I'm not saying that wanting gay people in more movies and literature is wrong, nor that any single instance of seeing male relationships as romantic is bad.

When I saw RRR, I was amazed. Among other things, I loved watching the healthy, emotional relationships on display. I wasn't surprised per se by the people who read a homosexual relationship between the two main characters. But I was a little disappointed. It seems that men can't have emotionally heartfelt relationships without people deciding that it's queer coding. Vulnerability is seen as gay. For instance,

Gilgamesh and Enkidu

David and Jonathan

Achilles and Patroclus (yes yes, I know about how gay the Greeks were, but the text doesn't explicitly say they were lovers)

Sherlock Holmes and John Watson

Frodo and Sam

Kirk and Spock

Bert and Ernie

Gon and Killua

Rama and Bheem Edit: (A Rama Raju and Bheem AKA Akhtar from RRR)

Again, I don't think it's wrong for LGBTQI people to want to see themselves more in movies and literature. My problem is, this is the stuff that toxic masculinity is made out of. The social conditioning against showing vulnerability, care, or affection, especially towards another man, is a cornerstone of the unhealthy masculine ideals promoted by it. When my friend and I were 6, we would hold hands. When my mom saw us doing it, she told us it was wrong for us to do that. His dad heard from her and got mad at him too. Two men shouldn't have to sit five feet apart from each other in a hot tub because they're not gay. If we perpetuate the assumption that for men to have a strong emotional bond is for them to be in a romantic relationship, we perpetuate that aspect of toxic masculinity.

I'm going to preempt the comments saying that if a male and female character did half the stuff these examples did it would be seen as blatant romantic writing. It would be, and that's wrong too. For a very long time, the primary purpose for female characters in most of these types of stories was to be romantic interests for male leads. We need more platonic friendships between men and women in fiction too.