TRP's slant on homosexuality

[David Casseres]

Paul Di Filippo sez
>Blood and Vato in Vineland as lovers?

Yes, definitely, if we take a broad view of the word "love" so as to 
include the more profound sense of "friendship."  I think that Pynchon is 
greatly concerned with love between men, especially in Vineland and Mason 
& Dixon, and I think that passage in Gravity's Rainbow that conveys 
disgust at Mossmoon's faggotry but acknowledges an (imagined?) older and 
nobler tradition in the trenches of the Great War, while unquestionably 
homophobic and painfully naive, still shows a yearning for some kind of 
man-love that is somehow as absolute and all-encompassing as we allow 
heterosexual love to be.  Blood and Vato are comrades-in-arms, 
soldier-buddies from the fires of Vietnam, and are surely connected to 
that vision of true love, as if to reflect that maybe it isn't lost after 
all.


Cheers,
David