Never “out” a hobbit unless you’re prepared to speak to his lawyersand by lawyers, I mean nutty, defensive Tolkienites turning their heads away from the Sci Fi Channel just long enough to act as self-appointed mouthpieces for a dead British author and skittish males everywhere.

I had a little fun in this column last week, as I am wont to do, toying with the not exactly new concept that The Return of the King‘s loyal Sam might have more than just manly affection for Frodo, the blue-eyed boy wonder of Peter Jackson’s Middle-earth epica film filled with more loaded, lingering glances between buddies than Ben-Hur. Well, let me tell you, the online orcs soon came stomping after me with angry, unwieldy e-mails (see Letters, p. 7). “Your column was so fuckin weak,” one cried. “Its no longer the love that dare not speak, its the love that wont shut up.” (You can expect any missive beginning with “Im not a prude or a homophobe” to disprove both.) I haven’t experienced such resistance to the cold, queer facts since antidyke dorks tried to pull the “just good friends” bit on me about the lady love in Fried Green Tomatoes, even though the film featured two freethinking single gals dipping their fingers into honey pots and saying things like, “I’m as married as I ever hope to be.”

The main complaint? Outside of hyperventilation over what was taken as egregious damage to Mr. Tolkien’s grave, the boo-hoos all seemed to stem from the supposedly ennobling idea that “people can love one another without it involving genitalia.” Sam’s palpitating heart doesn’t actually indicate love, see, but Loveor rather, as one musty Old Tymer writing in put it, “loyalty, something so radically missing from the modern mind-set.” It’s naming it dirty, apparently, to suggest that brave little men could ever experience romantic love for one anotheralthough, call me newfangled, I don’t find romantic love between men to be dirty, and I don’t think it was something only invented to coincide with the record release of “I Will Survive,” either. (Tellingly, the distaff side of Tolkienville all dropped me lines of support; several women wrote in to say that Rosie, Sam’s so-called true love, wasn’t much more than some kind of symbolic afterthought even in the books.)

I can’t help but find it fascinating that so many men, quite a few of whom I’d bet have never even cried in front of their closest relations, get up in arms over the idea that two sensitive, furry males proclaiming their moist, unwavering devotion to one another are in any way gay. Hey, fellas, I’m all for you gettin’ Alan Alda on me with your bad selves, but actions speak louder than words. So straight men are frequently misty-eyed and emotive? Fabulous. What say some of you bathetic butches and I hook up for Mona Lisa Smile this weekend and a couple of white wine spritzers? Don’t worrywe can leave an empty seat between us in the movie theater so nobody will think we’re that way.

swiecking@seattleweekly.com