Warren Ockrassa wrote: ...
Depends on the joke and context too. In the 80s movie _Bill & ted's Excellent Adventure_ Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves hug briefly after a fight, then eye each other and shout, "Fag!" It's a pretty damn funny moment, I think.
A roommate (straight) and I did a similar thing a few years later after a dispute. It was even funnier then.
My brother-in-law Mark, whose daughter's husband is the one just killed in Iraq, has always been uncomfortable about hugging men. We'd made kind of a joke about it over the years, adopting a "man hug" approach that basically amounted to patting each other on the back while maintaining maximum torso separation.
When we got to Houston for Wes' funeral, he was the first person talked to on the phone as we drove in... and after he told me how torn up he was, I warned him that he'd been evading real hugs for too long and it was gonna end. Later, I kidded Chayla (his daughter, our niece, a widow at 21) that her dad might not show up at all because I said I'd hug him. Cindy (my wife) said Mark wouldn't show up because people would think I'm gay. No, I joked, if he doesn't show up, it'll be because he's afraid people will think he's gay.
There were no more jokes about it after that. Mark *initiated* a few hugs over the next couple of days, tears in his eyes.
Parker Palmer writes that when I choose to stand in the "tragic gap" between what is and what is possible, setting aside our internal demand to resolve issues quickly, my heart can "break open into greater capacity to hold more of my own and the world's suffering and joy, despair and hope."
He recounts an old Hasidic story. A student asks the rabbi, "Why does the Torah tell us to 'place these words *upon* your hearts'? Why does it not tell us to place these holy words *in* our hearts?" Answer: "It is because as we are, our hearts are closed, and we cannot place the holy words in our hearts. So we place them on top of our hearts. And there they stay until, one day, the heart breaks, and the words fall in."
Nick
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