The phrase "passing the love of women" in "Follow Me 'Ome" is from the story of Saul & Jonathan (2 Samuel 1:26). They, too, were army buddies. I have never been in the service, but I gather from the literature that such relationships usually do not involve sexual activity, tho it sometimes happens if the parties have the right temperament & courage and/or are drunk.

There is what I take to be a comic reference to homosexuality in "The Shut-Eye Sentry": "There was me 'e'd kissed in the sentry-box / As I 'ave not told in my song, / But I took my oath, which were Bible-truth, / I 'adn't seen nothin' wrong." The sergeant was drunk, and the sentry shut his eyes & thought of England. (I don't know if that one has ever been set to music, but I wouldn't mind having it.) Also, my reading of "The Mary Gloster" is that the dying magnate's spoiled son was queer; but a queer friend of mine thinks he was just a sissy.

I cannot think of any traditional song in which homosexuality *as a preference* is mentioned; but there are a few bawdy songs in which homosexual *activity* is described, in a polymorphous-perverse spirit, as evidence of sexual exuberance. In "The Pioneers", they fuck sheep, "nor care a damn if it's a ram"; Tom Bolynn, surprising his wife in bed with a friend, offers to sleep in the middle; and it is allowed that the time the Highland Tinker "fucked the butler was the finest fuck of all".

--- Joe Fineman    joe_f@verizon.net

||: It is the fate of fools to amuse their enemies and bore their friends. :||