Writers often use comparative language to describe uncommon experience. Using common shared experience as reference, good writers will establish the common to accentuate the uncommon. I think this is what the author of 2 Samuel was doing when describing the relationship between David and Jonathan. To assume that homosexuality is in view when David says that Jonathan’s love for him surpassed the love of women is to be ignorant of the usage of language in context.
I am distressed for you, my brother Jonathan; very pleasant have you been to me; your love to me was extraordinary, surpassing the love of women.
2 Samuel 1:26
Enrich Maria Remarque, author of All Quiet on the Western Front, uses similar language to describe the relationship a soldier, Paul Baumer, shares with his comrades. Surely no one accuses Baumer of homosexuality. Clearly Remarque is using comparative language to evoke the intense love one can have for a lover to provide reference for those that have not had the opportunity to experience such intense camaraderie.
At once a new warmth flows through me. These voices, these quiet words, these footsteps in the trench behind me recall me at a bound from the terrible loneliness and fear of death by which I had been almost destroyed. They are more to me than life, these voices, they are more than motherliness and more than fear; they are the strongest, most comforting thing there is anywhere: they are the voices of my comrades.
I am no longer a shuddering speck of existence, alone in the darkness; – I belong to them and they to me; we all share the same fear and the same life, we are nearer than lovers, in a simpler, a harder way; I could bury my face in them, in these voices, these words that have saved me and will stand by me.
Remarque, Enrich Maria. All Quiet on the Western Front; pg. 212
Anchored 
Stupidest thing I’ve ever read.
Reducing Homosexuality to sexual intercourse is the issue with your argument. With your logic, it’s camaraderie when two males identify as straight, but homosexuality when two males identify as gay. I argue that it is homosocial regardless of sexuality and that, the relationships of David and Jonathan, men in the military, prisoners, Cowboys and men of frontier cities are very different from the hegemonic expectation of male behavior.
The military quite literally relies on homosocial relationships to strengthen it’s men. It isn’t “gay” in pop culture sense, but it is using tactics that are considered gay in the civilian world. In the civilian world, men *routinely* don’t sleep together, eat their meals together, hold each other, cry to each other, sing songs together, look at porn together, do each others laundry, etc.
The only people in the civilian who do this are gay men, youth, and maybe college roommates just before succumbing to hegemonic rule.
Literally. If you are not a gay man and are a civilian, you most likely navigate this world through a male-female lens.
Gay men, military men, prisoners, priests, cowboys and others do not. It is strictly male-male. And we like it that way.
Homosexuality is not just fucking other men. It’s more than that. It’s how you navigate relationships with all men. If you think it’s just sex with men, then you lose out on a big part of what being gay mens. You sterilize us of our humanity.
Calling David and Jonathan’s relationship “Camaraderie” to justify why the Bible takes a moment to highlight their experience together is simply an act of cognitive dissonance. Surely, in today’s time, if two men met under the moonlight, stripped naked, professed their love for one another and made a covenant with God, it would not only be seen as gay, but as Witchcraft.
You can’t deny the homosexuality of David and Jonathan or men in the military simply because, on the surface, the Bible and the military are anti-gay. Lol. That’s stupid. This whole world is anti-gay, and yet, we still exist.
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