Was listening to an audio recording of C.S. Lewis talking about “The Four Loves” today from 1971. In it, when talking about “phileo”, he said
There is lately a nastier bit of evidence that the experience of philea is not universal: If you speak of it with any seriousness, you are now quite likely to be suspected of homosexuality. This is extremely revealing… [It proves] is that they’ve never known friendship or never known eros. I appeal to everyone who’s known both to bear me witness that in some ways nothing is so unlike a friendship as a love affair.
Until modern times, male friendship expressed itself through kisses embraces and tears. This behavior might be connected with a repressed erotic element, but no one with any historical sense could expect this was always so. The truth is what is eccentric, what needs explaining was not the demonstrative gestures of old friendship, but the apparent coldness of ours. This modern repugnance of close physical contact with my own sex may be diagnosable as pathological.