Am I missing something here? Despite the title, I see very little rethinking of the Gay Best Friend trope and instead find an author merely repeating and reveling in it. As a gay man who once...
Exemplary
Am I missing something here? Despite the title, I see very little rethinking of the Gay Best Friend trope and instead find an author merely repeating and reveling in it.
Perhaps it was this foundational dishonesty that led to the inner world of private jokes and fantasy that quickly grew around us
As a gay man who once entertained Gay Male/Straight Woman friendships before aligning myself in late adolescence with more traditional friendships found between heterosexual men, I have spent a lot of time reflecting on this particular type of friendship and what it means.
I'm sure my analysis will not be well regarded by many and perhaps even disagreed with and challenged but I find that these types of friendships usual originate from a place of unhealthiness despite their authenticity. I'm casting an awfully wide net here but - I find what straight women usually find so special in these relationships: the inside jokes, the hilarity, the lightness and lack of challenges and heaviness found in normal female friendships to just simply be what is experienced by most men in platonic male friendships. This is a concept that is of course foreign to women who never had a lot of guy friends but it's not some special connection or bond between you and your gay bestie that is totally alien to the rest of the world and then there is the oft commented on aspect of having that emotional relationship with a man with none of the other strings. The latter is even alluded to by the author when asking herself whether she timed her breakup to coincide with her friends' arrival, a man who would provide her the same sense of love, minus the sex, that she lost when dumping here boyfriend.
On the male side, I find that these types of friendships often develop out of some deep fear of other men and especially of straight men. This concept had been totally foreign to me until I started to date a lot more and began encountering a troubling number of gay men who had no close male friendships, had never had any friendships with straight men and often had some sort of nebulous fear and inability to relate to them. On the one hand, who could blame them? The testosterone driven male posturing, the teasing and bullying, some sort of ingrained fear for safety and security - but to throw out the whole bunch because of fears and experiences acquired in childhood and adolescence is a shame.
Overall, there is nothing wrong with gay male/straight female friends. Or with straight male/straight female friends, for that matter. Plenty of men find best friendships with females and there is surely such positivity, beauty, and diversity in those connections existing in a world dominated by same-sex friend pairs but it would be dishonest to turn a blind eye to the foundation of many of these types of friendships: that they can be born of and breed unhealthy distrust of others, of self, and a sometimes sickening reliance on an unhealthy coping mechanism.
In an era of unprecedented acceptance of gay males and much attention given to the plight of the male loneliness epidemic, perhaps a true rethinking of the gay best friend would be one of healing and acceptance of what is now being rejected. In other words, the gay male/straight male gay best friendship. I once read about the concept that gay males are unusually privileged in western society, at once allowed to be both a masculine male but also allowed to drift into states of femininity: emotionality, sensitivity, "feminine expression and activities," and all things not strictly gender conforming. Perhaps the new gay best friend would be where gay men are able to heal the wounds that made them so fearful of or disinterested in straight men in the first place and where they're able to offer those men a closer bond of both traditional maleness and the privileged femineity - the inside jokes, the rough play, the bonding through doing, as well as that deeper emotional vulnerability and connection that eludes so many straight male pairings.
Male/female friendships of all types deserve to be celebrated and elevated, a phenomenon I wish were more common in our society for the richness that they bring, but I think it's time that we rethink the gay best friend paradigm and encourage both gay men and straight women to approach these friendships from a place of healing and authenticity instead of continuing to play to the tropes of the fearful gay man and woman seeking an ersatz love partner.
It's not just you. The article title piqued my interest, but as I read on I was disappointed that, in her rethinking of the Gay Best Friend, she basically just hits the notes of the trope...
Exemplary
Am I missing something here? Despite the title, I see very little rethinking of the Gay Best Friend trope and instead find an author merely repeating and reveling in it.
It's not just you. The article title piqued my interest, but as I read on I was disappointed that, in her rethinking of the Gay Best Friend, she basically just hits the notes of the trope beat-for-beat. Ryan's life and character are all but absent from the article. His presence is a simple springboard for her feelings and literary aspirations, while the article itself is mostly just a long-form narrative advertisement for her new book. This smacks of the "using" of an individual for cultural clout that underpins the GBF trope in the first place.
I'm not attempting to criticize their relationship itself: she and Ryan almost certainly do have a genuine connection and friendship -- they continue to correspond regularly; they go on trips together; they got matching tattoos! I do, however, think that the way she writes about that friendship is unintentionally revealing in a bad way. Ryan goes from being afraid to come out of the closet to being partnered across the course of the article, and both of those significant aspects of his life are treated as little more than ancillary details for the author's cultural commentary. If the piece were about her specifically, this wouldn't be a problem, but by nominally attempting to deconstruct a specific trope, she invites a specific scrutiny.
I hate being the cynical internet person that speaks with an unearned intimacy about people based on only a few details (and always with the purpose of taking someone down). Giving paranoid readings to everything is also its own tired trope (and far worse than the tame, mostly harmless GBF one could ever be). Still, I can't deny that this piece left me feeling hollow. When I think about friendship, I think about warmth, but this piece has a coldness to it.
Thank you @kfwyre and @TreeFiddyFiddy for voicing this. I didn't want to start the conversation off negatively, but the entire reason I decided to post this is that I wanted to gut check myself,...
Thank you @kfwyre and @TreeFiddyFiddy for voicing this. I didn't want to start the conversation off negatively, but the entire reason I decided to post this is that I wanted to gut check myself, too. Like kfwyre I didn't want to read into the piece too negatively, but when I first read this article I also felt that it just seemed fundamentally empty. As has already been stated, it's pretty clear from the objective facts that these two have a strong relationship, they've been in each others lives for ages, she's writing a book to honor their relationship, they have matching tattoos, etc. But it struck me as quite weird that I left the article like I still had no idea who he was? Not once is he quoted. The things that happen in his life seem more like a sideshow, given little thought or emotion but rattled off like facts. I don't know this person and I don't know what he thinks about the relationship. We know that she is getting a strong nonsexual romantic life partner out of the relationship, but what about him? What fulfillment does he get out of her that he can't get elsewhere? Does this relationship have unique aspects that he can't find in other humans?
When I ran across the article elsewhere it sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole of thinking from my own experiences because I've often been the gay/lesbian best friend for many men and women throughout my life and nearly every time that a queer descriptor has been necessary to describe the relationship has been one which always felt fundamentally shallow. The point during which the author describes a trope of these relationships felt particularly poignant:
They provided the heroine with empathy and access to a highly connected underworld of culture, media and whatever else she might need.
My experience with queer/straight relationships has often felt very much like this trope- in ways I was the trophy of the straight person, their token friend, who was often involved in getting these folks access to that which they would normally be denied. At times it would feel parasitic, like the straight person could not access this world because they were kept out, when in reality it was because they were boring and confined by their own normative behaviors and thought patterns - they weren’t being invited into this underworld without me precisely because they didn’t truly accept this underworld and were more like captive observers drawn in by the taboo, treating their experience like buying tickets to the circus. To be fair, I think many of them simply lacked the ability to expand their mind, not that they were malicious actors, uninterested in the lives and safety of these performers, but more that they did not understand the culture they came from and were unwilling to shift their rigid thoughts about the world to accommodate a greater view.
To be fair to the author I do think there's often a very human desire to share a truly deep bond with someone who is very different from you. Being able to share experiences across such diverse backgrounds and to still be able to find empathy or sympathy can be extremely validating. People with a very different background are also often fantastic at giving advice or a new viewpoint and when this comes from a place of trust, it can be extremely useful and often quite healing. In that perspective I can see how this kind of a dynamic might feel particularly deep and special, especially if you are stuck in a conservative area where you don't run into nearly as many minority individuals and your friend groups are often restricted in their world views. Conservative cultures may also restrict what is acceptable or normative when it comes to the relationships you have with these individuals and discourage or make it more difficult to find deep authentic relationships with others.
I appreciate that both of you were willing to come in here and share fair criticism of the article- it's taught me a bit about the lens through which you both read this article and provided me with some new insight coming from backgrounds that are both similar yet quite a bit different than mine. My major hope from posting this article was to gather the opinions of others, both from the perspective of queers as well as the perspective of straight women. So far I have yet to see a woman chime in on the article with anything meaningful and I'm very curious to hear their opinion, whether it is good or bad, on the dynamic and how they view queer friendships. This article also helped me realize that while I participated in a decent amount of straight/queer relationships in my life, I never bothered to ask the other party what they were getting out of it and I have so few straight friends anymore that the opportunity is quickly dwindling.
Hello, I am a straight woman who has lots of thoughts about my queer friendships. :) I haven't really had a male "gay best friend" in my life. I was in theater as a kid, so I certainly have had...
So far I have yet to see a woman chime in on the article with anything meaningful and I'm very curious to hear their opinion, whether it is good or bad, on the dynamic and how they view queer friendships.
Hello, I am a straight woman who has lots of thoughts about my queer friendships. :)
I haven't really had a male "gay best friend" in my life. I was in theater as a kid, so I certainly have had gay male friends, but never to the extent of the "gay best friend" trope. I do, however, have a number of queer friends as an adult (primarily non-binary folks, cis lesbians, and bisexual cis men.)
I am a married, straight woman who tends to dress quite masc. My queer friends joke about how they might mistake me for a lesbian because I always hook my keys on my jeans, and other silly little things like that. Sometimes strangers (like bartenders) use they/them pronouns for me since they're not sure about my gender identity. I also don't particularly subscribe to heterosexual norms. This is all to say, queer people seem to feel at ease to be their authentic, uncensored selves around me, and visa versa. I often feel more comfortable around queer crowds than I do straight crowds.
Despite all that, of course, it's not uncommon for me to feel like I'm somewhat of an intruder in spaces that aren't necessarily intended for me. Usually it's when I'm invited to a casual party/gathering that happens to have mostly queer people there, and I get a bit nervous wondering if anyone cares that I'm actually straight. A few times, I've been invited by a queer person to a more formal queer event, only to find out that the event is explicitly for queer people only, and the person who invited me either didn't notice that, or forgot that I am straight/cis. In either case I politely decline. (I think defined, relatively safe spaces are important, and I don't wish to intrude on any of them, even though I have a lot of fun in queer spaces and queer-led events.)
In writing this comment, I've realized that there is probably a whole new dynamic between straight women/people and queer people in general that probably builds on the old "gay best friend" trope, but in new ways. Like I said, I actually don't have many gay male friends currently, mostly acquaintances. Not sure why that is, actually. But regardless, this post has prompted me to wonder what my queer friends think about our relationship, and how they feel about how I treat their queerness. I should ask them about it.
Edit, you said you hoped for a straight woman's take on the story. I'm straight but I couldn't read it. I tried to read your archive link on my phone but it covered the text with uncloseable ads....
Edit, you said you hoped for a straight woman's take on the story. I'm straight but I couldn't read it. I tried to read your archive link on my phone but it covered the text with uncloseable ads. I might go back on my laptop and try, but I am somewhat busy right now. Thanks for the archive link though.
Here's the full text of the article: Ryan and I met working behind the tills in HMV Cork in the winter of 2009. We bonded instantly, and as we are both natural romantics, began the process of...
Here's the full text of the article:
Ryan and I met working behind the tills in HMV Cork in the winter of 2009. We bonded instantly, and as we are both natural romantics, began the process of myth-making in our friendship while it was still slippery from birth. We moved in together quickly. We began writing a sitcom based on our lives, then got stoned and paranoid about being sued by former co-workers when we became famous. We left long Facebook posts on each other’s walls, quoting the things we said to one another, terrified that our specialness and our closeness would not be noticed or rewarded by the wider world. We wanted them to say: you two really have something here.
We were 19, and we were insufferable. But there was a lot of that kind of thing around. Bright young women and their even brighter gay friends were burning up our screens. There was Will & Grace, of course, and there was Stanford Blatch from Sex and The City. There was Stanley Tucci’s Nigel in The Devil Wears Prada, and Damian in Mean Girls, and Rupert Everett’s George in My Best Friend’s Wedding. We opened Word documents, centre-aligned the text and transcribed ourselves.
Insufferable as we were, it wasn’t incorrect of us to think of our dynamic, the facts of it anyway, as TV-ready. You had to be quick and young and pop-culture obsessed. We were those things. You had to be adventure-ready, slightly fucked-up, and we were that, too. We had no life experiences and no responsibilities and so filled that chasm with plot. Like Friends episodes, we thought of each day of our life together as The One With. The One With The Failed Oscars Party. The One Where We Played Hide and Seek On The Roof. The One Where Each Jilted Our One Night Stands In Order To Eat A Lasagne In An Italian Restaurant at Eleven In The Morning.
Inevitably, the sitcom idea tailed off, and so did the living together. Ryan did a masters degree in Wales, and I moved to London in 2011. I became a writer and while the friendship maintained itself at various distances, it didn’t occur to me to write about Ryan or our relationship again. It wasn’t as if we had no adventures, no plot. If anything, the major movements of our lives still seemed to draw us back together. Ryan moved to London in March 2014; I broke up with my live-in boyfriend in April. Ryan came and filled a black cab with my things – I still didn’t have very many things – and he took me to his house.
“Thank you for coming to get me,” I said, an Anglepoise lamp teetering on my lap in the back of the cab.
“I’ll always come to get you,” he replied and, since then, it’s become a strange mantra of our friendship. He said it to me last Sunday, when he picked me up for brunch. A call and response, a song lyric that I always start and he always finishes.
That day has been a chicken-or-egg question in my head ever since. I know that the boyfriend and I broke up for good reasons. But did I time the break up to go with Ryan’s arrival? Was it just a coincidence? I had no family in the country before Ryan emigrated, no one who would look after me if I needed it. So I put off needing anything until he showed up, and then I needed everything.
The years passed and a cultural resistance grew up around “the gay best friend”. A sense of disgust around Will & Grace, around Stanford Blatch. As much as these characters provided energy and verve to otherwise by-the-book movies, the limitations of the gay best friend became a subject of cultural critique. Who were these homophobic caricatures, and why were they so everywhere?
They provided the heroine with empathy and access to a highly connected underworld of culture, media and whatever else she might need. But their sexuality, their private lives, their wants and desires are unimportant. They dissolve as soon as the heroine leaves the room, or puts the phone down.
As Elliot Page writes in his new memoir, Pageboy, “Hollywood is built on leveraging queerness. Tucking it away when needed, pulling it out when beneficial, while patting themselves on the back.”
The gay best friend was fairly criticised for being an example of both the tuck and pull of queer culture in mainstream media. He could not win: to conservative viewers, he was too much, and to liberal ones, not enough.
While much was written in the intervening years about what this stock character couldn’t give us, there was almost nothing written about what he could. He remained a standby of the sitcom and the romcom, often providing the com in each. But he was virtually invisible in literary fiction, where I was trying to make a name for myself.
Friendship, we’ve decided, is a reliable subject for literary exploration. Female friendship more than anything. From Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels to Zadie Smith’s Swing Time, and The Joy Luck Club to Fried Green Tomatoes, there have always been a great deal of words set aside for women agonising about their relationships with other women. Women are the ones reading the vast majority of novels in the world, after all, and it makes sense that they would want to read about their relationships with one another.
And yet in all the countless literary friendship stories, the relationship between gay men and straight women feels barely touched. It is an entertaining subject enough for comedy, but not for exploration within drama. In our resistance to the gay best friend as a trope, we have skipped over analysing the nuances of the dynamic to begin with. We have decided that this particular kind of relationship is low-rent, and sort of tacky. There will not be a trio of Elena Ferrante novels about it.
I’ve been writing novels for six years, and reading them for far longer. I have learned by now that when there is an absence of stories about a given subject, it is either because it lacks stakes or it lacks an audience. The audience question is a no brainer. Every woman and gay man I know has a relationship in their lives that is a bit like this. Thank you for coming to get me/I will always come to get you.
So let’s talk about stakes. Stories about platonic friendship are always wary on this subject, simply because romantic relationships have the stakes built in. Will they say, “I love you”? Will he propose? Will they both show up to the wedding and, inevitably, will they both stay faithful? Friendship stories have to be more creative. There are no flashy ceremonies built into friendship and you can have as many friends as you like, so fidelity is never a struggle.
And yet when I examine my and Ryan’s relationship, I can see that from its very beginnings, the stakes were enormous. Officially speaking, Ryan was straight. He existed, in 2009, in what I think of as a very Schrödinger’s Cat problem of queerness. It was too dangerous for him to come out and so we existed in a suspended realm of both knowing and not knowing – defending his right to be straight right now if he needed to be straight right now, but also leaving room for the inevitable coming out, later. And while it was understood that we would maintain a mutual delusion of his straightness, we spent all of our spare time having the gayest conversations imaginable.
Perhaps it was this foundational dishonesty that led to the inner world of private jokes and fantasy that quickly grew around us. We were not dowdy students in retail, but darling chat show hosts, Southern belles, old movie stars. We watched Thelma & Louise, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, Hairspray, Grease, and argued about which one of us was the Geena Davis, which was the Dolly Parton, which the Bad Sandy.
There’s something, I think, in the specifics of the gay man/straight woman dynamic that lends itself to this kind of playtime. Maybe the fact that straight women and gay men, for different reasons, have to present such a variety of masks to the world. She, if she wants a boyfriend, has to tap into the deep feminine well of being both effortlessly beautiful and cheerfully lowkey. If she wants to be beloved by other women, she must approach them with humility and a low profile. “If there are three little girls,” a friend with daughters tells me, “two of them are talking shit about the third.”
For him, the stakes are higher. Particularly in 2009. The pressure of passing is more intense, and if you can’t pass, then to be the kind of gay person who is funny and won’t try anything weird. It’s exhausting. It was designed to be.
What’s more alluring than someone who wants to drop the droopy, gauzy veil of everyday life with you, and instead don the heightened, insane costume of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
“But you ARRRR in that chair, Blanche!”
Our house was a nature reserve for state-protected campness, and it needed to be protected from everything that threatened it. Part of my 19-year-old self never wanted Ryan to come out so that I could carry on being the sole receiver of his outsized specialness.
“So you’re writing about your gay best friend?” It is February 2021 and, in the midst of late-pandemic depression, I have come back to the idea of writing about me and Ryan. This is my sixth novel and my first to commit the female writer’s sin of identifiably using my life to inform my fiction. It strikes me, again, that there are things that haven’t been said about how gay men and straight women relate. Suddenly, I can see them everywhere. The Sound of Music was on, again, at Christmas. For the first time I had no interest in Maria or Captain Von Trapp. I was looking at the Baroness and Max.
Baroness Elsa von Schraeder, you will remember, has been the long-time lover of Captain Von Trapp and spends the entire film walking the high-wire act that the widower sets out for her. She must be the graceful, beautiful aristocrat he fell in love with in Vienna, but must also morph on command into a warm, domestic mother figure to seven children. It’s an impossible task, especially when Julie Andrews is right there, but we see her try anyway. And only once does she let her mask slip.
And it’s with Max. Uncle Max, who is no one’s brother. Uncle Max who has a pencil moustache and works in showbiz in the 1930s. “Tell me everything,” he urges, when they’re alone. “Come on. Tell me every teensy-weensy, intimate, disgusting detail.”
“Well, let’s just say,” the Baroness eventually confesses. “I have a feeling I may be here on approval.”
“How can you miss?”
“Far too easily.”
He regards her. “If I know you, darling, and I do – you’ll find a way.”
There’s a tone here, something that feels fabulous and correct: the unknowable woman turning to someone who really wants to know her. And not just on a surface level, not just the nice parts. He wants, as he says, every teensy-weensy, intimate, disgusting detail. It all adds up to the same conclusion: you are safe. You are safe to be yourself with me.
So here it was: everything I was interested in, in a film that everyone has seen, that somehow held a dynamic no one had talked about.
“So you’re writing about your gay best friend? Does he know? Is he OK with it?”
We talk every day while I’m writing the book; I send him chapter by chapter. I keep asking if he is OK with it. He says he is. In fact, he is more than OK. Because this was the deal, wasn’t it? When we met almost 15 years ago it was implicit that our role in one another’s lives was to make life itself more special. We were two kids in a small Irish city and nobody else was going to make us feel famous, if not each other. That’s why we wrote failed TV shows; why we cast one another as Joan Crawford and Bette Davis; why we named our adventures, on top of living them.
Last April, we went to Denmark together, on a whim. Now that we both live with our partners, short trips abroad are our favourite way to re-access our original dynamic. Two stupid kids, confused and excited by everything. We found ourselves in a tattoo parlour and, in a giggling sweep of hungover hormones, got matching True Romance tattoos. You know the film. The Bonnie-and-Clyde story about the prostitute and the comic-book nerd who fall in love, steal a suitcase of cocaine, and drive to Mexico with the money.
The book, which is now a bestseller, turned out to be my suitcase full of cocaine. And here’s the kicker: they really do want to make a television show about it. The 19-year-olds in 2009 were right, after all. Those two really had something, there.
It reminds me somewhat of white people who are a bit too into the fact that they have a black friend. Or a woman I knew who went on mission trips and specifically became obsessed with "little...
Ryan's life and character are all but absent from the article. His presence is a simple springboard for her feelings and literary aspirations, while the article itself is mostly just a long-form narrative advertisement for her new book. This smacks of the "using" of an individual for cultural clout that underpins the GBF trope in the first place.
It reminds me somewhat of white people who are a bit too into the fact that they have a black friend. Or a woman I knew who went on mission trips and specifically became obsessed with "little brown African children" and how they were so much "cuter and sassier" than American/white children. (Hell, even the "sassy" stereotype reminds me of the "gay best friend issue.")
It's fantastic to have friends of different races, genders, and sexualities, but it can veer into fetishization or tokenization pretty quickly if white/straight people aren't very self-aware. It's a difficult thing to put your finger on, since the intentions of the person are normally innocent, but I think your point about Ryan's perspective/personality being absent from the article is definitely a warning sign. In these situations, people are somewhat reduced to accessories rather than full, complex human beings.
I swear there's nothing about this "gay BFF" friendship that can't be found in any close female-male friendship, regardless of orientation. It does feel special being the only girl a boy can...
I swear there's nothing about this "gay BFF" friendship that can't be found in any close female-male friendship, regardless of orientation. It does feel special being the only girl a boy can confide in, because unlike potential romantic partners they don't have to impress you, but they don't have to be gay to have that relationship, just no mutual sexual attraction/tension.
It does feel like the focus on sexuality and assumption that the author can't have the same closeness with another woman says more about the author than about general gay-man-straight-woman relationships. The way she describes their friendship sounds exactly like the dynamic my sister and her best friend have, and they're both women.
I have to admit, I read the very first sentence of the article and came running back to your comment to say something about this (from the article): As a straight woman, this describes every...
Exemplary
I swear there's nothing about this "gay BFF" friendship that can't be found in any close female-male friendship, regardless of orientation.
I have to admit, I read the very first sentence of the article and came running back to your comment to say something about this (from the article):
He makes you laugh, shares your woes and comes with no sexual strings attached.
As a straight woman, this describes every single one of the many close, wonderful friendships I have with men. In fact, it comes across as quite sad to me. My straight male friends bring so much joy and perspective to my life. We confide in each other about our careers, our love lives, our dreams/insecurities/hobbies, really anything you'd discuss with a friend of any gender.
I agree with you - I wonder if this isn't necessarily a special thing about gay best friends, but rather it simply doesn't happen often between women and men because 1) women don't feel physically/emotionally safe enough with most straight men to trust that it's a sexually neutral situation, and/or 2) straight men don't often feel emotionally safe enough to "share woes" and be emotionally vulnerable with women (or people in general.) Therefore, straight women find themselves gravitating towards gay men because they don't feel threatened (and I can't confirm this, but I imagine gay men gravitate towards straight women because the emotional intelligence/vulnerability and communication style of women feels more familiar to them.)
Personally, I never worry about the former issue (sexual attraction.) If my male friends are sexually attracted to me, that's their own business. I'm sexually attracted to some of them and I manage to keep things respectful, and I trust them to do the same. I've been with my husband for a decade, all my male friends know we have a happy marriage, and they are close friends with him as well. People on the internet, (ahem, reddit,) love to assert that these male friends are all standing around waiting to have sex with me. Well, so be it, I guess. I'd be fascinated to see the day that my male friends of 2-10+ years finally reveal themselves as being bad, fake friends with ulterior motives - but I won't be holding my breath.
The latter issue (men not feeling comfortable enough to be vulnerable,) doesn't seem to be a big issue in my friendships with men, but I hear other women talking all the time about how they can never get men to be vulnerable with them, romantically or platonically. Now, men are certainly different from women as a whole... I do have to blatantly explain to men that it's really, really okay for them to talk to me about their feelings, and usually reassert it once or twice, but once I do (and once they believe me,) things feel pretty normal moving forward. I have suspicions that it has something to do with the fact that I'm close with my dad, and have always felt a little more comfortable with men than with women. (My dad is a really sensitive, vulnerable guy, so from a very early age, I was never under the impression that men are emotionally "simple" or lacking in vulnerable feelings.)
Anyway, I do think gay men tend to have a lot of qualities that make them more appealing as friends than straight men do, at least for many women. But gay men don't deserve to be tokenized, and there's also no reason to do so. Gay men and straight men alike have the capacity to be good friends to women. All people should simply treat each of their friends like an individual human being who is separate from the stereotypes that may come with their gender/sexual identity. We should, of course, be aware of how the world may treat our friends differently, so we can understand their unique perspective in life and what they deal with. But these elements don't need to (and shouldn't) define our friendships.
I've read the whole article at this point, and to be honest, I'm not sure what the author was getting at. It seems that she feels a bit insecure about being very close friends with a man who is gay. But why? Does she tokenize him? Does she sense that he feels uncomfortable about the basis of their relationship? It's unclear, but the main thing that stood out to me in this article was this:
Part of my 19-year-old self never wanted Ryan to come out so that I could carry on being the sole receiver of his outsized specialness.
This does feel weird. Really weird, actually. I'm out of gas now and I probably shouldn't give a half-assed take on this, especially as a straight person - can anyone else comment on this sentence who has a relevant perspective? All I can say is that it's quite disturbing to me as a person who has had friends that have experienced painful, long, overdue processes of "coming out." I can't even imagine wanting a queer friend to not live openly as their authentic self (as long as it is relatively safe for them to come out. If they do not feel safe, of course I support whatever path they want to take.)
That last part would be weird if she ever acted on it, but I get the raw appeal in the abstract sense of "us sharing a secret together has shaped our friendship in a unique way and I'm scared of...
That last part would be weird if she ever acted on it, but I get the raw appeal in the abstract sense of "us sharing a secret together has shaped our friendship in a unique way and I'm scared of the friendship becoming more mundane without that".
Sure, that makes sense. I also just noticed she specifically said this is how she felt when she was a teenager, which is certainly the most reasonable time to have such an insecurity/concern.
Sure, that makes sense. I also just noticed she specifically said this is how she felt when she was a teenager, which is certainly the most reasonable time to have such an insecurity/concern.
Actually, to follow on from that second paragraph, it seems to come down to what role people expect others to fulfil in their life. To illustrate, between my mother, my sister and myself we all...
Actually, to follow on from that second paragraph, it seems to come down to what role people expect others to fulfil in their life.
To illustrate, between my mother, my sister and myself we all have a different idea of who our primary emotional relationship should be. For me it's a romantic partner, for my sister it's a platonic female friend, for my mother it's a female relative (formerly her mother, now it flips between her sister or either of us daughters depending on who's not upset her recently). We're all married to men, and those men fulfil very different roles for each of us.
So for the author of this article, her primary emotional relationship is with her gay male friend.
As for what the "gay BFF" means in media, he's just the straight woman's equivalent of a manic pixie dreamgirl. He has no needs or demands of his own, he exists to fulfil the character arc of his female friend. Straight men gain status from sexual conquest so the manic pixie dream girl wants to sleep with them, but straight women lose status from sexual conquest so their manic pixie dreamboy is sexually unthreatening yet totally devoted.
So what I saw in the article is primarily a puff piece for her new book. To me, the details about the friendship relate back to her statement that as a writer and reader she doesn't see books...
So what I saw in the article is primarily a puff piece for her new book. To me, the details about the friendship relate back to her statement that as a writer and reader she doesn't see books about these kinds of friendship and she plans to write a book to fill the gap. She explains the friendship to show that it was important to her, and by extension other such friendships would be important to others and thus there is a market for the book and an unmet need.
She's got some nostalgia for being nineteen and naive and in a friendship focused around sharing secrets. Thankfully the closet is less frequently needed these days. Also, my experience as a woman at 19 was that male sexual desire was always obnoxiously in my face, coming from classmates, acquaintances and strangers. Catcalls and (less frequent) groping were part of my lived experiences. Post menopause, things are much more civil. I didn't have a gay friend then but it would have been a relief to know a young man other than my brother with no sexual dynamic at all.
Writers using life as raw material for their art can look really selfish, even narcissistic. I can't judge the quality of the friendship or the depth of her understanding or empathy for her gay friend based only on this piece.
Am I missing something here? Despite the title, I see very little rethinking of the Gay Best Friend trope and instead find an author merely repeating and reveling in it.
As a gay man who once entertained Gay Male/Straight Woman friendships before aligning myself in late adolescence with more traditional friendships found between heterosexual men, I have spent a lot of time reflecting on this particular type of friendship and what it means.
I'm sure my analysis will not be well regarded by many and perhaps even disagreed with and challenged but I find that these types of friendships usual originate from a place of unhealthiness despite their authenticity. I'm casting an awfully wide net here but - I find what straight women usually find so special in these relationships: the inside jokes, the hilarity, the lightness and lack of challenges and heaviness found in normal female friendships to just simply be what is experienced by most men in platonic male friendships. This is a concept that is of course foreign to women who never had a lot of guy friends but it's not some special connection or bond between you and your gay bestie that is totally alien to the rest of the world and then there is the oft commented on aspect of having that emotional relationship with a man with none of the other strings. The latter is even alluded to by the author when asking herself whether she timed her breakup to coincide with her friends' arrival, a man who would provide her the same sense of love, minus the sex, that she lost when dumping here boyfriend.
On the male side, I find that these types of friendships often develop out of some deep fear of other men and especially of straight men. This concept had been totally foreign to me until I started to date a lot more and began encountering a troubling number of gay men who had no close male friendships, had never had any friendships with straight men and often had some sort of nebulous fear and inability to relate to them. On the one hand, who could blame them? The testosterone driven male posturing, the teasing and bullying, some sort of ingrained fear for safety and security - but to throw out the whole bunch because of fears and experiences acquired in childhood and adolescence is a shame.
Overall, there is nothing wrong with gay male/straight female friends. Or with straight male/straight female friends, for that matter. Plenty of men find best friendships with females and there is surely such positivity, beauty, and diversity in those connections existing in a world dominated by same-sex friend pairs but it would be dishonest to turn a blind eye to the foundation of many of these types of friendships: that they can be born of and breed unhealthy distrust of others, of self, and a sometimes sickening reliance on an unhealthy coping mechanism.
In an era of unprecedented acceptance of gay males and much attention given to the plight of the male loneliness epidemic, perhaps a true rethinking of the gay best friend would be one of healing and acceptance of what is now being rejected. In other words, the gay male/straight male gay best friendship. I once read about the concept that gay males are unusually privileged in western society, at once allowed to be both a masculine male but also allowed to drift into states of femininity: emotionality, sensitivity, "feminine expression and activities," and all things not strictly gender conforming. Perhaps the new gay best friend would be where gay men are able to heal the wounds that made them so fearful of or disinterested in straight men in the first place and where they're able to offer those men a closer bond of both traditional maleness and the privileged femineity - the inside jokes, the rough play, the bonding through doing, as well as that deeper emotional vulnerability and connection that eludes so many straight male pairings.
Male/female friendships of all types deserve to be celebrated and elevated, a phenomenon I wish were more common in our society for the richness that they bring, but I think it's time that we rethink the gay best friend paradigm and encourage both gay men and straight women to approach these friendships from a place of healing and authenticity instead of continuing to play to the tropes of the fearful gay man and woman seeking an ersatz love partner.
It's not just you. The article title piqued my interest, but as I read on I was disappointed that, in her rethinking of the Gay Best Friend, she basically just hits the notes of the trope beat-for-beat. Ryan's life and character are all but absent from the article. His presence is a simple springboard for her feelings and literary aspirations, while the article itself is mostly just a long-form narrative advertisement for her new book. This smacks of the "using" of an individual for cultural clout that underpins the GBF trope in the first place.
I'm not attempting to criticize their relationship itself: she and Ryan almost certainly do have a genuine connection and friendship -- they continue to correspond regularly; they go on trips together; they got matching tattoos! I do, however, think that the way she writes about that friendship is unintentionally revealing in a bad way. Ryan goes from being afraid to come out of the closet to being partnered across the course of the article, and both of those significant aspects of his life are treated as little more than ancillary details for the author's cultural commentary. If the piece were about her specifically, this wouldn't be a problem, but by nominally attempting to deconstruct a specific trope, she invites a specific scrutiny.
I hate being the cynical internet person that speaks with an unearned intimacy about people based on only a few details (and always with the purpose of taking someone down). Giving paranoid readings to everything is also its own tired trope (and far worse than the tame, mostly harmless GBF one could ever be). Still, I can't deny that this piece left me feeling hollow. When I think about friendship, I think about warmth, but this piece has a coldness to it.
Thank you @kfwyre and @TreeFiddyFiddy for voicing this. I didn't want to start the conversation off negatively, but the entire reason I decided to post this is that I wanted to gut check myself, too. Like kfwyre I didn't want to read into the piece too negatively, but when I first read this article I also felt that it just seemed fundamentally empty. As has already been stated, it's pretty clear from the objective facts that these two have a strong relationship, they've been in each others lives for ages, she's writing a book to honor their relationship, they have matching tattoos, etc. But it struck me as quite weird that I left the article like I still had no idea who he was? Not once is he quoted. The things that happen in his life seem more like a sideshow, given little thought or emotion but rattled off like facts. I don't know this person and I don't know what he thinks about the relationship. We know that she is getting a strong nonsexual romantic life partner out of the relationship, but what about him? What fulfillment does he get out of her that he can't get elsewhere? Does this relationship have unique aspects that he can't find in other humans?
When I ran across the article elsewhere it sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole of thinking from my own experiences because I've often been the gay/lesbian best friend for many men and women throughout my life and nearly every time that a queer descriptor has been necessary to describe the relationship has been one which always felt fundamentally shallow. The point during which the author describes a trope of these relationships felt particularly poignant:
My experience with queer/straight relationships has often felt very much like this trope- in ways I was the trophy of the straight person, their token friend, who was often involved in getting these folks access to that which they would normally be denied. At times it would feel parasitic, like the straight person could not access this world because they were kept out, when in reality it was because they were boring and confined by their own normative behaviors and thought patterns - they weren’t being invited into this underworld without me precisely because they didn’t truly accept this underworld and were more like captive observers drawn in by the taboo, treating their experience like buying tickets to the circus. To be fair, I think many of them simply lacked the ability to expand their mind, not that they were malicious actors, uninterested in the lives and safety of these performers, but more that they did not understand the culture they came from and were unwilling to shift their rigid thoughts about the world to accommodate a greater view.
To be fair to the author I do think there's often a very human desire to share a truly deep bond with someone who is very different from you. Being able to share experiences across such diverse backgrounds and to still be able to find empathy or sympathy can be extremely validating. People with a very different background are also often fantastic at giving advice or a new viewpoint and when this comes from a place of trust, it can be extremely useful and often quite healing. In that perspective I can see how this kind of a dynamic might feel particularly deep and special, especially if you are stuck in a conservative area where you don't run into nearly as many minority individuals and your friend groups are often restricted in their world views. Conservative cultures may also restrict what is acceptable or normative when it comes to the relationships you have with these individuals and discourage or make it more difficult to find deep authentic relationships with others.
I appreciate that both of you were willing to come in here and share fair criticism of the article- it's taught me a bit about the lens through which you both read this article and provided me with some new insight coming from backgrounds that are both similar yet quite a bit different than mine. My major hope from posting this article was to gather the opinions of others, both from the perspective of queers as well as the perspective of straight women. So far I have yet to see a woman chime in on the article with anything meaningful and I'm very curious to hear their opinion, whether it is good or bad, on the dynamic and how they view queer friendships. This article also helped me realize that while I participated in a decent amount of straight/queer relationships in my life, I never bothered to ask the other party what they were getting out of it and I have so few straight friends anymore that the opportunity is quickly dwindling.
Hello, I am a straight woman who has lots of thoughts about my queer friendships. :)
I haven't really had a male "gay best friend" in my life. I was in theater as a kid, so I certainly have had gay male friends, but never to the extent of the "gay best friend" trope. I do, however, have a number of queer friends as an adult (primarily non-binary folks, cis lesbians, and bisexual cis men.)
I am a married, straight woman who tends to dress quite masc. My queer friends joke about how they might mistake me for a lesbian because I always hook my keys on my jeans, and other silly little things like that. Sometimes strangers (like bartenders) use they/them pronouns for me since they're not sure about my gender identity. I also don't particularly subscribe to heterosexual norms. This is all to say, queer people seem to feel at ease to be their authentic, uncensored selves around me, and visa versa. I often feel more comfortable around queer crowds than I do straight crowds.
Despite all that, of course, it's not uncommon for me to feel like I'm somewhat of an intruder in spaces that aren't necessarily intended for me. Usually it's when I'm invited to a casual party/gathering that happens to have mostly queer people there, and I get a bit nervous wondering if anyone cares that I'm actually straight. A few times, I've been invited by a queer person to a more formal queer event, only to find out that the event is explicitly for queer people only, and the person who invited me either didn't notice that, or forgot that I am straight/cis. In either case I politely decline. (I think defined, relatively safe spaces are important, and I don't wish to intrude on any of them, even though I have a lot of fun in queer spaces and queer-led events.)
In writing this comment, I've realized that there is probably a whole new dynamic between straight women/people and queer people in general that probably builds on the old "gay best friend" trope, but in new ways. Like I said, I actually don't have many gay male friends currently, mostly acquaintances. Not sure why that is, actually. But regardless, this post has prompted me to wonder what my queer friends think about our relationship, and how they feel about how I treat their queerness. I should ask them about it.
Edit, you said you hoped for a straight woman's take on the story. I'm straight but I couldn't read it. I tried to read your archive link on my phone but it covered the text with uncloseable ads. I might go back on my laptop and try, but I am somewhat busy right now. Thanks for the archive link though.
I think this is the most out of place "as a _______" I've ever seen
See my edit. Also see the comment I replied to. You are right. It needed clarification.
Here's the full text of the article:
Ryan and I met working behind the tills in HMV Cork in the winter of 2009. We bonded instantly, and as we are both natural romantics, began the process of myth-making in our friendship while it was still slippery from birth. We moved in together quickly. We began writing a sitcom based on our lives, then got stoned and paranoid about being sued by former co-workers when we became famous. We left long Facebook posts on each other’s walls, quoting the things we said to one another, terrified that our specialness and our closeness would not be noticed or rewarded by the wider world. We wanted them to say: you two really have something here.
We were 19, and we were insufferable. But there was a lot of that kind of thing around. Bright young women and their even brighter gay friends were burning up our screens. There was Will & Grace, of course, and there was Stanford Blatch from Sex and The City. There was Stanley Tucci’s Nigel in The Devil Wears Prada, and Damian in Mean Girls, and Rupert Everett’s George in My Best Friend’s Wedding. We opened Word documents, centre-aligned the text and transcribed ourselves.
Insufferable as we were, it wasn’t incorrect of us to think of our dynamic, the facts of it anyway, as TV-ready. You had to be quick and young and pop-culture obsessed. We were those things. You had to be adventure-ready, slightly fucked-up, and we were that, too. We had no life experiences and no responsibilities and so filled that chasm with plot. Like Friends episodes, we thought of each day of our life together as The One With. The One With The Failed Oscars Party. The One Where We Played Hide and Seek On The Roof. The One Where Each Jilted Our One Night Stands In Order To Eat A Lasagne In An Italian Restaurant at Eleven In The Morning.
Inevitably, the sitcom idea tailed off, and so did the living together. Ryan did a masters degree in Wales, and I moved to London in 2011. I became a writer and while the friendship maintained itself at various distances, it didn’t occur to me to write about Ryan or our relationship again. It wasn’t as if we had no adventures, no plot. If anything, the major movements of our lives still seemed to draw us back together. Ryan moved to London in March 2014; I broke up with my live-in boyfriend in April. Ryan came and filled a black cab with my things – I still didn’t have very many things – and he took me to his house.
“Thank you for coming to get me,” I said, an Anglepoise lamp teetering on my lap in the back of the cab.
“I’ll always come to get you,” he replied and, since then, it’s become a strange mantra of our friendship. He said it to me last Sunday, when he picked me up for brunch. A call and response, a song lyric that I always start and he always finishes.
That day has been a chicken-or-egg question in my head ever since. I know that the boyfriend and I broke up for good reasons. But did I time the break up to go with Ryan’s arrival? Was it just a coincidence? I had no family in the country before Ryan emigrated, no one who would look after me if I needed it. So I put off needing anything until he showed up, and then I needed everything.
The years passed and a cultural resistance grew up around “the gay best friend”. A sense of disgust around Will & Grace, around Stanford Blatch. As much as these characters provided energy and verve to otherwise by-the-book movies, the limitations of the gay best friend became a subject of cultural critique. Who were these homophobic caricatures, and why were they so everywhere?
They provided the heroine with empathy and access to a highly connected underworld of culture, media and whatever else she might need. But their sexuality, their private lives, their wants and desires are unimportant. They dissolve as soon as the heroine leaves the room, or puts the phone down.
As Elliot Page writes in his new memoir, Pageboy, “Hollywood is built on leveraging queerness. Tucking it away when needed, pulling it out when beneficial, while patting themselves on the back.”
The gay best friend was fairly criticised for being an example of both the tuck and pull of queer culture in mainstream media. He could not win: to conservative viewers, he was too much, and to liberal ones, not enough.
While much was written in the intervening years about what this stock character couldn’t give us, there was almost nothing written about what he could. He remained a standby of the sitcom and the romcom, often providing the com in each. But he was virtually invisible in literary fiction, where I was trying to make a name for myself.
Friendship, we’ve decided, is a reliable subject for literary exploration. Female friendship more than anything. From Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels to Zadie Smith’s Swing Time, and The Joy Luck Club to Fried Green Tomatoes, there have always been a great deal of words set aside for women agonising about their relationships with other women. Women are the ones reading the vast majority of novels in the world, after all, and it makes sense that they would want to read about their relationships with one another.
And yet in all the countless literary friendship stories, the relationship between gay men and straight women feels barely touched. It is an entertaining subject enough for comedy, but not for exploration within drama. In our resistance to the gay best friend as a trope, we have skipped over analysing the nuances of the dynamic to begin with. We have decided that this particular kind of relationship is low-rent, and sort of tacky. There will not be a trio of Elena Ferrante novels about it.
I’ve been writing novels for six years, and reading them for far longer. I have learned by now that when there is an absence of stories about a given subject, it is either because it lacks stakes or it lacks an audience. The audience question is a no brainer. Every woman and gay man I know has a relationship in their lives that is a bit like this. Thank you for coming to get me/I will always come to get you.
So let’s talk about stakes. Stories about platonic friendship are always wary on this subject, simply because romantic relationships have the stakes built in. Will they say, “I love you”? Will he propose? Will they both show up to the wedding and, inevitably, will they both stay faithful? Friendship stories have to be more creative. There are no flashy ceremonies built into friendship and you can have as many friends as you like, so fidelity is never a struggle.
And yet when I examine my and Ryan’s relationship, I can see that from its very beginnings, the stakes were enormous. Officially speaking, Ryan was straight. He existed, in 2009, in what I think of as a very Schrödinger’s Cat problem of queerness. It was too dangerous for him to come out and so we existed in a suspended realm of both knowing and not knowing – defending his right to be straight right now if he needed to be straight right now, but also leaving room for the inevitable coming out, later. And while it was understood that we would maintain a mutual delusion of his straightness, we spent all of our spare time having the gayest conversations imaginable.
Perhaps it was this foundational dishonesty that led to the inner world of private jokes and fantasy that quickly grew around us. We were not dowdy students in retail, but darling chat show hosts, Southern belles, old movie stars. We watched Thelma & Louise, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, Hairspray, Grease, and argued about which one of us was the Geena Davis, which was the Dolly Parton, which the Bad Sandy.
There’s something, I think, in the specifics of the gay man/straight woman dynamic that lends itself to this kind of playtime. Maybe the fact that straight women and gay men, for different reasons, have to present such a variety of masks to the world. She, if she wants a boyfriend, has to tap into the deep feminine well of being both effortlessly beautiful and cheerfully lowkey. If she wants to be beloved by other women, she must approach them with humility and a low profile. “If there are three little girls,” a friend with daughters tells me, “two of them are talking shit about the third.”
For him, the stakes are higher. Particularly in 2009. The pressure of passing is more intense, and if you can’t pass, then to be the kind of gay person who is funny and won’t try anything weird. It’s exhausting. It was designed to be.
What’s more alluring than someone who wants to drop the droopy, gauzy veil of everyday life with you, and instead don the heightened, insane costume of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
“But you ARRRR in that chair, Blanche!”
Our house was a nature reserve for state-protected campness, and it needed to be protected from everything that threatened it. Part of my 19-year-old self never wanted Ryan to come out so that I could carry on being the sole receiver of his outsized specialness.
“So you’re writing about your gay best friend?” It is February 2021 and, in the midst of late-pandemic depression, I have come back to the idea of writing about me and Ryan. This is my sixth novel and my first to commit the female writer’s sin of identifiably using my life to inform my fiction. It strikes me, again, that there are things that haven’t been said about how gay men and straight women relate. Suddenly, I can see them everywhere. The Sound of Music was on, again, at Christmas. For the first time I had no interest in Maria or Captain Von Trapp. I was looking at the Baroness and Max.
Baroness Elsa von Schraeder, you will remember, has been the long-time lover of Captain Von Trapp and spends the entire film walking the high-wire act that the widower sets out for her. She must be the graceful, beautiful aristocrat he fell in love with in Vienna, but must also morph on command into a warm, domestic mother figure to seven children. It’s an impossible task, especially when Julie Andrews is right there, but we see her try anyway. And only once does she let her mask slip.
And it’s with Max. Uncle Max, who is no one’s brother. Uncle Max who has a pencil moustache and works in showbiz in the 1930s. “Tell me everything,” he urges, when they’re alone. “Come on. Tell me every teensy-weensy, intimate, disgusting detail.”
“Well, let’s just say,” the Baroness eventually confesses. “I have a feeling I may be here on approval.”
“How can you miss?”
“Far too easily.”
He regards her. “If I know you, darling, and I do – you’ll find a way.”
There’s a tone here, something that feels fabulous and correct: the unknowable woman turning to someone who really wants to know her. And not just on a surface level, not just the nice parts. He wants, as he says, every teensy-weensy, intimate, disgusting detail. It all adds up to the same conclusion: you are safe. You are safe to be yourself with me.
So here it was: everything I was interested in, in a film that everyone has seen, that somehow held a dynamic no one had talked about.
“So you’re writing about your gay best friend? Does he know? Is he OK with it?”
We talk every day while I’m writing the book; I send him chapter by chapter. I keep asking if he is OK with it. He says he is. In fact, he is more than OK. Because this was the deal, wasn’t it? When we met almost 15 years ago it was implicit that our role in one another’s lives was to make life itself more special. We were two kids in a small Irish city and nobody else was going to make us feel famous, if not each other. That’s why we wrote failed TV shows; why we cast one another as Joan Crawford and Bette Davis; why we named our adventures, on top of living them.
Last April, we went to Denmark together, on a whim. Now that we both live with our partners, short trips abroad are our favourite way to re-access our original dynamic. Two stupid kids, confused and excited by everything. We found ourselves in a tattoo parlour and, in a giggling sweep of hungover hormones, got matching True Romance tattoos. You know the film. The Bonnie-and-Clyde story about the prostitute and the comic-book nerd who fall in love, steal a suitcase of cocaine, and drive to Mexico with the money.
The book, which is now a bestseller, turned out to be my suitcase full of cocaine. And here’s the kicker: they really do want to make a television show about it. The 19-year-olds in 2009 were right, after all. Those two really had something, there.
Thank you!
It reminds me somewhat of white people who are a bit too into the fact that they have a black friend. Or a woman I knew who went on mission trips and specifically became obsessed with "little brown African children" and how they were so much "cuter and sassier" than American/white children. (Hell, even the "sassy" stereotype reminds me of the "gay best friend issue.")
It's fantastic to have friends of different races, genders, and sexualities, but it can veer into fetishization or tokenization pretty quickly if white/straight people aren't very self-aware. It's a difficult thing to put your finger on, since the intentions of the person are normally innocent, but I think your point about Ryan's perspective/personality being absent from the article is definitely a warning sign. In these situations, people are somewhat reduced to accessories rather than full, complex human beings.
I swear there's nothing about this "gay BFF" friendship that can't be found in any close female-male friendship, regardless of orientation. It does feel special being the only girl a boy can confide in, because unlike potential romantic partners they don't have to impress you, but they don't have to be gay to have that relationship, just no mutual sexual attraction/tension.
It does feel like the focus on sexuality and assumption that the author can't have the same closeness with another woman says more about the author than about general gay-man-straight-woman relationships. The way she describes their friendship sounds exactly like the dynamic my sister and her best friend have, and they're both women.
I have to admit, I read the very first sentence of the article and came running back to your comment to say something about this (from the article):
As a straight woman, this describes every single one of the many close, wonderful friendships I have with men. In fact, it comes across as quite sad to me. My straight male friends bring so much joy and perspective to my life. We confide in each other about our careers, our love lives, our dreams/insecurities/hobbies, really anything you'd discuss with a friend of any gender.
I agree with you - I wonder if this isn't necessarily a special thing about gay best friends, but rather it simply doesn't happen often between women and men because 1) women don't feel physically/emotionally safe enough with most straight men to trust that it's a sexually neutral situation, and/or 2) straight men don't often feel emotionally safe enough to "share woes" and be emotionally vulnerable with women (or people in general.) Therefore, straight women find themselves gravitating towards gay men because they don't feel threatened (and I can't confirm this, but I imagine gay men gravitate towards straight women because the emotional intelligence/vulnerability and communication style of women feels more familiar to them.)
Personally, I never worry about the former issue (sexual attraction.) If my male friends are sexually attracted to me, that's their own business. I'm sexually attracted to some of them and I manage to keep things respectful, and I trust them to do the same. I've been with my husband for a decade, all my male friends know we have a happy marriage, and they are close friends with him as well. People on the internet, (ahem, reddit,) love to assert that these male friends are all standing around waiting to have sex with me. Well, so be it, I guess. I'd be fascinated to see the day that my male friends of 2-10+ years finally reveal themselves as being bad, fake friends with ulterior motives - but I won't be holding my breath.
The latter issue (men not feeling comfortable enough to be vulnerable,) doesn't seem to be a big issue in my friendships with men, but I hear other women talking all the time about how they can never get men to be vulnerable with them, romantically or platonically. Now, men are certainly different from women as a whole... I do have to blatantly explain to men that it's really, really okay for them to talk to me about their feelings, and usually reassert it once or twice, but once I do (and once they believe me,) things feel pretty normal moving forward. I have suspicions that it has something to do with the fact that I'm close with my dad, and have always felt a little more comfortable with men than with women. (My dad is a really sensitive, vulnerable guy, so from a very early age, I was never under the impression that men are emotionally "simple" or lacking in vulnerable feelings.)
Anyway, I do think gay men tend to have a lot of qualities that make them more appealing as friends than straight men do, at least for many women. But gay men don't deserve to be tokenized, and there's also no reason to do so. Gay men and straight men alike have the capacity to be good friends to women. All people should simply treat each of their friends like an individual human being who is separate from the stereotypes that may come with their gender/sexual identity. We should, of course, be aware of how the world may treat our friends differently, so we can understand their unique perspective in life and what they deal with. But these elements don't need to (and shouldn't) define our friendships.
I've read the whole article at this point, and to be honest, I'm not sure what the author was getting at. It seems that she feels a bit insecure about being very close friends with a man who is gay. But why? Does she tokenize him? Does she sense that he feels uncomfortable about the basis of their relationship? It's unclear, but the main thing that stood out to me in this article was this:
This does feel weird. Really weird, actually. I'm out of gas now and I probably shouldn't give a half-assed take on this, especially as a straight person - can anyone else comment on this sentence who has a relevant perspective? All I can say is that it's quite disturbing to me as a person who has had friends that have experienced painful, long, overdue processes of "coming out." I can't even imagine wanting a queer friend to not live openly as their authentic self (as long as it is relatively safe for them to come out. If they do not feel safe, of course I support whatever path they want to take.)
Yeah that last bit is really gross to me. I'm not a gay man but I am queer and it makes me feel really icky.
That last part would be weird if she ever acted on it, but I get the raw appeal in the abstract sense of "us sharing a secret together has shaped our friendship in a unique way and I'm scared of the friendship becoming more mundane without that".
Sure, that makes sense. I also just noticed she specifically said this is how she felt when she was a teenager, which is certainly the most reasonable time to have such an insecurity/concern.
Actually, to follow on from that second paragraph, it seems to come down to what role people expect others to fulfil in their life.
To illustrate, between my mother, my sister and myself we all have a different idea of who our primary emotional relationship should be. For me it's a romantic partner, for my sister it's a platonic female friend, for my mother it's a female relative (formerly her mother, now it flips between her sister or either of us daughters depending on who's not upset her recently). We're all married to men, and those men fulfil very different roles for each of us.
So for the author of this article, her primary emotional relationship is with her gay male friend.
As for what the "gay BFF" means in media, he's just the straight woman's equivalent of a manic pixie dreamgirl. He has no needs or demands of his own, he exists to fulfil the character arc of his female friend. Straight men gain status from sexual conquest so the manic pixie dream girl wants to sleep with them, but straight women lose status from sexual conquest so their manic pixie dreamboy is sexually unthreatening yet totally devoted.
So what I saw in the article is primarily a puff piece for her new book. To me, the details about the friendship relate back to her statement that as a writer and reader she doesn't see books about these kinds of friendship and she plans to write a book to fill the gap. She explains the friendship to show that it was important to her, and by extension other such friendships would be important to others and thus there is a market for the book and an unmet need.
She's got some nostalgia for being nineteen and naive and in a friendship focused around sharing secrets. Thankfully the closet is less frequently needed these days. Also, my experience as a woman at 19 was that male sexual desire was always obnoxiously in my face, coming from classmates, acquaintances and strangers. Catcalls and (less frequent) groping were part of my lived experiences. Post menopause, things are much more civil. I didn't have a gay friend then but it would have been a relief to know a young man other than my brother with no sexual dynamic at all.
Writers using life as raw material for their art can look really selfish, even narcissistic. I can't judge the quality of the friendship or the depth of her understanding or empathy for her gay friend based only on this piece.
Archived version: https://archive.ph/Nfsx0