It's a sad commentary that our culture has become so feminized that an example of strong male friendship has come to be suspected of being a homosexual relationship.
Even Bert and Ernie aren't exempt! LOL!
You kind of ignore Rosie.
It might be helpful if you read Shippey's biography of JRRT, or some other biographies. Most of JRRT's chums died in the muck of trenches in WWI Europe. It was a miracle that JRRT survived it--but he did, just barely. I imagine the memory of clinging to dying comrades figures greatly in LOTR.
It says something sad about our modern culture--that it is so sex-crazed and effete-- that so many have sought to impose this interp upon Frodo and Sam.
I think Friend 1 is probably a closet gay. They are always looking for stuff like this to validate their lifestyle.
Some people will see gay overtones in nearly everything. I don’t know if they are afraid they might be closets queens, or they are just terrified of anything that may be even slightly homosexual related.
But, the reality is that it's a culture that simply cannot understand that the bonds of male friendship can be strong without sexual overtones. Happens in the military all the time. Those bonds are deep. Men would die for their brothers. But they wouldn't sleep with them.
The accusation is centuries old. The same folks who would see Sam and Frodo as gay, would say the same thing about David and Jonathan in the Bible.
What you saw in Sam and Frodo was loyalty and love. Not lust.
In the books, Sam's loyalty to Frodo begins as that of a servant to a master. Not servile, but proud to be of service. It also develops into friendship and love, in the Aristotelian or Ciceronian sense--the love of one virtuous person for another, out of admiration for their virtue. In the end, Sam ceases to be a servant, marries Rose, and sets up his own family, becoming mayor and rising above his "servant" status.
The movie is not, in my opinion, slanted toward homosexuality. But the great failure of the entire sequence of movies is to understand what it means to be a servant, a master, or a king. There is nothing demeaning about such "service." Christians serve God. Warriors serve their king.
Aragorn is a great king in disguise, but he never fully emerges in that role in the movie. Faramir is a true knightly leader, but in the movie he is virtually indistinguishable from his brother, Boromir.
In the book, Theoden has been persuaded by Grima Wormtongue that he is no longer up to the job of being a king. When Gandalf speaks to him, he reminds him of his duty, and Theoden rises out of his moral sleep into greatness again. Once more, the movie hardly understand this.
The great deficit is that the makers of the movie have some understanding of concepts like love and duty, but they can't put them in the proper aristocratic terms. Aristocracy can be snobbish and effete, but it can also be great and noble. Tolkien had a tremendous admiration for true aristocracy: kings, knights, great ladies. There is no way to translate that into modernist terms. If you can't understand that loyal service to a great leader is noble and good, then you can't understand the basics on which Tolkien builds his tales.
Tolkien was a medievalist. Much of this can be found in the idea of the medieval war band or comitatus. Understanding the nature of the comitatus, as reflected in Anglo Saxon poetry, is a good place to start.
Anytime you see people project contemporary political and cultural matters onto works of the past, you have to ask yourself what did the writer/artist really intend. Tell them that Tolkien was a staunch traditionalist Catholic and that there is zero chance of homosexual undertones. The characters are simple very good friends trying to save the world. In terms of mythological archetypes, Frodo is the hero and Sam is the helper.
Gay overtones is a load of crap - perverts have completely ruined normal human relationships where friendship and love do not have to involve sexual activity.
Now, if you look at someone/thing then you must want to copulate with them/it right then and there.
Sam worked for Frodo but they also had a friendship - a very important friendship that allowed the ring to meet it's appropriate destruction - a friendship that was more valuable then having something to rub your organs on.
We would have a better country if people could develop that kind of friendship without a misguided miniscule segment of society trying to ram sexual activity into it.
Of course, if all they think they are is an animal, then love doesn't exist anyway.
Your friend 1 has a small, distorted worldview. Not every friendship is sexual. Friend 2 is closer to correct - epsecially about projecting modern American culture on a story in order to judge it.
I'm guessing Friend 1 is a big fan of Judy Garland.
Sam & Frodo have a relationship that would look very, very odd for almost any two men to go thru today. But in the context of the book and the movies, it's not gay. At all. It works for what it is.
"I think the simple 'rustic' love of Sam and his Rosie (nowhere elaborated) is absolutely essential to the study of his character, and to the theme of the realtion of ordianry life (breathing, eating, working, begetting) and quests, sacrifice, causes, and the 'longing for Elves', and sheer beauty."
-JRRT, Letter to Milton Walman, probably written late 1951
(The Letters of JRR Tolkien, ed H. Carpenter, Houghton Miffin 2000)
I completely missed the whole gay hobbit aspect of the movie.
I have at six male friends that I am very close to and have known for over 20 years. I don't consider my relationship to any of them to be of a homosexual nature. They are like brothers, for which I would help in any way I could. As long as they didn't ask me to be gay! : )
if you had read the books you would have known that they are merely friends..as master and servant nothing more.
If you read the books, you'll see Sam was not overplayed, and the books have ZERO - NADA - homosexual tones of any kind.
When I was a teenageer and young adult, I read and re-read LOTR numerous times. Drew maps. Learned runes. The whole thing, could recite parts of the books.
Have the extended versions of the movie.
IMO, Frodo was miscast. In the book, he was not a squeamish, delicate youth. He was a stolid man of 50.
Aragorn was also miserably miscast. Mr. "No Blood for Oil" was not kingly. Theoden was kingly. Mr. "No Blood"s eyes are too close together, his voice not commanding, his presence too self absorbed, and his persona more of a loser/loner than a descendent of the line of kings. Especially his voice was bad.
Just a couple of thoughts.
At least Samwise never took Frodo's car keys away from him when Frodo started to display self-destructive behavior. That would definitely have sexual overtones which would (in my humble opinion) require some overzealous prosecutor to charge Samwise with battery.
Tolkien, a committed Roman Catholic, would have abominated the suggestion.
Ian McKellan who, sadly, is homosexual, said fairly emphatically that no homosexuality was implied in Frodo and Sam's relationship.
Now that was gay indeed.
There is another body of work that focuses on the friendship of two men, but by no means would you ever be able to call it a homosexual one : the two main characters of Patrick O'Brian's Master and Commander series (there are 20 books which you might say is just one big huge singular novel), Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin.
That's not to say that the slash culture on the internet hasn't tried to make something homosexual out of that relationship - all too often it is young women who have really warped ideas about relationships between men and women, much less between two members of the same sex.
But yes, your #2 friend was dead on : Frodo was, in Middle Earth terms a very well-to-do hobbit, probably akin to upper class (think Mr. Bingley of Pride and Prejudice) who had a good working relationship with some of the families of his servants, and one of those servants fell into the story by happenstance. A lot of times the newcomers to the stories don't pay much attention to what Tolkien says, and assume that Sam had always been a close friend of Frodo's, when I think in actuality, he got pulled into it, but because he so admired the Baggins and had such a good standing with them, the servant/master relationship evolved into a friendship...and Sam, being loyal and understanding of the tremendous journey, proves himself to be every bit a hero as the other characters.
Hope that makes sense.