One of the most infuriating things about modern culture is the fact that there are no friendships that can be deep anymore without being labeled as potentially homosexual.
I want to be very clear about what I mean. I don't mean "Look at how friendly and close these two dudes are, they're probably gay." While there's definitely an element of that, behind it all, there's the element of the inevitability of homosexuality, even if it goes unspoken.
It's a weird narrative trap that effectively boils any relationship down to the sexual, no matter what underlies the bond.
In my latest YouTube video, I praised the writing about the character Lyonel Baratheon in the Game of Thrones spin-off show, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, which I also wrote about here on RedState.
Read: The Most Well-Written Masculinity I've Seen in a While Was Just Dropped on Us
To sum up, I loved what we got from Lyonel is a type of masculinity that leads through confidence and challenge. He may step on your foot to get you to dance one minute, then cut someone down the next for daring to try to hurt you. In the show, he quickly develops something of a brotherly bond with the main character, "Dunk," a hedgeknight of no renown. The two have that "extrovert/introvert" friendship that results in Lyonel volunteering to fight with Dunk against seven opponents.
It's a fantastic display of male friendship, and I do mean "male" particularly. The two are brothers in arms by the end of the show, with Lyonel asking Dunk to come back with him to his homeland to effectively be his best friend and serve as a knight.
Yet, in my comments section, I'd get these random takes that honestly frustrate me. I won't post them all, but one in particular made my eyes roll so hard they practically fell out of my head.
"It seems you missed that Lyonel is pretty seriously flirting with Dunk the entire series. I am glad you still see him as a masculine leader despite his sexuality."
Comment on my latest YouTube video.
— Brandon Morse (@TheBrandonMorse) March 2, 2026
Why are people like this? pic.twitter.com/E9efU0GInG
Many of the comments have this exact tone of certainty. To be clear, neither in the show nor in the books the show is based on does Lyonel exhibit any homosexual tendencies. In fact, he goes on to have two children.
But it's like these people cannot see a same-sex friendship without suspecting homosexuality being embedded somewhere in it. The concept of a bond forming without sexual undertones is wholly foreign to many people nowadays, whether they're in the alphabet soup or not.
This alienation from deep friendship isn't new either. Back in 2016, I penned an article for The Federalist over the obsession many had with the idea of Captain America having a homosexual relationship with Bucky Barnes. Something that has never happened in the movies or comics, but people couldn't stop demanding it happen, whether they were gay or not.
This wasn't just an internet trend either. Time, E Online, and the Los Angeles Times reported this, almost borderline advertising it as a movement.
Keep in mind that Steve Rogers and Barnes were war buddies. They were best friends from childhood who fought together during World War II, and continued to be best friends, bonded through thick and thin, well into the future. Their interactions with each other show a deeper understanding of each other's habits, histories, and humor. Indeed, there is love there, but there's nothing erotic about it.
You can see the same relationship between Frodo and Sam from The Lord of the Rings. Two men who were best friends before the adventure began, and were bonded so tightly through their mutual experience of carrying the fate of the world on their shoulders that their love for each other literally saved the world. However, just like Rogers and Barnes, there was nothing erotic about the love they had for each other. It was a very tight bond forged from a dire situation that very few others will ever experience.
And perhaps that's one of the reasons the homosexual agenda was able to creep into deep friendships. We live in a very safe time, and thus these deeper bonds are few and far between. It's a type of true friendship that has become a bit rarer, given the fact that we don't have to face the kind of troubles that would often cause us to form these kinds of relationships. We have friends, to be sure, but to see a friendship like the kind that forms between two war buddies might appear something like alien to the ignorant.
The only kind of closeness they can relate to is that of the erotic, which is wholly absent from the relationship they see before them.
C.S. Lewis noted this even in his time in his book The Four Loves, when he said:
Those who cannot conceive Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend. The rest of us know that though we can have erotic love and friendship for the same person, yet in some ways nothing is less like a Friendship than a love-affair.
Sadly, too many people cannot detach sexuality from friendship. I think the programming that was thrust upon modern society from the LGBTQ+ agenda being mainstreamed truly did a number on us all. Erotic love is, of all the loves, probably the most flimsy and fleeting. You can feel a rush of lust for someone for months, only to watch that lust fade over time, and you realize the "bond" you had with the person is literally skin deep, and you lose interest in them completely. You may even be repulsed by them.
But the love that comes from bonding with someone through shared experiences, especially dire ones, are bonds stronger than steel and lasts, very often, until both who share the bond are dead. I hate the fact that this seems to be an alien concept nowadays, and I can't help but wonder how many people go without a positive or supporting influence in their life because they have no concept of what a deep relationship looks like, or that one is entirely normal.
The modern LGBTQ+ movement left a lot of messes for us to clean up, but repairing the idea of deep friendship is definitely one of those things we need to address.
