Homoeroticism
The presence of same-sex desire, attraction, or charged intimacy in a text — whether the author intends it, winks at it, or simply leaves it open for the reader to draw out. In literature it runs the full range from the explicit to the deniable: the tender, quasi-marital bond between two men, the coded Victorian language of repression and the secret double life, or a subtext that readers and critics keep circling back to. It recurs in Herman Melville's Moby Dick, where Ishmael and Queequeg share a bed as a "cozy loving pair"; hovers over the repression-and-double-life reading of Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde; and surfaces as the "gay interpretation" the hosts keep threatening to give Raymond Carver's Cathedral.