#15: 'Gay Best Friends'

-A lot of people – particularly (but not exclusively) girls who garnered their ideals of modern womanhood and femininity from watching Sex and the City box sets – delight at the idea of having what they call a ‘gay best friend’.

-If they have not acquired one, they will warble to you, with an Americanized intonation that goes up at the end of their sentence, aping Cher from Clueless, Phoebe from Friends and the entire cast of Made in Chelsea, that they wish they ‘had a gay best friee-end’.

-If they have already acquired one, they will tell you about all the fun stuff they do with their ‘gay best friee-end’, such as spending all day in their pajamas watching trashy movies, staying up all night reading vogue and shoe blogs, bitching and, most importantly, going ‘shawping’.

-They tend not to think about the fact that commoditizing a person because of their sexual preferences is definitely not something that friends do to one another. At least, I try not to categorize my friends that way. Among my circle of chums there could potentially be some pretty unseemly epithets; ‘BFFWLGR’ (BFF Who Likes Getting Rimmed).

-However, this is not about niche sexual practices. It’s got more to do with minority groups and cultural stereotypes. The ‘gay best friend’ idea perpetuates the fallacy that, in order to be accepted into the narrow margins of mainstream heteronormative culture, homosexual men have to talk like Truman Capote, dress fashionably, and gesticulate senselessly, whilst declaring everything as ‘faaaabulous’. Those are the good little gays we like to see, apparently. This is why representation of gay men in the media doesn’t stretch far beyond the realms of Graham Norton and Alan Carr. It seems there is far less space in the popular consciousness for gay men who don’t wear their ‘otherness’ as flamboyantly as their Vivien Westwood man-bags. Would the kinds of people who yearn for a ‘gay best frie-eeend’ want, quite as much, to be friends with a man who works in carphone warehouse, likes reading crime novels, listens to Classic FM and happens also to be openly gay? Not tho thure, thweetie.

-And what about ‘lesbian best friends’? I don’t hear of many of them knocking around. Is that because, once again, stereotypes come into play, and the fictional image we have of big, scary, frumpy, aggressive lesbians is less appealing than that of ‘fun’ gay men, for whom life is apparently just one big bitch-athon?

-As far as I can tell, the pressure for gay men to pander to campy stereotypes is something that is embedded in the landscape of mainstream heterosexual culture, and may take a long time to change. It’s like, “we’ve just about accepted that there are people out there who don’t do the kind of love it says to do in The Bible, but we will only accept the ones who amuse and appease us by behaving in a non-threatening, non-‘manly’ fashion. And as for the women who engage in such tomfoolery… Well, they’d better be as funny as Ellen Degeneris, or as smoking hot as her girlfriend, or we shall have no truck with them whatsoever.”

-But, back to the whinge about ‘gay best friends’. Basically, the popular appeal of the ‘gay best friend’ thing is unconsciously based on a patronizing presupposition that homosexual men are cute and cuddly, naturally effeminate and devoid of sexual agency, and must therefore enjoy living vicariously through people with ‘proper’ heterosexual love lives. Basically, the human equivalent of a Chihuahua poking out of an Hermès Berkin. It’s as crass and tokenistic as the idea of having an ‘Asian best friend’, or a ‘black ex-partner’ as opposed to all your other best friends and ex-partners. Much the same as Asians, black people and all your other best friends, non-heterosexuals are capable of possessing an identity that is not informed by cultural stereotypes, and if befriended, should just be referred to as ‘friends’.

#14: People who show you 'cool stuff!!!' on Youtube

-The internet is a double-edged sword.

-On one hand, the internet and has presented us with many wonderful opportunities for expanding our opinions, outlook and general knowledge, visa vis news and current affairs from multiple sources, The Gutenberg Project and Wikipedia.

-On the other hand, the internet has also presented us with many opportunities to shrink our brains into half eaten, saliva-soaked marshmallows, wasting our time and misinforming us about our world and the people in it, visa vis Miniclip.com, Facebook and, of course, Wikipedia. Not only because a lot of its entries are improperly researched and unverified, but also because of the varying and unaccountable nature of its coverage. The 400 word entry for Elizabeth Smart’s breathtaking 1945 prose poetry masterpiece By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept is pretty measly in comparison to the 6 section mini biography that comprises the entry for Dappy from N-Dubz. Apparently the cunt puts pepper in his toddler’s mouth as a punishment for swearing. He also got kicked out of Alton Towers last year for smoking a joint.

-Anyway, Youtube is a fascinating addition to our brave new world, giving us pop culture on tap, as it were. It’s amazing to have mini documentaries about Leonard Peltier, or trailers from forgotten Italian Giallo films and other groovy little cultural relics at our fingertips. We can even dig around in obscure music genres, listening to whole albums of rare afro-beat and Peruvian surf rock if we so wish.

-It’s less amazing that thousands of halfwits can post almost identical videos of their whippet going ballistic after bathtime and share it with a seemingly indifferent online world.

-The reason I say ‘seemingly indifferent’ is because though I know I don’t give a shit, and you may not either, I am still ceaselessly amazed, and often concerned, by the amount of views and comments that these pieces of audio-visual flim flam seem to gather. Under the soberly titled ‘Funny Dog Video’, posted four years ago by hotgirl5753, there are such insights as;

‘Who says cat videos are the best? FUCK CATS! Dogs can do everything a cat can, they can do more and they can do it better!’ 

- IamEyalMarcosLevit

and,

‘good video is funny :D. Song??’

-McRAEize

The accompanying song was, of course, Who Let the Dogs Out?, released by the Baha Men in the year 2000. Not sure how it managed to slip past the ears of McRAEize, what with it being the most irritating piece of music of all time, but there you go.

-In a weird way, these faceless (and very brainless) comments are really interesting, bringing Roland Barthe’s groundbreaking and diabolically boring thesis on ‘The Death of the Author’ back into relevance, in a poignant, yet totally hopeless format.

-However, the main thing I wanted to moan about is the fact that there are certain people who insist on showing you what they deem as ‘cool stuff!’ on youtube. And unless you have a good reason not to, you end up being subjected to repeatedly viewing a 47 second clip of a baby being surprised, or a cat that walks backwards. The people who seek out and share these videos are the grown up equivalent of the kid in the playground who wasted your whole break-time by describing the entire plot of their favourite Simpsons episode in a non-linear fashion, and I would like them to leave me alone.

#13: Nerdy Cannabis Enthusiasts

 Cannabis enthusiasts Cypress Hill's cameo on The Simpsons.

It’s a hybrid? It’s grown in Southern California? It’s called ‘mango wizzle’? I suppose that's interesting, but I don’t really care. Get me a glass of water because my mouth is extremely dry. And stop giving me a biography of the dope we just smoked, because I’m trying to watch Beverly Hills Ninja. 

-One of my least favourite types of people (though I have very few ‘favourite types of people’) are those who get sucked into the pointless discipline of knowing too much about cannabis – proponents of doob scholarship, if you will.

-It’s not that I hate these people, but I have always found them incredibly dull. No prizes for guessing the major contributing factor.

-Every hobby has its enthusiasts, and there’s a fine line between enthusiasts and nerds. I don’t hate nerds either. In fact, I have always felt very comfortable around them, because I am one. However, nerds do have the habit of bending your ear about stuff you couldn’t care less about, and that can be tremendously irritating - even on an interdisciplinary nerd level; an animé nerd will have no time for the ramblings of a military history nerd. Although there are exceptions, such as the nerd I met working in a sex shop in Soho recently. He was, for all intents and purposes, a total nerd, but his niche interest lay in the area of racy things such as lube, pornography and disconcertingly life-like rubber fists, as opposed to warlocks’ incantations and magical elixirs. This made him, in my eyes at least, something of a crossover. I was more inclined to let him guide me through the glass cabinet of jewel-encrusted male urethra enlargers (they’re like the Cartier bracelets of BDSM apparel), than I would have been if he were showing me a selection of replica Viking fantasy weapons. I also found it interesting that his nerdiness probably gets him laid more than the average man – a bit like Neil Strauss, or the bloke who played Seth Coen in The O.C.

-I will put up with – perhaps even enjoy - someone giving me a whirlwind tour through the (thankfully) unfamiliar territory of aggressive sex gear. But I have much less time for nerdy cannabis enthusiasts, who used to bore my buzz into smithereens when I smoked dope, by mumbling away about the name and gender of the strain, where it came from and how fruity/bubbly/dank it was. Let’s get something straight: even if it is the fruitiest, bubbliest, dankest bud ever, and was grown in Indonesia, that just means it spent a long haul flight wrapped in cling-film and buried deep in some poor guy’s arsehole before it found its way to the Carhartt sticker mosaic on your coffee table.

-The last time I remember smoking dope was on my own a few years go, and I spent about 45 minutes in the mirror, combing my hair into a variety of humorous styles. I no longer take any form of drugs or intoxicants. But I do often find myself cornered by a nerdy cannabis enthusiast, providing me with vital information such as ‘ this is the squidgiest Moroccan hash you’ve ever seen, trust me’. Look pal, I trust you alright, it’s just that I just couldn’t give a flying fuck.

In the words of Peter Tosh, ‘legalize it’ (I suppose).