're hit with them over and over and over again.

Like a fighter on the ropes, you're bludgeoned into submission.

Until you have no will to resist.

Robert has said, Change the thinking, change the behavior.

And that too is correct.

But you have to be in a PLACE where you *can* think.

Where you can resist.

If you're constantly being hit -- hit and hit and hit -- with no one there to help and support you -- you eventually crumble.

Emasculated and unmanned, you're made ready for what Robert properly calls The Ultimate Defeat.

You need a PLACE.

A place where you can think.

Where you can resist.

Where you can LIVE.

I've been working with NW aka Naked Wrestler for years.

Years.

I've talked to him on the phone for years.

It's only recently though, that he's really understood that he's not "gay," that he's a MAN, that the gay-straight categories are a result of heterosexualization --

AND that he's been able to make the connection between his life and the lives of MEN in the ancient world.

Now he does understand.

But it's taken a very long time.

And he has two huge advantages -- he trains in Fight Sport; and he lives with a pro fighter, who fortunately, is not an American and not a puritan, and whose Masculinity is a lot closer to Natural than you ordinarily find in this country.

So NW now understands.

His letters to me are truly luminous with understanding.

They're a joy to read.

But it's taken a long time.

Too long.

Why has it taken so long?

Because NW lives in our heterosexualized culture.

And, like I said, it's very difficult to escape that culture.

Fact: Whether you're gay-identified or straight-identified, heterosexualization hampers and hinders you at every turn.

If you read this board, and if you reflect honestly on your own life, you know that's true.

Yet that heterosexualized culture, as destructive as it is, is all that you know.

Or put better, all that you're *allowed* to know.

It surrounds you.

And binds you.

Binds you hand and foot.

It binds you and blinds you.

Blinds you to the truth.

And leaves you constantly, as Robert said, crushed and defeated in your own mind.

Battered, crushed, and defeated -- like a fighter on the ropes.

It's difficult -- almost impossible for most of you -- living in that culture, and taking all those hits, to see your way clear for even a few moments.

And even when you do, chances are that you're pulled and pummeled back into the culture time and time again.

Not good.

That's why it's taken so long, despite all his advantages, for NW.

And again, NW has advantages that most guys just don't have.

VII -- Fighting Back

I used the metaphor of a fighter on the ropes.

In Fight School, you're taught how to fight your way off the ropes -- and out of a corner.

Which means that NW understands -- not just in his mind, but IN HIS BODY -- what it means to FIGHT BACK.

He knows what it means to take a punch -- and to throw a punch -- and to CONNECT with that punch.

He knows what it means to get hit in the face -- and to HIT BACK.

The vast majority of you don't.

What's more, he's been *trained* in HOW to hit -- to fight -- back.

The vast majority of you haven't.

And he's been *taught* that it's RIGHT to fight back.

That his Male Aggression is HONORABLE and WORTHY.

HONORABLE and WORTHY

The vast majority of you don't understand that.

Example:

In 2004 a man wrote to me, characterizing himself as having been an activist in the gay community in the 1970s and 80s and into the present, and saying that he'd founded a chapter of Integrity, which is an organization for gay-identified Episcopalians, in his native town.

He stated that he agreed with us about anal -- which he's never liked.

And in particular, this guy, who's about ten years older than me, noted that he'd lived through the 60s and 70s and knew that what we're saying about the shift in sexual fashion -- is the truth.

Here's part of his letter:

For decades, I have been put off by the growing popularity of anal sex. I have always been afraid of it and thought it to be unwise. Even before the advent of HIV, it created health risks which were best avoided. I'm old enough to remember when it was not popular.

You may wish, if possible, to check the archives of The Advocate to verify what I am saying.

In the 1970s, the classifieds section of The Advocate was not a separate publication, i.e., the classifieds consisted of the back pages of the same publication. In addition to advertisements for models and masseurs, there were personal advertisements which specifically specified what approaches to sex were preferred by the advertiser. One thing was totally clear: anal was in a small minority; oral was in a large majority.

A survey at the time (I don't know exactly how it was taken) showed that the majority of gay men were not into anal.

When I moved in 1978 to San Diego, I used to get Update, which was a gay periodical published in San Diego. Even then, oral was more popular than anal. I couldn't state exactly when anal became more popular than anything else, but I believe that the trend was well established by the early 1980s.

There is no doubt that AIDS would be a rare disease in the U.S. if anal were not popular.

No kidding.

So -- this is a guy who doesn't like anal, who considered anal to be, years ago, "unwise," and who clearly remembers that it didn't used to be popular.

And who thought it worthwhile to write to me and say so.

At the same time, this is a guy who's been very active in a very mainstream, very establishment, gay organization -- Integrity.

And in his 2004 letter, he felt constrained to say,

The warrior concept doesn't really do anything for me, but if others like it, I'm not about to object.

Okay.

That was in 2004.

A few days before Thanksgiving -- late in 2007 -- I got another letter from him.

Now, he's clearly been keeping up with the site, because he mentions that he'd lived in a third-world country for a number of years, in which men could freely put their arms around each other, hold hands, and hug, "without arousing suspicions about their sexuality."

And he notes, "as pointed out in your web site, that was possible in the U.S. til near the middle of the 20th century."

Actually, we didn't say that, but it's close enough.

But then he says -- and please bear with me --

The push towards the warrior image and fighting on your web site is somewhat off-putting to me. It seems to me that it is possible to be masculine without engaging in violence.

AARGH!!!!!!!!!!

I've spent eight years talking about the difference between aggression and violence.

And of course at no place on the site do we endorse or recommend violence.

Do we?

But what you're hearing is the voice of the gay establishment:

"Any expression of male aggression -- is bad."

"It's violence."

Now -- this guy is almost seventy years old.

He's been out for at least forty years, and maybe fifty.

Yet he's never been in a relationship.

Is it possible, and indeed likely, that if he'd acknowledged and honored his own innate and biological Natural Male Aggression -- instead of hewing so close to the party line all these years -- he would have had a lover?

Yes.

Because males who are attracted to other males -- that is to say, ALL males -- are attracted to Masculinity.

And, as my foreign friend says, "Fighting Spirit is the hallmark of Masculinity."

So this is a guy who's been out for four decades or more, and who had the courage, at some point, to be in some way an activist in the gay community --

and who's been utterly shafted by that community and its dominant ideology of anal, promiscuity, and effeminacy.

Doesn't matter.

Whenever he writes to me, he feels that he must put distance between himself and the Warrior Ideal.

Even though, as he admits in his more recent letter,

Not that violence [sic] is always wrong; decades ago, I used physical means to defend a very shy guy who was being harassed by four other guys, after verbal means failed.

After the confrontation, those guys were afraid of me. Actually, I didn't even remember what I did since seeing what they were doing so incensed me that my brain ceased to function normally.

Now, you may say to me, Well, Bill, you could talk to him about that incident and help him see that male aggression is not ipso facto a bad thing.

To which I reply, Indeed I could.

I could spend the next ten years emailing back and forth with him and guys like him on the web, and then I too will be seventy years old --

And we won't be any closer to realizing our goals.

Will we?

NO.

Because every time I score a point with this guy -- and all the guys like him -- via email, the culture in which he lives will contradict me two or three thousand times.

Actually more like ten thousand times.

So it's all Bambi meets Godzilla.

In which I get to be Bambi.

Not my life's ambition.

Think about NW.

I said that NW's been taught that it's Honorable and Worthy to Fight Back.

He's spent many years in a social milieu that supports his fighting back.

Our gay Episcopalian has not.

He was successful in the one fight he had.

But there was no one there to interpret it for him and to support him in his success.

Instead, he believes that his exercise of a basic Male INSTINCT -- to defend the weak -- was, fundamentally, wrong.

Because it was "violent."

He needs to be in a milieu in which he is told -- not once -- but repeatedly -- that Fighting is Honorable and Aggression Worthy.

And that Victory is to be celebrated.

Sidebar:

Life lessons:

When Patrick was six years old, he was playing outside on a warm day, wearing just shorts and flip-flops, when a neighborhood kid of the same age swung at him with a piece of broken glass.

Patrick grabbed him by the hair and punched him in the face, till he ran away.

The kid's big brother -- considerably bigger -- returned in his place and pushed Patrick down into an areaway filled with broken glass.

So Patrick was covered with broken glass.

Patrick's aunt, who was black, saw what happened, pulled Patrick out of the glass, and complained to the parents of the other kids.

Who responded with a string of anti-Irish and anti-black epithets.

Patrick's father, who had a fearsome reputation as a fighter, then appeared; the offending parents immediately ran into their house and locked their door.

Patrick's father warned them to leave Patrick alone, and then took Patrick home.

When they got there, and after Patrick's mom had removed all the broken glass from Patrick's shirtless body, Patrick's father hit him -- in the mouth.

Patrick said, What's that for?

And his father responded, A little bit of pain isn't going to kill you.

The lesson was this:

The worst thing in life isn't getting hurt.

It's being afraid.

The worst thing in life isn't getting hurt.

The worst thing in life -- is not fighting back.

Fighting isn't free.

You always get hurt in a fight;

But if when attacked, you Fight Back, you come out of the Fight with your Manhood intact.

Now, no doubt many of you are appalled by Patrick's father's striking his son.

And we can, if we wish, fault his parenting skills.

Though Patrick is actually a very well-adjusted guy with great love for both his father and mother.

Fact is, they lived in a very rough neighborhood.

And neither Patrick nor his father are big men.

They're actually below the average height, and though they're large-boned, they're not heavy, so they don't look it.

Again, they're both gifted with a natural athleticism, and with a bodily structure which gives their punches a tremendous wallop.

But just by looking at them -- you wouldn't know that.

In a tough neighborhood, a bully looking for a target would find someone like Patrick very attractive.

Which his father knew.

Which is why his father wanted to be sure that Patrick would fight not just a boy his size -- but a bigger boy as well.

Fight him with such ferocity -- that the bigger boy would never attack again.

Over the years, what Patrick's father taught him was to go all out in a fight.

You have to fight, he said, as though you're going to kill the other guy.

You won't succeed in doing that.

But if you fight like that, you'll never have to fight the same guy twice.

Even if you lose, you'll inflict so much damage, that he'll never bother you again.

That's the truth guys.

Of course Patrick and his father were talking about street fights.

Which neither Patrick's father, nor Patrick, nor we, in any way glorify.

Patrick eventually sought out training in martial arts.

As did I.

We pay a lot of attention to martial arts and to mixed martial arts (MMA) in the Alliance, and for a reason -- the martial arts in general are empowering; while mixed martial arts in particular have a distinct relationship to a core element of ancient Greek athleticism.

Of course mixed martial arts is skin-on-skin -- not nude, but then, we're living not in pagan Greece, but in puritan America.

But there's another, and more important element, and it's this:

Mixed martial arts fighting is what comes closest in our era to capturing the Greek idea and ideal of the Agon -- the contest -- which the Greeks defined, as I noted earlier, as one man's strenuous physical effort to overcome another.

That's what you see in mixed martial arts:

One man's strenuous physical effort to overcome another.

Conducted, generally speaking, in an atmosphere of male camaraderie and good fellowship, which is fostered by the dojo and the fight school, the modern-day equivalents of the palaistrai.

And which treats Male Aggression as Honorable and Worthy.

Of course MMA is not ancient Greece.

Not only is there no nudity; but there are no herms -- which we can think of as godly phalluses and phallic gods -- in the fight schools; nor other than some maudlin religiosity, is there any overt sense of the Sacred in the Fight.

So the Fight Schools are not blessed with the presence of divine figures like Hermes and Pollux; and the competitions themselves are not religious festivals -- as they were in the ancient world.

Rather, the competitions are staged to benefit promoters -- businessmen and women.

And unlike in the ancient world, where palaistrai were supported either by the commune of the city-state itself or by rich individuals as a civic duty, most fight schools are privately owned and are for-profit ventures.

Not all -- Patrick's dojo was without walls and free for inner-city kids.

But most fight schools today are businesses, which have to make money.

That means that they're usually not homosocial environments, but are mixed gender, since the owners can't afford to turn away potential students.

And though there's plenty of amateurism at the local level, the fighters you see on TV are professionals -- they're paid.

So there are many differences.

But MMA is what, in our little corner of the space-time continuum, we've got in the way of -- and which comes closest to -- the classic Agon.

Does that mean that many people involved with MMA today have a sense of the idealism -- civic, communal, and religious -- associated with ancient Greek fight sports?

My answer is No, I wouldn't think so.

I've said that there's no overt sense today of the Fight as Sacred; nor is there any sense of the Fight School as a Sacred Space -- not at least in the Greek sense.

And that's important.

To be fair, dojos teaching a traditional Asian martial art, like karate, may well attempt to communicate some of the principles of Eastern spirituality to their students.

They may even tell the students that the dojo is a temple.

But that's within the context of a larger society which views fighting, fight sports, male aggression, and male sexuality -- as profane -- and religion as something which is restricted to church.

That's not the way it was for the Greeks -- for whom all of life was, as Frances has said, imbued with spirit.

And for whom Fighting in particular was Sacred.

So: by ancient standards -- and in this case, since we're speaking of the agogé, it's ancient standards which matter -- in MMA today there's no overt sense of the Fight as Sacred; nor is there any sense of the Fight School as a Sacred Space.

And, like I say, that's important.

Nor is there any true sense of the Fight School as a communal and civic space.

That too is important.

Nor is there any sense of the need for the Fight School to be a homosocial space.

When people do have those feelings today, not only are they likely to be unexpressed, but they're even more likely to be inchoate -- that's to say, felt, perhaps, but barely understood.

So: guys going to a fight school might to some degree think of the school as a communal space, but in reality it's not -- it's privately owned.

The owner might well have a sense of the school as performing a civic duty -- but he's also running a business, and has to constantly worry about his bottom-line.

Again, the owner might well recognize that there's a difference between single-gender classes and mixed-gender classes; but again, he has to maximize profits, and in addition there's not only the law but contemporary feelings about gender equity which he must take into account.

And while some guys -- no doubt most -- sense the eroticism underlying and accompanying the Fight, they dare not express that to their fellows;

nor would any dare say that, to them, the Fight is Sacred.

So the Agon, as we see it today, has been divorced from its Sacred, as well as its Communal, aspect.

That's a problem -- and I'll have more to say about it below.

Nevertheless, and given that right now we're concerned with helping Men to see once again that Male Aggression expressed in Fighting is Honorable and Worthy, and that Fighting Back is a necessary part of being a Man -- let's look at some more pix from mixed martial arts, which I remind you is a sport, pitting Men who choose to and are qualified to fight each other, against each other; and in which there are rules to protect and safeguard the fighters.

This is a mixed martial artist named Clay Guida.

He's had a big career.

And he's taken some hits:

But he doesn't quit.

As you can see in this fight with the formidable Josh Thomson.

Josh (on the left) and Clay are clowning affectionately at the weigh-in -- we've seen this before and it speaks to the good-natured quality of the sport and the fighters --

but as you'll see, the fight itself is a serious and grim undertaking, a strenuous struggle by one man to overcome another:

JoshxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxClay