-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’.
