Thoughts on Andrew Micheal Roberts's "Masculinity, Modernity, and Homosexual Desire"

Focus is mostly on Homosexuality and the budding relationship between Marlow and Kurtz
1.) States that the novel is based upon gaining and passing on knowledge about relationships between men.

2.) An article by Straus was incredibly interesting, so the following points are based off of this article.
a.) Feels that women are used to distort men's passionate love for one another.
b.) Feels that Marlow puts his love on "the Intended" to conceal himself from the complexity of love "a love that strikes him with horror" for Kurtz,
c.) Relationship between Marlow and Kurtz involves competitiveness, desire, bonding, and sharing power. Feels that this notion sets up powerful barriers between sexual and male relationships.
d.) States that the women within the novel are solely utilized to distract and are objects of desire.
e.) The knowledge that Marlow and Kurtz share has sexual overtones. She feels that because Kurtz is a "very remarkable man", a man who will go "far, very far", a "prodigy", "a special being" and a "emissary of pity, and science, and progress, and God knows what else," that there is a sexual relationship between the two.
f.) "Marlow's own feelings for Kurtz (tinged are they with idol-worship) are themselves the horror. It is in sexual terms, as well as in terms of imperialist exploitation, that the darkness which Marlow imagines he finds in Africa is reflected back into the heart of the culture inhabited by Marlow and his respectable male listeners."
-Conrad, Joseph, The Heart of Darkness, New York: Armstrong, 2006. 460.

3.) Homosexual desire is prevalent in that the story is told by one man to a group of men who is feels he has a close bond. "His story concerns his growing fascination, disgust, and identification for another man, centred on his realization that this man has been involved in taboo practices about which the story-teller will not be specific."pg.460
"Enduring intimacy with the other man, despite his death, an intimacy involving the sharing of a disgraceful yet exciting knowledge from which the dead man's finacee must be protected."460