I just finished rereading the Lord of the Rings, so this is an excellent time for me to run across this essay.

I was struck by the tender physical relationship between Frodo and Sam more this time than on any other read. Whether or not Tolkien intended for certain passages to be homoerotic, some of them seem almost impossible to read any other way.

I won’t elaborate a great deal, but I just have one thing to add, and that is the matter of Boromir’s brother Faramir. While Boromir himself was brought down by the consequences of his own unhealthy masculinity, his brother, who possesses far more feminine characteristics, thrives.

And isn’t it interesting that he marries a woman who rejects a woman’s role in society?

She doesn’t read as a lesbian, not having been intensely attracted also to Aragorn, but she does read as a gender rebel. A warrior princess.

She and Faramir make quite the queer couple, even if I’m probably using queer in its original sense of strange.