What are homos looking for?

Well, the obvious answer is: other guys. But it's a bit more complex than that.

A Toronto Jungian analyst, Graham Jackson, wrote a set of rich books about archetypal patterns of male intimacy: The Secret Lore of Gardening (1991) and The Living Room Mysteries (1993). In typical (!) Jungian fashion, he produces a typology of male partnerships. He mixes clinical material with a lot of examples from myth and literature, both classic and popular. I have found it pretty true-to-life in its description of the attractions of opposites working themselves out in male-male relationships.

Secret Lore explores the varieties of "green" earth-bound men bonding with "yellow" solar and sky oriented men, the practical down-to-earth man with the man who lives for ideas and the Big Picture. Living Room investigates connections between "red" men, romantically passionate, aesthetically and emotionally gifted and "blue men" the rational patriarchal man of societal duty and status.

Another structural set that Jackson notes, and which informs both of the above patterns: the man-youth dyad and the dyad of the more equal comrades-in-arms. In a simpler way, father-son and brother-brother dyads. Kinship libido playing itself out in, for example, the classic Greek age structure of erastes-eromenos and in the primordial fellow love of Gilgamesh and Enkidu.

Other writers, such as Paul Rosenfels (who influenced Jackson) with his "assertive and yielding" dyads and Keith Swain's "alpha-beta" couples explore other aspects of unlikeness in same-sex bonding.

In my last relationship, with B, it was definitely of the comrades-in-arms type, brothers. No dads and no sons. I was both the more yellow to his green and the more red to his blue. And though he always assertively denied it, --thereby proving my point! -- the alpha.

In my relationship history, I am almost always yellower, but the red and blue position are both ones I have held. Not all constellations are the same, even for the same person.

Of course the deep feminine and masculine are always playing underneath here: Gaia and romance vs thinking and hierarchy. Assertive and alpha vs yielding and beta. The fundamental mysteries of Yin and Yang seem inescapeable.

And once you get to know them, why would you want to?

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Some notes some day on Innis and Jack in Brokeback Mountain, the homoerotic and not gay movie of 2006. Complex stuff there. And I am an unabashed fan both of the short story and the movie. (It is probably the most parodied film of all time; just check out YouTube. My psych take on that is that it was too close to the bone, pardon the phrase. People who were expecting to see or talking themselves into seeing two "gay cowboys" were confronted with something much more universal, precisely by being so unusual.) While I could truthfully say that both film and story move me, often to the point of tears, my actual experience is not so much being moved as being nailed, riveted, transfixed, in effect, so moved that I couldn't move. Is there a verb for that?

Update. There is a verb for that: transfixed, which means emotionally impaled and rendered immobile through awe, etc.  Checked the dictionary. Kinda figured I was not the first person to feel that way!