February 4, 2015 • 41 mins
Pop culture tells us gay men and straight women make the best of friends, but why? Cristen and Caroline dissect the sociology, culture and evolutionary psychology of these relationships to figure out whether these presumed besties are a product of nature or nurture.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff Mom Never Told You from how Supports
dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Kristen
and I'm Caroline, and this week we're talking about themes
on friendship and last on the podcast we talked about
shine theory and success in competition in women's friendships, and
(00:24):
now we're going to switch our focus to the gay
best friend, both the trope and also these actual relationships
between straight women and gay men and other kinds of
cross sex and cross orientation friendships. Yeah, it's been super
interesting looking at these sources and just charting the evolution
(00:46):
of not only the perception of gay people in our
country and what that meant for friendships at the time,
but then seeing how they are now. When you when
you look at shows like Will and Grace or Sex
in the City and how the leading ladies had their
gay friends who were almost treated like pets. They were
completely sexually neutered and expected to just be accessories. And
(01:09):
then you move forward in time and look at a
show like Girls where Hannah and Elijah are super bff.
Granted they did date back in the day, but it's
it is very interesting to look at how this has
evolved as the perception of gay people in America has
evolved as well well, and when it comes to sort
of a pop cultural timeline of it, the late nineties
(01:32):
is when this gay best friend trope really sunk it's
claws into film and television, starting with My Best Friend's Wedding.
I remember watching My best Friend's Wedding when I was
a younger girl. I don't know how what it was,
but I was old enough to look at Rupert Everett
(01:55):
and be like, I screw that straight guy, Julia Roberts
and you I really wanted Rupert Everett and Julia Roberts
at the end of the film to leave the wedding
and then make a life together, because he just used
to say they didn't. I know, it just wouldn't be
that kind of life that you were hoping. They would
have an unconventional life, yes, but did be near him
(02:17):
a okay? And in the following year, in You have
the premiere of not only Will and Grace also Sex
in the City, as well as the Object of My
Affection starring Jennifer Aniston and Paul Rudd, who it plays
the gay best friend in that one. And yes, I've
also seen that movie apparently I really enjoy these kinds
of films, and that's almost become its own mini genre
(02:41):
of the straight single or recently broken up with straight
girl pining away for her male gay best friend, because
then in two thousand you also have the next best thing,
which is a similar kind of set up. And Thomas
Rogers over at Salon did point out that Will and
Grace had many positive effects for him as a gay
(03:02):
man coming out during that era, and also for many
other gay men who were kind of looking around it
how to be, how do I act? What do I do?
And so Will and Grace had the benefit of being like, hey,
you can be accepted by people in society and not
be shamed. But the downside he was saying was that,
like I pointed out earlier, the gay characters in that show,
(03:25):
we're totally neutered. He's I think he said, they were
as sexual as a pastel card again, and the friendship
has become a trope essentially. But I didn't think it
was interesting when a few seasons in they bring in
this sexy young boyfriend for him, which maybe I don't know,
maybe was their effort to make him into more of
a human person and actual like three dimensional, performed human
(03:49):
who was desirable. But that was the whole the whole
joke too, of like this guy's going for Stanford, how
is that possible? But anyway, Uh, this whole though, even
though it seemed to blossom in the nineties the late nineties,
it's been around for a long time, just that very
basic assumption that straight women and gay men are essentially
(04:13):
made for each other. And this also jumped out to
me when I was researching for this podcast and I
was on the side reading Catla Moran's How to Be
a Woman, and she writes at one point, at eighteen,
I'm discovering what generations of women have long known that
the natural ally of a straight woman is the gay
man because they are other losers, to which I mean
(04:36):
that kind of sums up our assumptions about this relationship. Yeah,
they are both outside the norm and the dominant social
construct being you know, the white man, the white straight man. Um. Well,
we found some interesting points about the origins of what
would become this this major trope in this paper called
fast Friends and Queer Couples, Relationships between gay men and
(04:58):
straight women in North American put bular culture from nineteen
fifty nine to two thousand by James Allen. And Allen
points out that since the late nineteenth century, a lot
of researchers have seen commonalities, as we just said, between
gay men and straight women in terms of being the other.
So when did these relationships really start to pop up
(05:19):
on screen. Well, in the late nineteen fifties we get
the weakening of the Hayes Code. Now, the Hayese Code
proceeded like the rating system for movies, which is like
rated are rated PG. It was basically a set of
moral guidelines for the film industry that was in effect
from nineteen thirty to nineteen sixty eight. But when it
started to major league weekend in the fifties, Hollywood began
(05:42):
showing these relationships between straight women and openly gay men
more prominently on screen. And if they weren't openly gay,
they were kind of wink wink, nudge nudge game. They're
always like the the interior designer man friend who can
be playful with this woman who has a boyfriend and
her boyfriend won't get upset. Um and Alan categorizes these
(06:05):
kinds of relationships into mother and son, the perfect couples,
kind of like Will and Grace, and also the Gals
and Pals, which is a little more Carrie Bradshaw and
Stanford Blatch, But they've always been so steeped and stereotypes
because underlying a lot of this historically are bigoted assumptions
(06:26):
that gay means secretly want to be women, that they
identify more with the female experience, and that women who
associate with gay men simply aren't sexy enough to get
straight men to fall in love with them, find them attractive,
and that they derive their self esteem from gay men's compliments.
So I mean this, this trope has a lot of baggage.
(06:49):
It has a lot of negative things to say about
everyone involved. Basically, Yeah, and I want to clarify that
we're talking about the trope, We're not talking about these
actual relationships that do exist in the real world off
screen between gay men and straight women. But I mean,
speaking of that, let's dive into those real, actual human
relationships and find out what researchers say, because I mean, obviously, yes,
(07:11):
these friendships do exist, they do happen, They're not just
a pop culture television phenomenon, and research support that these
cross sex and cross orientation friendships do happen from a
young age. Yeah. There was a paper published in Social
science Research in called Patterns of Cross Orientation Friendships in
(07:31):
high School and it confirmed that among all gender combinations
in cross friendships in other words, boy girl friendships quote
those between straight females and sexual minority males, which is
perhaps the most clinical way of saying a gay guys
have received a great amount of attention in previous research.
The scholarly interests perhaps reflect the high rate of friendships
(07:55):
in the gender combination. And they point to a two
thousand to study which found that gay boys tend to
have more female friends than straight boys, although lesbians, younger
lesbians do not necessarily have more male friends than straight
females do. And we'll come back to that in a minute,
(08:15):
because that was a big question in our research of well,
we have this focus on this cross sex, cross gender
gay men, straight women, but what about like gay women
and straight guys, and straight guys and gay guys, what
about all the other combinations? Right, And so they point
out that these sexual minority students, so to speak, seemed
to be largely cut off from one another at school.
(08:37):
They're not only small numbers, but there's also a concerted
effort to reduce visibility. I mean, middle school is hard enough,
you know, without feeling like you're about to be bullied
because you are of that sexual minority as they talk about.
And Kristen, you mentioned all of the different basically combinations
of these different friendships. And they also found that straight
(08:59):
girl are more likely to have cross orientation cross sexual
orientation friendships than straight boys are. And so if we
look to another study which is called Beyond Similarities Cross
Gender and Cross Orientation Best Friendship and a sample of
sexual minority and heterosexual young adults in the journal Sex Roles,
they also pointed to the differences in straight girls friendships
(09:22):
and straight boys friendships with people of cross orientations. And
so they found that gay men reported more cross gender
friendships than lesbians did, while straight girls reported a higher
percentage of cross gender best friendships than straight boys did.
So it's basically confirming what the previous study found. So yeah,
(09:44):
I mean, in a nutshell, girls are just likelier to
have strong friendships with gay boys and boys are likelier
to have strong friendships with girls. Yeah, I mean it
seems like straight boys are friends with straight boys. Yeah,
I mean kind of there is that that isolation. And yeah,
as we'll talk about, like you know the series Lesbians
(10:06):
are going to be Friends with lesbians, Straight boys are
friends of straight boys, and then gay boys are friends
and then there's the rest of us and we mixed
and mingle. And I will say that that pattern was
very much reflected in my high school. I mean I
had a pretty small graduating class. It was easy to
see and there was only one out gay guy in
(10:29):
our class, and he only really hung out with girls.
I mean he would hang out with the guys sometimes,
but they were merciless. Yeah, it was the same. Yeah,
it was the same. In my high school, I had
a gay friend who actually got chased out of school
by the popular boys. It was just just a sad,
unfortunate situation because he was part of the popular boy group.
(10:51):
They found out he was gay, they bullied him until
he left school. But up until then, well he had
been part of that group. The core of his friend
group had been girls, and so it was horrible to
see that the one boy who was able to try
to come out just it was he was not successful.
And while I have a feeling that for people who
(11:12):
are in high school today that kind of outright bigotry
and homophobia is not as bad as it used to be,
even when you and I were in high school, not
so long ago. But this study, I mean, it's from
two thousand and fourteen supports that those kinds of patterns
still exists, which is interesting. And one thing that further
(11:35):
studies have suggested is that these friendships between gay men
and straight women are also mutually beneficial. And this was
something that Thomas Rogers was pointing out over at Salon,
speaking more too in this instance of gay straight friendships
and more of the pre Stone Wall era, saying quote,
men got the appearance of heterosexual legitimacy and intimacy free
(11:59):
of sexual tension. Women got a touch of glamour and
performance and exoticism. And so when it comes to that
glamour and performance and exoticism, and this this mutually beneficial relationships. Supposedly,
this was something that a study publishing The General Body
Image looked into in two thousand nine study title the
(12:20):
Relation between Women's Body Esteem and Friendships with Gay Men,
and its results supported the hypothesis that women's body esteem,
specifically feelings of sexual attractiveness, was positively associated with friendships
with gay men, but correlation causation not clarified. Right, as
(12:41):
Jesse bearing Over Scientific American pointed out, there was absolutely
no link between a woman's relationship status, the number of
times she'd been on the receiving end of a breakup,
or her body esteem, and the number of gay male
friends in her life. Still, the longer that a woman
has been friends with her closest gamail friend, they found,
the lower her perceived sexual attractiveness. But this is I
(13:03):
mean again, this is all correlation. Because also you could think,
and this is the first thing I thought, well, like, okay,
the longer a woman has been friends with someone, the
lower her esteem body esteem. Well, like, also that means
you're getting older, which means that you might naturally feel
bad about things that are sagging. I don't know exactly. Yeah,
I mean that is why it is so important to
(13:26):
read studies when you can, because I mean, it's yeah,
especially in the case of this, it's like, who who
knows if the reason why they felt greater sexual self
esteem was just because they had a circle of gay
men all just like dolling out compliments all day long. Um.
But one study though in two thousand and ten publishing
(13:47):
The journal Evolutionary Psychology essentially went viral when it came out.
It's title is friends with Benefits but without the sex.
Straight women and gay men exchange trusted data advice, and
it suggests that these relationships flourish because there is no
(14:07):
sexual threat. So that's good for straight women. We can
have these relationships with these men who do not want
to have sex with us, and so that makes life
so much easier. And meanwhile, straight women offer the benefit
of possibly providing access to other gay men for their
gay friends to meet, and also swapping, as the study
(14:30):
title implies, or what it doesn't imply. As the study
title states, we can swap dating advice because we're all
we're all going for men, so we're all, you know,
but not the same men, so we're not in competition.
There's no sexual threat. There's no competition. I mean, what
more perfect relationship could you get? Right, basically that we
both love getting dating advice from each other because there
(14:52):
are no ulterior motives. You can get a male perspective
without any sort of bias. You know, you can get
a male perspective, but he's not trying to date you
and keep you from the other man that you like
and vices, and he wouldn't be able to try to
date the straight guy that you're going for. But there
were also some experimental limitations with a study design as well,
because essentially the way they set it up was through
(15:16):
um Facebook profile setting up these face fake Facebook profiles
for I think it was an obviously straight guy, obviously
gay guy, and an obviously straight woman, and they set
up a scenario of having to go to a party
and you don't know anyone, So who of these three
people and these fake Facebook profiles would you like to
(15:38):
go to this party with the most? And women were like, okay, guy,
And then they did the same thing for the gay men.
UM so it's not I would be more curious to
get a little more real world interaction. Well, so, obviously,
what what this is showing us is that there are
a lot of benefits for these the people in these
(16:00):
relationships and that the pop culture phenomenon that is the
gay best friend is based in something real that actually happens.
But not all of these relationships are always super healthy.
And we're going to get into that when we come
right back from a quick break and now back to
the shop. So in the first half of the show,
(16:25):
we established the fact that yes, indeed, gay men and
straight women, as you and I can both personally attest,
do exist. And there have been studies on these relationships
because they seem to fascinate us endlessly, I think, because
I mean, people are constantly puzzling over this question of
can men and women be friends? And this is the
(16:46):
one cut and dried situation where it's like, oh, yeah, absolutely,
because there is none of that sexual tension. And then
when it comes to female female friendships, there's a question
of competition and jealousy if you're both coming from the
same guy, unless, of course she's a lesbian, where the
lesbians will get to them. But yeah, and before we
talk about the different combinations of all of these friendships
(17:08):
and the dynamics and what they mean and are they positive,
we do have to talk about some of the downsides
of the stereotypical gay man straight woman relationship. For instance,
the idea that straight women get to use gay men
as this accessory, this arm candy, this this party favor
to feel better about themselves, exercising a lot of privilege
(17:30):
along the way. Yeah, and this is more speaking to
these relationships as reflected in pop culture and to almost
a trope extent, it's something. For instance, it comes up
a lot on shows like Real Housewives, where you have
the rich woman who loves to trot out her quote
unquote gay husband because he's so cute and fun and
(17:51):
her husband doesn't pay attention to her anyway. So thankfully
there's this one guy. And Thomas Rogers, who we've signed
a number of times now, wrote all about this in Salon,
at the headline of his piece being I'm not your
gay boyfriend. He said, quote, it feels like she's throwing
around a designer label or telling me she knows the
celebrity a kind of social conspicuous consumption. So there there
(18:16):
is some troubling factor that can exist in that more
in its portrayal I think on television rather than these
um well, and I'm sure sometimes in real life off
screen as well, because people are emulating those kinds of
statusy relationships, right. But you know, I mean, it's a
two way street if we're talking about using each other
(18:38):
and having privilege, because he also talks about gay men
getting to use their straight female friends as their own
accessories then exercising their own privilege, but this time male
privilege to the point of outright misogyny. Yeah. This was
something that Yolo Achilley wrote about over The Good Project
(19:00):
and got a lot of conversations started about this question
of gay male privilege, which might sound like it cannot
possibly exist well in the way Yolo wrote about it, quote,
the unique way our entitlement to women's physical bodies plays
itself out is only the tip of the iceberg when
it comes to gay cis gender men's sexism and privilege,
(19:23):
and goes on to talk about how in a class
he was leading, he was asking students, female students whether
they had ever been touched by a gay guy like
non consensually um, and a lot of them raise their hands,
and a lot had stories about, say, going out one
night and having their breasts grabbed, or the infamous incident
(19:47):
on the red carpet in two ten when Scarl Johansson
was talking to Isaac ms Rahi on the red carpet
at the Oscars and he grabbed her breast and she
was not happy about it. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I
can't imagine a scenario when she would be But that
whole thing has to do with the idea that gay men,
(20:10):
you know, aren't real men, the societal perception of gay
men being again totally neutered and safe, and so it's
not assault, it's not it's not offensive to have your
personal self, your physical self grabbed by someone else because
it's just a gay guy. And Achille was talking about
how a lot of game and see it as their
right to somehow be able to grope or offer advice
(20:33):
on women's bodies, like women's bodies are just an unfinished
painting that they can come in and critique and give
advice on. And I have a feeling too that this
also is a two way street in the sense of
there are gay men who don't really appreciate it when
a pack of drunk straight women walk into gay bars
(20:54):
and want to take over and be the centers of
attention and grab their butts and their crotches as well.
So I mean it becomes a complicated sort of dynamic
which I attribute to these this this portrayal of this
kind of newtered toy for straight women to play with,
(21:15):
when in fact, I mean in real life there are
such strong and powerful and intimate and important relationships which
we get between gay men and straight women. There is, however,
also these other factors that we need to confront too,
even though I mean I'm personally kind of seizing up
a little bit because it's a little uncomfortable to talk about. Frankly, Yeah,
(21:36):
and Rowan goa Over at Jezebel did an incredible job
talking about it. I mean, he wrote this incredibly long, detailed,
very personal piece about his life as a gay man
and his relationship with both other gay men and with
straight women, and the fact that he basically no longer
refers to himself as a gay man, that he calls
himself queer because he says that the term gay is
(21:59):
way too loaded now that a gay man is like
will on will and Grace, or like someone who's older
with a ton of privilege and he's wealthy, and he
has all these material needs and desires and obsessed obsessions,
whereas the queer guy isn't the one in his assessment
who's going to go out and grab women's boobs and
give them all makeovers. But basically he talks about kind
(22:22):
of the same stuff that Thomas Rogers at Salon did
that for young men looking for role models, looking for
an example of how to come out and how to
be yourself. Really, the examples you have are from pop culture.
And so then he gets in from there two points
about his perceived experiences with what he perceives to be
(22:43):
misogyny that exists between gay men in his life and
straight women in his life, and that he feels like
many of his female friends have been made to feel
unwelcome in his own culture, what he calls his own culture,
and says that, hey, guys, we need to empathize with women,
not just use them as props as arm candy at parties.
(23:04):
That we're all humans. Let's start treating each other like it.
Oh and and vice versa again too. I mean just
even even using remember that, at least to me in
my perspective. And I'm going out a limb and inserting
my own opinion here. I think that people should, at
this point, before gay marriage is legal in the US,
maybe think twice about what a privilege insulting kind of
(23:28):
statement it is to call someone your gay husband, you know,
if that person doesn't have the right to marry and
get his own husband. I think that's uh, maybe I'm
maybe I'm making a mountain out of him. Will help, Yeah,
but basically, I yeah, and I mean going off of
what Rohan was writing in terms of empathizing, and hey,
gay guys don't treat women like props. I mean absolutely,
(23:49):
it goes both ways. None of us should be treating
anyone like props. None of us should be leaning so
heavily on our privilege that we treat another human being
like a pet or a prop or some kind of
arm candy accessory. Well, and isn't it fascinating too, And
that these kinds of conversations are coming up right now
when we have had a lot of progress in terms
(24:13):
of gave his ability, lgbt Q rights and recognition, as
well as a lot of resurgence in terms of women's
rights gender equality. It's interesting that before all of that,
when both women and gay men were sort of shoved
off into the corner, they were the others. As Calamran
(24:34):
put it, we were considered because of that natural allies.
But now as both groups are coming into more rights
and recognition and equality on their own, we're now having
to take a closer look at some of the skeletons,
perhaps in this friendship closets. Well, sure, because both straight
(24:55):
women and gay men are hitting points where they're feeling
empowered enough to step up and say, hey, I am
not a prop. I'm not just Jack from Will and
Grace or I'm not just Karen from Will and Grace.
As much as those characters are great fictional television characters,
plenty of people now are stepping up to be like,
can we perceive or depict anyone as like a real human? Yeah?
(25:18):
That would be That would be wonderful. And one thing
I would like to see more of two and and
there is a little bit more of this on TV
and film, but more exploration of other cross sex and
cross orientation friendships. What about the gay men straight men
friendships that have historically just been hampered by homophobia? But
(25:44):
knowing some of I know some guys who are you know,
gay straight guy friends, and they're wonderful relationships to watch. Yeah. Um,
but unfortunately, and this is coming from a New York
Times story in two thousand nine, they talk about Jamie Price,
who's an Appalachian State University professor who studied forty six
(26:05):
pairs of straight and gay male friends for her book.
And while that's a lot of pairs, she concluded that
just thirteen of them could truly be called close friends,
often because of the barrier that straight men would put
up because they're not so willing to hear or want
to hear about their gay friends personal life slash you know, wait, wait,
(26:25):
nudge and nudge sex life. But I wonder though that
was in two thousand nine, not so long ago. But
it feels like so long ago in terms of where
we are as a culture with homophobia. But maybe I'm
also looking at the world through rainbow colored glasses um.
The New York Times also interviewed Professor rich C. Seven Williams,
super professor of developmental psychology at Cornell, who talked about how,
(26:50):
in a similar way that straight women might be drawn
to friendships with gay men because we can get dating
advice and maybe talk about things we can't talk about
two straight guys. Um. Seven Williams says that straight men
also feel like they can talk to gay men about
fashion and ask them if they're looking okay, and talk
(27:11):
about more emotional relationship issues, which made me think, Oh
my god, are straight people just always looking for as Tassi,
a sassy friend till because they can't communicate with each other?
So is this just another version of the shine theory,
like instead of like, hey, women, position yourself next to
powerful ladies that you can help you along in your career.
(27:33):
Is this just like hey, straight people, but listen yourself
next to a gay man so that you can get
advice whenever you want. Yeah, do you not like talking
to your straight partner? Well, do we have a sassy
friend for you? It's it's exhausting, But the whole gay
straight bromance thing does seem to be becoming at least
(27:54):
a little more visible. Um. Writing in Gawker, Brian Moyland
talks about hell, there should be a contract for friendships
between straight guys and gay guys, like, hey, talk about
your sex life, talk about your romantic life, but can
we both agree that neither one of you will go
into much detail because you don't want to hear about
penises and you don't want to hear about vaginas. So
(28:16):
let's just kind of give the general gist of things
and bond that way, but not get into the nitty gritty. Yeah,
and also, of course the assamble like accepting that, hey,
your gay friend doesn't necessarily want to have sex with
your your gay friend is not just flirting with you,
and playing a long game to try to get you
(28:37):
to bat for the other team. Sure, but I mean,
but there is the reality too that just like in
straight man straight woman relationships where the guys maybe holding
a candle for the girl and the girls not aware
of it. I mean, it's not like that doesn't happen,
But you can't go into every friendship thinking like, is
he just trying to get me into bed? Is that
(28:59):
your is such your Blanche Devereaux, she's wondering absolutely in
her in one of her night gowns. Yes, yes, yes
it is well And and another thing Moyland requests as
well with this gay straight bromance contract is no jokes
about a feministcy and homophobic nonsense, which is just a
(29:20):
good rule of thumb in general. Right, oh man, whatever, whatever,
I still hear it. It's it's like nails and a
chalkboard when you hear those kinds of jokes today, especially
because it's like, seriously, you're making that you really so unfunny,
that is really so foolish you sound um. But I
do think, I mean, I think that these relationships are
becoming more normalized, and it's been a byproduct of just
(29:44):
the generalized embrace of the bromance, which I think is fantastic.
I am all for guy friendships because they are adorable.
Oh yeah, and they're necessary. They're so necessary. We've talked
about the health benefits of having very close friends before,
so we won't get into all that. But let's talk
(30:04):
about another cross sex, cross orientation friendship dynamic here. Where
are the straight men and the lesbians in this conversation? Yes,
there is actually a term called les bros. No, we
did not coin it. Um. There was an article about
this not too long ago in Details magazine. So grain
(30:24):
of salt, but all about this les bro person who essentially,
to me, read like the gay version of Jillian Flynn's
Cool Girl and Gone Girl. Because the way that that
this author was pitching straight guys you need to become
friends with lesbians, which, sure, I think that's totally fine. Yeah,
(30:46):
may make friends with lesbian's, absolutely, But the benefits were dudes,
she well, we watch football, you can go to strip clubs,
you can go out to abuse, and you go from
all mine because she'll found out with lesbian she won't
care guys, and I that was I'm just mocking the
(31:06):
overall tone of this article yeah. Well, I mean, but
just like with any friendship, you've got to worry about
some potential sexual tension because I mean, just think about
chasing Amy was chasing Amy. Chasing Amy was one of
the worst. I mean, Chasing Amy just put a nail
in the coffin of straight men and lesbian relationships because
(31:28):
it it lit a candle for some for some fellows
out there, some ben affleck the idea that you're going
to turn a woman so that she just hasn't met
the right guy yet, she hasn't met the right penis yet.
Soon as she meets this penis, she'll become a straight woman.
And we're not just talking in trope either. This was
something that came up, uh from the Stuff Mom Never
Told You YouTube channel. I got a question about from
(31:50):
a lesbian why do straight guys never believe me when
I say that I'm a lesbian? Why why do they
need proof for that? And I talked about it on
the show and got so many comments from so many
other lesbians to saying that even if they are approached
by a straight guy at a bar and they say, hey, thanks,
no thanks, I'm a lesbian. Even though thanks, I thinks
(32:13):
should suffice that doesn't suffice they don't really believe it.
There is this assumption that that can happen. And for
that reason, Lee Clara le Berge, who was an assistant
professor of gender studies at the University of Chicago, told
Details magazine quote, for a straight guy, there's probably some
(32:34):
disavowed sexual excitement. He knows perfectly well sex would never happen.
But still so it's not to say that these friendships
don't and can't exist, but I do think that they
are rarer, perhaps because of that dynamic, a little bit
of sexual baggage. Yeah. Yeah, And there was a post
(32:55):
about this at after ellen dot com as well, of
a lesbian asking nic question of like, why are we
never the gay bff and then explaining it she was like,
one of the things she was saying was, well, I
guess we don't really wanted to hang out with straight
guys all the time, So I don't know that's one
person's opinion. Well yeah, And in that same post, the
(33:15):
blogger Chloe contends that part of it might just be
that there's this stereotype of lesbians just being aggressive that
they're not, You're like glittery, cuddly unicorn like stereotypical best
gay guy friend. Well, and it also reflects those studies
that we started earlier looking at friendships in middle and
(33:36):
high school, and lesbians are likelier to essentially like make
friends with each other, they aren't necessarily as um as
likely to have those cross sex friendships. Yeah, But jumping
off of that, Tyler Curry, writing at Huffington's Post, talks
about the whole dynamic of gay boys and then eventually
(33:58):
men and lesbian girls and women, and talks about how
early on in life, especially when you're younger, you're sort
of pushed together because it's like, oh, you're gay, so
just go be together. Yeah, go in the gay corner.
Yeah you're the others, so go be other together. And
he talks about how it's like being different animals in
(34:18):
the same cage. They're assumed to be natural allies, when
really it's more like fraternal twins. You just don't have
the same struggle. And ironically, of all of the cross
sex cross orientation combinations, the one that at least in
the research we did for the podcast, the one that
(34:39):
seems to get the least amount of in depth research
is gay lesbian friendships. They are actually stereotypes that they
don't get along really at all. Yeah, when really it's like, Okay,
we're fighting similar fights. It's not that they don't get along,
but it's just that it is a different fight, and
(35:00):
so we we automatically assume, kind of in a stereotypical
assuming fashion, that, um, well, they must be best friends.
It's like when Harry met Stally, it's like the perfect combination.
It's men and women, but they want completely different things.
Of course they should get along. Um, but you know,
anecdote doesn't always bear that out to be true. Yeah,
(35:23):
and even uh, even looking back at TV. One thing
that jumped out to me when I was reading all
this stuff was how on the HBO show Looking, which
is all about gay guys in San Francisco, the sort
of token lady pal is straight, and she not only
is straight, but is the ex wife of one of
the super dreamy gay guys. Um. There's as far as
(35:48):
I can remember, there has really been very little lesbian interaction.
But people who are better versed on looking correct me
if I'm wrong. Um. But there was something that also
jumped out in the book A Companion to l g
pt Q Studies. It said, quote queer friendships between women
and men disturbed the mechanisms of homosocial cultures and force
(36:11):
us to quote deconstruct the forms of relationality that are
imposed upon them. So, in other words, maybe one of
the reasons why we there there has been, at least
so far, so little focus on those friendships is because
they sort of defy all of the possible norms, and
(36:33):
maybe we're at a loss to like, well, how well,
well then what do we do? Right? Yeah, we're we're
concerned that we won't be able to make a hit
sitcom based off of that. Yeah, yeah, I mean well,
And there's also two very little focused on straight similar
even less focused on street women and lesbians friendships then
(36:53):
on straight dudes and lesbian's friendships, probably because we as
humans seem really obsessed with the concept of men and
women being friends period. So, now, with all that we've
talked about about friendship dynamics, sexual orientation, romance, all of
these things, I'm sure our listeners have so much to
(37:13):
share with us, and I'm very curious to hear. Have
you been on the receiving end of being considered someone's pet,
Have you been treated a certain way or dragged along
on social escapades for a certain reason, just because you're
somebody's gay best friend or gay husband, or do you
have one of those awesome, super healthy cross sex cross
(37:35):
orientation friendships that you cherish and you love and you
are each other's people. We want to know all of
your stories, good, bad and ugly. And just one note
about the whole gay best friend thing. I really hope
that we are also to the point sort of in
what we were talking about with our episode on gay
(37:55):
weddings gay best friend, that phrase can just be shortened
to just best friend. Right, Yeah, so right to us
mom Stuff at how stuff works dot com is our
email address. You can also tweet us at mom Stuff
podcast and messages on Facebook, and we've got a couple
of messages to share with you right now. We have
(38:19):
a couple letters here about consent um. This one's from Jennifer.
She says, love the podcast, and I wanted to share
something my parents did to teach us about the importance
of consent. As early as I remember, when my dad
and I, or my sister and I would play fight
artickle as soon as anyone said stop or no, we stopped.
(38:39):
I didn't realize how deliberate my parents were with this
lesson until I started working with children who had been
sexually abused. When I started, I mentioned on my parents
how I remembered their rule. My mom told me that
children are powerless enough, it's their parents job to reinforce
that even small children are in charge of their bodies
and are worthy of respect for their decisions about their bodies. This,
(39:00):
along with a comprehensive sex education from my mother, ensure
that I felt empowered to make decisions about my sex
life and ensure that I was the one friends came
to with any embarrassing questions. So thank you, Jennifer. And
I've got a letter here from Kendra who writes, I
just listened to your rate Prevention nail polished episode, and
when you talked about the importance of teaching people the
(39:22):
importance of getting and giving consent, especially when they're younger
than college age, I had an interesting reaction. I have
two sons and a daughter, and my sons are eleven
and nine. My daughter is six, and my first thought
was that my sons feel much too young to be
having conversations with them about their role as men and
about what it means to get consent from a sexual partner.
(39:43):
But later that day, as I interacted with the five
daycare children in my home, all ages three and younger,
I realized how easy it is to teach and model
those issues all the kids, regardless of age and gender,
for the same messages. For me, you don't use your
body to hurt anyone ever. It's okay to touch someone
they love, giving hugs and kisses, but you should always
(40:05):
ask first, and if they say no, that means no,
because we're all the boss of our own body. Sex
is a complicated issue, and when it comes to sexual violence,
there's no easy way to talk about it, and I
think there's a point at which kids are really too
young to be having those conversations. But the underlying issues
are easy to teach and easy to talk about. And
if we do that teaching that no means no and
(40:25):
that you don't get to touch anyone who says no,
maybe we can reduce the chances that anyone will need
to be afraid. So thanks for that insight, Kendra, and
I think that's fantastic advice. So if you have advice,
our anecdotes to send our way. Mom Stuff at how
stuff works dot com is our email address, and for
links to all of our social media as well as
all of our blogs, videos, and podcasts with our sources
(40:48):
so you can read along. Head on over to stuff
Mom Never told You dot com.
Welcome to Stuff Mom Never Told You from how Supports
dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Kristen
and I'm Caroline, and this week we're talking about themes
on friendship and last on the podcast we talked about
shine theory and success in competition in women's friendships, and
(00:24):
now we're going to switch our focus to the gay
best friend, both the trope and also these actual relationships
between straight women and gay men and other kinds of
cross sex and cross orientation friendships. Yeah, it's been super
interesting looking at these sources and just charting the evolution
(00:46):
of not only the perception of gay people in our
country and what that meant for friendships at the time,
but then seeing how they are now. When you when
you look at shows like Will and Grace or Sex
in the City and how the leading ladies had their
gay friends who were almost treated like pets. They were
completely sexually neutered and expected to just be accessories. And
(01:09):
then you move forward in time and look at a
show like Girls where Hannah and Elijah are super bff.
Granted they did date back in the day, but it's
it is very interesting to look at how this has
evolved as the perception of gay people in America has
evolved as well well, and when it comes to sort
of a pop cultural timeline of it, the late nineties
(01:32):
is when this gay best friend trope really sunk it's
claws into film and television, starting with My Best Friend's Wedding.
I remember watching My best Friend's Wedding when I was
a younger girl. I don't know how what it was,
but I was old enough to look at Rupert Everett
(01:55):
and be like, I screw that straight guy, Julia Roberts
and you I really wanted Rupert Everett and Julia Roberts
at the end of the film to leave the wedding
and then make a life together, because he just used
to say they didn't. I know, it just wouldn't be
that kind of life that you were hoping. They would
have an unconventional life, yes, but did be near him
(02:17):
a okay? And in the following year, in You have
the premiere of not only Will and Grace also Sex
in the City, as well as the Object of My
Affection starring Jennifer Aniston and Paul Rudd, who it plays
the gay best friend in that one. And yes, I've
also seen that movie apparently I really enjoy these kinds
of films, and that's almost become its own mini genre
(02:41):
of the straight single or recently broken up with straight
girl pining away for her male gay best friend, because
then in two thousand you also have the next best thing,
which is a similar kind of set up. And Thomas
Rogers over at Salon did point out that Will and
Grace had many positive effects for him as a gay
(03:02):
man coming out during that era, and also for many
other gay men who were kind of looking around it
how to be, how do I act? What do I do?
And so Will and Grace had the benefit of being like, hey,
you can be accepted by people in society and not
be shamed. But the downside he was saying was that,
like I pointed out earlier, the gay characters in that show,
(03:25):
we're totally neutered. He's I think he said, they were
as sexual as a pastel card again, and the friendship
has become a trope essentially. But I didn't think it
was interesting when a few seasons in they bring in
this sexy young boyfriend for him, which maybe I don't know,
maybe was their effort to make him into more of
a human person and actual like three dimensional, performed human
(03:49):
who was desirable. But that was the whole the whole
joke too, of like this guy's going for Stanford, how
is that possible? But anyway, Uh, this whole though, even
though it seemed to blossom in the nineties the late nineties,
it's been around for a long time, just that very
basic assumption that straight women and gay men are essentially
(04:13):
made for each other. And this also jumped out to
me when I was researching for this podcast and I
was on the side reading Catla Moran's How to Be
a Woman, and she writes at one point, at eighteen,
I'm discovering what generations of women have long known that
the natural ally of a straight woman is the gay
man because they are other losers, to which I mean
(04:36):
that kind of sums up our assumptions about this relationship. Yeah,
they are both outside the norm and the dominant social
construct being you know, the white man, the white straight man. Um. Well,
we found some interesting points about the origins of what
would become this this major trope in this paper called
fast Friends and Queer Couples, Relationships between gay men and
(04:58):
straight women in North American put bular culture from nineteen
fifty nine to two thousand by James Allen. And Allen
points out that since the late nineteenth century, a lot
of researchers have seen commonalities, as we just said, between
gay men and straight women in terms of being the other.
So when did these relationships really start to pop up
(05:19):
on screen. Well, in the late nineteen fifties we get
the weakening of the Hayes Code. Now, the Hayese Code
proceeded like the rating system for movies, which is like
rated are rated PG. It was basically a set of
moral guidelines for the film industry that was in effect
from nineteen thirty to nineteen sixty eight. But when it
started to major league weekend in the fifties, Hollywood began
(05:42):
showing these relationships between straight women and openly gay men
more prominently on screen. And if they weren't openly gay,
they were kind of wink wink, nudge nudge game. They're
always like the the interior designer man friend who can
be playful with this woman who has a boyfriend and
her boyfriend won't get upset. Um and Alan categorizes these
(06:05):
kinds of relationships into mother and son, the perfect couples,
kind of like Will and Grace, and also the Gals
and Pals, which is a little more Carrie Bradshaw and
Stanford Blatch, But they've always been so steeped and stereotypes
because underlying a lot of this historically are bigoted assumptions
(06:26):
that gay means secretly want to be women, that they
identify more with the female experience, and that women who
associate with gay men simply aren't sexy enough to get
straight men to fall in love with them, find them attractive,
and that they derive their self esteem from gay men's compliments.
So I mean this, this trope has a lot of baggage.
(06:49):
It has a lot of negative things to say about
everyone involved. Basically, Yeah, and I want to clarify that
we're talking about the trope, We're not talking about these
actual relationships that do exist in the real world off
screen between gay men and straight women. But I mean,
speaking of that, let's dive into those real, actual human
relationships and find out what researchers say, because I mean, obviously, yes,
(07:11):
these friendships do exist, they do happen, They're not just
a pop culture television phenomenon, and research support that these
cross sex and cross orientation friendships do happen from a
young age. Yeah. There was a paper published in Social
science Research in called Patterns of Cross Orientation Friendships in
(07:31):
high School and it confirmed that among all gender combinations
in cross friendships in other words, boy girl friendships quote
those between straight females and sexual minority males, which is
perhaps the most clinical way of saying a gay guys
have received a great amount of attention in previous research.
The scholarly interests perhaps reflect the high rate of friendships
(07:55):
in the gender combination. And they point to a two
thousand to study which found that gay boys tend to
have more female friends than straight boys, although lesbians, younger
lesbians do not necessarily have more male friends than straight
females do. And we'll come back to that in a minute,
(08:15):
because that was a big question in our research of well,
we have this focus on this cross sex, cross gender
gay men, straight women, but what about like gay women
and straight guys, and straight guys and gay guys, what
about all the other combinations? Right, And so they point
out that these sexual minority students, so to speak, seemed
to be largely cut off from one another at school.
(08:37):
They're not only small numbers, but there's also a concerted
effort to reduce visibility. I mean, middle school is hard enough,
you know, without feeling like you're about to be bullied
because you are of that sexual minority as they talk about.
And Kristen, you mentioned all of the different basically combinations
of these different friendships. And they also found that straight
(08:59):
girl are more likely to have cross orientation cross sexual
orientation friendships than straight boys are. And so if we
look to another study which is called Beyond Similarities Cross
Gender and Cross Orientation Best Friendship and a sample of
sexual minority and heterosexual young adults in the journal Sex Roles,
they also pointed to the differences in straight girls friendships
(09:22):
and straight boys friendships with people of cross orientations. And
so they found that gay men reported more cross gender
friendships than lesbians did, while straight girls reported a higher
percentage of cross gender best friendships than straight boys did.
So it's basically confirming what the previous study found. So yeah,
(09:44):
I mean, in a nutshell, girls are just likelier to
have strong friendships with gay boys and boys are likelier
to have strong friendships with girls. Yeah, I mean it
seems like straight boys are friends with straight boys. Yeah,
I mean kind of there is that that isolation. And yeah,
as we'll talk about, like you know the series Lesbians
(10:06):
are going to be Friends with lesbians, Straight boys are
friends of straight boys, and then gay boys are friends
and then there's the rest of us and we mixed
and mingle. And I will say that that pattern was
very much reflected in my high school. I mean I
had a pretty small graduating class. It was easy to
see and there was only one out gay guy in
(10:29):
our class, and he only really hung out with girls.
I mean he would hang out with the guys sometimes,
but they were merciless. Yeah, it was the same. Yeah,
it was the same. In my high school, I had
a gay friend who actually got chased out of school
by the popular boys. It was just just a sad,
unfortunate situation because he was part of the popular boy group.
(10:51):
They found out he was gay, they bullied him until
he left school. But up until then, well he had
been part of that group. The core of his friend
group had been girls, and so it was horrible to
see that the one boy who was able to try
to come out just it was he was not successful.
And while I have a feeling that for people who
(11:12):
are in high school today that kind of outright bigotry
and homophobia is not as bad as it used to be,
even when you and I were in high school, not
so long ago. But this study, I mean, it's from
two thousand and fourteen supports that those kinds of patterns
still exists, which is interesting. And one thing that further
(11:35):
studies have suggested is that these friendships between gay men
and straight women are also mutually beneficial. And this was
something that Thomas Rogers was pointing out over at Salon,
speaking more too in this instance of gay straight friendships
and more of the pre Stone Wall era, saying quote,
men got the appearance of heterosexual legitimacy and intimacy free
(11:59):
of sexual tension. Women got a touch of glamour and
performance and exoticism. And so when it comes to that
glamour and performance and exoticism, and this this mutually beneficial relationships. Supposedly,
this was something that a study publishing The General Body
Image looked into in two thousand nine study title the
(12:20):
Relation between Women's Body Esteem and Friendships with Gay Men,
and its results supported the hypothesis that women's body esteem,
specifically feelings of sexual attractiveness, was positively associated with friendships
with gay men, but correlation causation not clarified. Right, as
(12:41):
Jesse bearing Over Scientific American pointed out, there was absolutely
no link between a woman's relationship status, the number of
times she'd been on the receiving end of a breakup,
or her body esteem, and the number of gay male
friends in her life. Still, the longer that a woman
has been friends with her closest gamail friend, they found,
the lower her perceived sexual attractiveness. But this is I
(13:03):
mean again, this is all correlation. Because also you could think,
and this is the first thing I thought, well, like, okay,
the longer a woman has been friends with someone, the
lower her esteem body esteem. Well, like, also that means
you're getting older, which means that you might naturally feel
bad about things that are sagging. I don't know exactly. Yeah,
I mean that is why it is so important to
(13:26):
read studies when you can, because I mean, it's yeah,
especially in the case of this, it's like, who who
knows if the reason why they felt greater sexual self
esteem was just because they had a circle of gay
men all just like dolling out compliments all day long. Um.
But one study though in two thousand and ten publishing
(13:47):
The journal Evolutionary Psychology essentially went viral when it came out.
It's title is friends with Benefits but without the sex.
Straight women and gay men exchange trusted data advice, and
it suggests that these relationships flourish because there is no
(14:07):
sexual threat. So that's good for straight women. We can
have these relationships with these men who do not want
to have sex with us, and so that makes life
so much easier. And meanwhile, straight women offer the benefit
of possibly providing access to other gay men for their
gay friends to meet, and also swapping, as the study
(14:30):
title implies, or what it doesn't imply. As the study
title states, we can swap dating advice because we're all
we're all going for men, so we're all, you know,
but not the same men, so we're not in competition.
There's no sexual threat. There's no competition. I mean, what
more perfect relationship could you get? Right, basically that we
both love getting dating advice from each other because there
(14:52):
are no ulterior motives. You can get a male perspective
without any sort of bias. You know, you can get
a male perspective, but he's not trying to date you
and keep you from the other man that you like
and vices, and he wouldn't be able to try to
date the straight guy that you're going for. But there
were also some experimental limitations with a study design as well,
because essentially the way they set it up was through
(15:16):
um Facebook profile setting up these face fake Facebook profiles
for I think it was an obviously straight guy, obviously
gay guy, and an obviously straight woman, and they set
up a scenario of having to go to a party
and you don't know anyone, So who of these three
people and these fake Facebook profiles would you like to
(15:38):
go to this party with the most? And women were like, okay, guy,
And then they did the same thing for the gay men.
UM so it's not I would be more curious to
get a little more real world interaction. Well, so, obviously,
what what this is showing us is that there are
a lot of benefits for these the people in these
(16:00):
relationships and that the pop culture phenomenon that is the
gay best friend is based in something real that actually happens.
But not all of these relationships are always super healthy.
And we're going to get into that when we come
right back from a quick break and now back to
the shop. So in the first half of the show,
(16:25):
we established the fact that yes, indeed, gay men and
straight women, as you and I can both personally attest,
do exist. And there have been studies on these relationships
because they seem to fascinate us endlessly, I think, because
I mean, people are constantly puzzling over this question of
can men and women be friends? And this is the
(16:46):
one cut and dried situation where it's like, oh, yeah, absolutely,
because there is none of that sexual tension. And then
when it comes to female female friendships, there's a question
of competition and jealousy if you're both coming from the
same guy, unless, of course she's a lesbian, where the
lesbians will get to them. But yeah, and before we
talk about the different combinations of all of these friendships
(17:08):
and the dynamics and what they mean and are they positive,
we do have to talk about some of the downsides
of the stereotypical gay man straight woman relationship. For instance,
the idea that straight women get to use gay men
as this accessory, this arm candy, this this party favor
to feel better about themselves, exercising a lot of privilege
(17:30):
along the way. Yeah, and this is more speaking to
these relationships as reflected in pop culture and to almost
a trope extent, it's something. For instance, it comes up
a lot on shows like Real Housewives, where you have
the rich woman who loves to trot out her quote
unquote gay husband because he's so cute and fun and
(17:51):
her husband doesn't pay attention to her anyway. So thankfully
there's this one guy. And Thomas Rogers, who we've signed
a number of times now, wrote all about this in Salon,
at the headline of his piece being I'm not your
gay boyfriend. He said, quote, it feels like she's throwing
around a designer label or telling me she knows the
celebrity a kind of social conspicuous consumption. So there there
(18:16):
is some troubling factor that can exist in that more
in its portrayal I think on television rather than these
um well, and I'm sure sometimes in real life off
screen as well, because people are emulating those kinds of
statusy relationships, right. But you know, I mean, it's a
two way street if we're talking about using each other
(18:38):
and having privilege, because he also talks about gay men
getting to use their straight female friends as their own
accessories then exercising their own privilege, but this time male
privilege to the point of outright misogyny. Yeah. This was
something that Yolo Achilley wrote about over The Good Project
(19:00):
and got a lot of conversations started about this question
of gay male privilege, which might sound like it cannot
possibly exist well in the way Yolo wrote about it, quote,
the unique way our entitlement to women's physical bodies plays
itself out is only the tip of the iceberg when
it comes to gay cis gender men's sexism and privilege,
(19:23):
and goes on to talk about how in a class
he was leading, he was asking students, female students whether
they had ever been touched by a gay guy like
non consensually um, and a lot of them raise their hands,
and a lot had stories about, say, going out one
night and having their breasts grabbed, or the infamous incident
(19:47):
on the red carpet in two ten when Scarl Johansson
was talking to Isaac ms Rahi on the red carpet
at the Oscars and he grabbed her breast and she
was not happy about it. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I
can't imagine a scenario when she would be But that
whole thing has to do with the idea that gay men,
(20:10):
you know, aren't real men, the societal perception of gay
men being again totally neutered and safe, and so it's
not assault, it's not it's not offensive to have your
personal self, your physical self grabbed by someone else because
it's just a gay guy. And Achille was talking about
how a lot of game and see it as their
right to somehow be able to grope or offer advice
(20:33):
on women's bodies, like women's bodies are just an unfinished
painting that they can come in and critique and give
advice on. And I have a feeling too that this
also is a two way street in the sense of
there are gay men who don't really appreciate it when
a pack of drunk straight women walk into gay bars
(20:54):
and want to take over and be the centers of
attention and grab their butts and their crotches as well.
So I mean it becomes a complicated sort of dynamic
which I attribute to these this this portrayal of this
kind of newtered toy for straight women to play with,
(21:15):
when in fact, I mean in real life there are
such strong and powerful and intimate and important relationships which
we get between gay men and straight women. There is, however,
also these other factors that we need to confront too,
even though I mean I'm personally kind of seizing up
a little bit because it's a little uncomfortable to talk about. Frankly, Yeah,
(21:36):
and Rowan goa Over at Jezebel did an incredible job
talking about it. I mean, he wrote this incredibly long, detailed,
very personal piece about his life as a gay man
and his relationship with both other gay men and with
straight women, and the fact that he basically no longer
refers to himself as a gay man, that he calls
himself queer because he says that the term gay is
(21:59):
way too loaded now that a gay man is like
will on will and Grace, or like someone who's older
with a ton of privilege and he's wealthy, and he
has all these material needs and desires and obsessed obsessions,
whereas the queer guy isn't the one in his assessment
who's going to go out and grab women's boobs and
give them all makeovers. But basically he talks about kind
(22:22):
of the same stuff that Thomas Rogers at Salon did
that for young men looking for role models, looking for
an example of how to come out and how to
be yourself. Really, the examples you have are from pop culture.
And so then he gets in from there two points
about his perceived experiences with what he perceives to be
(22:43):
misogyny that exists between gay men in his life and
straight women in his life, and that he feels like
many of his female friends have been made to feel
unwelcome in his own culture, what he calls his own culture,
and says that, hey, guys, we need to empathize with women,
not just use them as props as arm candy at parties.
(23:04):
That we're all humans. Let's start treating each other like it.
Oh and and vice versa again too. I mean just
even even using remember that, at least to me in
my perspective. And I'm going out a limb and inserting
my own opinion here. I think that people should, at
this point, before gay marriage is legal in the US,
maybe think twice about what a privilege insulting kind of
(23:28):
statement it is to call someone your gay husband, you know,
if that person doesn't have the right to marry and
get his own husband. I think that's uh, maybe I'm
maybe I'm making a mountain out of him. Will help, Yeah,
but basically, I yeah, and I mean going off of
what Rohan was writing in terms of empathizing, and hey,
gay guys don't treat women like props. I mean absolutely,
(23:49):
it goes both ways. None of us should be treating
anyone like props. None of us should be leaning so
heavily on our privilege that we treat another human being
like a pet or a prop or some kind of
arm candy accessory. Well, and isn't it fascinating too, And
that these kinds of conversations are coming up right now
when we have had a lot of progress in terms
(24:13):
of gave his ability, lgbt Q rights and recognition, as
well as a lot of resurgence in terms of women's
rights gender equality. It's interesting that before all of that,
when both women and gay men were sort of shoved
off into the corner, they were the others. As Calamran
(24:34):
put it, we were considered because of that natural allies.
But now as both groups are coming into more rights
and recognition and equality on their own, we're now having
to take a closer look at some of the skeletons,
perhaps in this friendship closets. Well, sure, because both straight
(24:55):
women and gay men are hitting points where they're feeling
empowered enough to step up and say, hey, I am
not a prop. I'm not just Jack from Will and
Grace or I'm not just Karen from Will and Grace.
As much as those characters are great fictional television characters,
plenty of people now are stepping up to be like,
can we perceive or depict anyone as like a real human? Yeah?
(25:18):
That would be That would be wonderful. And one thing
I would like to see more of two and and
there is a little bit more of this on TV
and film, but more exploration of other cross sex and
cross orientation friendships. What about the gay men straight men
friendships that have historically just been hampered by homophobia? But
(25:44):
knowing some of I know some guys who are you know,
gay straight guy friends, and they're wonderful relationships to watch. Yeah. Um,
but unfortunately, and this is coming from a New York
Times story in two thousand nine, they talk about Jamie Price,
who's an Appalachian State University professor who studied forty six
(26:05):
pairs of straight and gay male friends for her book.
And while that's a lot of pairs, she concluded that
just thirteen of them could truly be called close friends,
often because of the barrier that straight men would put
up because they're not so willing to hear or want
to hear about their gay friends personal life slash you know, wait, wait,
(26:25):
nudge and nudge sex life. But I wonder though that
was in two thousand nine, not so long ago. But
it feels like so long ago in terms of where
we are as a culture with homophobia. But maybe I'm
also looking at the world through rainbow colored glasses um.
The New York Times also interviewed Professor rich C. Seven Williams,
super professor of developmental psychology at Cornell, who talked about how,
(26:50):
in a similar way that straight women might be drawn
to friendships with gay men because we can get dating
advice and maybe talk about things we can't talk about
two straight guys. Um. Seven Williams says that straight men
also feel like they can talk to gay men about
fashion and ask them if they're looking okay, and talk
(27:11):
about more emotional relationship issues, which made me think, Oh
my god, are straight people just always looking for as Tassi,
a sassy friend till because they can't communicate with each other?
So is this just another version of the shine theory,
like instead of like, hey, women, position yourself next to
powerful ladies that you can help you along in your career.
(27:33):
Is this just like hey, straight people, but listen yourself
next to a gay man so that you can get
advice whenever you want. Yeah, do you not like talking
to your straight partner? Well, do we have a sassy
friend for you? It's it's exhausting, But the whole gay
straight bromance thing does seem to be becoming at least
(27:54):
a little more visible. Um. Writing in Gawker, Brian Moyland
talks about hell, there should be a contract for friendships
between straight guys and gay guys, like, hey, talk about
your sex life, talk about your romantic life, but can
we both agree that neither one of you will go
into much detail because you don't want to hear about
penises and you don't want to hear about vaginas. So
(28:16):
let's just kind of give the general gist of things
and bond that way, but not get into the nitty gritty. Yeah,
and also, of course the assamble like accepting that, hey,
your gay friend doesn't necessarily want to have sex with
your your gay friend is not just flirting with you,
and playing a long game to try to get you
(28:37):
to bat for the other team. Sure, but I mean,
but there is the reality too that just like in
straight man straight woman relationships where the guys maybe holding
a candle for the girl and the girls not aware
of it. I mean, it's not like that doesn't happen,
But you can't go into every friendship thinking like, is
he just trying to get me into bed? Is that
(28:59):
your is such your Blanche Devereaux, she's wondering absolutely in
her in one of her night gowns. Yes, yes, yes
it is well And and another thing Moyland requests as
well with this gay straight bromance contract is no jokes
about a feministcy and homophobic nonsense, which is just a
(29:20):
good rule of thumb in general. Right, oh man, whatever, whatever,
I still hear it. It's it's like nails and a
chalkboard when you hear those kinds of jokes today, especially
because it's like, seriously, you're making that you really so unfunny,
that is really so foolish you sound um. But I
do think, I mean, I think that these relationships are
becoming more normalized, and it's been a byproduct of just
(29:44):
the generalized embrace of the bromance, which I think is fantastic.
I am all for guy friendships because they are adorable.
Oh yeah, and they're necessary. They're so necessary. We've talked
about the health benefits of having very close friends before,
so we won't get into all that. But let's talk
(30:04):
about another cross sex, cross orientation friendship dynamic here. Where
are the straight men and the lesbians in this conversation? Yes,
there is actually a term called les bros. No, we
did not coin it. Um. There was an article about
this not too long ago in Details magazine. So grain
(30:24):
of salt, but all about this les bro person who essentially,
to me, read like the gay version of Jillian Flynn's
Cool Girl and Gone Girl. Because the way that that
this author was pitching straight guys you need to become
friends with lesbians, which, sure, I think that's totally fine. Yeah,
(30:46):
may make friends with lesbian's, absolutely, But the benefits were dudes,
she well, we watch football, you can go to strip clubs,
you can go out to abuse, and you go from
all mine because she'll found out with lesbian she won't
care guys, and I that was I'm just mocking the
(31:06):
overall tone of this article yeah. Well, I mean, but
just like with any friendship, you've got to worry about
some potential sexual tension because I mean, just think about
chasing Amy was chasing Amy. Chasing Amy was one of
the worst. I mean, Chasing Amy just put a nail
in the coffin of straight men and lesbian relationships because
(31:28):
it it lit a candle for some for some fellows
out there, some ben affleck the idea that you're going
to turn a woman so that she just hasn't met
the right guy yet, she hasn't met the right penis yet.
Soon as she meets this penis, she'll become a straight woman.
And we're not just talking in trope either. This was
something that came up, uh from the Stuff Mom Never
Told You YouTube channel. I got a question about from
(31:50):
a lesbian why do straight guys never believe me when
I say that I'm a lesbian? Why why do they
need proof for that? And I talked about it on
the show and got so many comments from so many
other lesbians to saying that even if they are approached
by a straight guy at a bar and they say, hey, thanks,
no thanks, I'm a lesbian. Even though thanks, I thinks
(32:13):
should suffice that doesn't suffice they don't really believe it.
There is this assumption that that can happen. And for
that reason, Lee Clara le Berge, who was an assistant
professor of gender studies at the University of Chicago, told
Details magazine quote, for a straight guy, there's probably some
(32:34):
disavowed sexual excitement. He knows perfectly well sex would never happen.
But still so it's not to say that these friendships
don't and can't exist, but I do think that they
are rarer, perhaps because of that dynamic, a little bit
of sexual baggage. Yeah. Yeah, And there was a post
(32:55):
about this at after ellen dot com as well, of
a lesbian asking nic question of like, why are we
never the gay bff and then explaining it she was like,
one of the things she was saying was, well, I
guess we don't really wanted to hang out with straight
guys all the time, So I don't know that's one
person's opinion. Well yeah, And in that same post, the
(33:15):
blogger Chloe contends that part of it might just be
that there's this stereotype of lesbians just being aggressive that
they're not, You're like glittery, cuddly unicorn like stereotypical best
gay guy friend. Well, and it also reflects those studies
that we started earlier looking at friendships in middle and
(33:36):
high school, and lesbians are likelier to essentially like make
friends with each other, they aren't necessarily as um as
likely to have those cross sex friendships. Yeah, But jumping
off of that, Tyler Curry, writing at Huffington's Post, talks
about the whole dynamic of gay boys and then eventually
(33:58):
men and lesbian girls and women, and talks about how
early on in life, especially when you're younger, you're sort
of pushed together because it's like, oh, you're gay, so
just go be together. Yeah, go in the gay corner.
Yeah you're the others, so go be other together. And
he talks about how it's like being different animals in
(34:18):
the same cage. They're assumed to be natural allies, when
really it's more like fraternal twins. You just don't have
the same struggle. And ironically, of all of the cross
sex cross orientation combinations, the one that at least in
the research we did for the podcast, the one that
(34:39):
seems to get the least amount of in depth research
is gay lesbian friendships. They are actually stereotypes that they
don't get along really at all. Yeah, when really it's like, Okay,
we're fighting similar fights. It's not that they don't get along,
but it's just that it is a different fight, and
(35:00):
so we we automatically assume, kind of in a stereotypical
assuming fashion, that, um, well, they must be best friends.
It's like when Harry met Stally, it's like the perfect combination.
It's men and women, but they want completely different things.
Of course they should get along. Um, but you know,
anecdote doesn't always bear that out to be true. Yeah,
(35:23):
and even uh, even looking back at TV. One thing
that jumped out to me when I was reading all
this stuff was how on the HBO show Looking, which
is all about gay guys in San Francisco, the sort
of token lady pal is straight, and she not only
is straight, but is the ex wife of one of
the super dreamy gay guys. Um. There's as far as
(35:48):
I can remember, there has really been very little lesbian interaction.
But people who are better versed on looking correct me
if I'm wrong. Um. But there was something that also
jumped out in the book A Companion to l g
pt Q Studies. It said, quote queer friendships between women
and men disturbed the mechanisms of homosocial cultures and force
(36:11):
us to quote deconstruct the forms of relationality that are
imposed upon them. So, in other words, maybe one of
the reasons why we there there has been, at least
so far, so little focus on those friendships is because
they sort of defy all of the possible norms, and
(36:33):
maybe we're at a loss to like, well, how well,
well then what do we do? Right? Yeah, we're we're
concerned that we won't be able to make a hit
sitcom based off of that. Yeah, yeah, I mean well,
And there's also two very little focused on straight similar
even less focused on street women and lesbians friendships then
(36:53):
on straight dudes and lesbian's friendships, probably because we as
humans seem really obsessed with the concept of men and
women being friends period. So, now, with all that we've
talked about about friendship dynamics, sexual orientation, romance, all of
these things, I'm sure our listeners have so much to
(37:13):
share with us, and I'm very curious to hear. Have
you been on the receiving end of being considered someone's pet,
Have you been treated a certain way or dragged along
on social escapades for a certain reason, just because you're
somebody's gay best friend or gay husband, or do you
have one of those awesome, super healthy cross sex cross
(37:35):
orientation friendships that you cherish and you love and you
are each other's people. We want to know all of
your stories, good, bad and ugly. And just one note
about the whole gay best friend thing. I really hope
that we are also to the point sort of in
what we were talking about with our episode on gay
(37:55):
weddings gay best friend, that phrase can just be shortened
to just best friend. Right, Yeah, so right to us
mom Stuff at how stuff works dot com is our
email address. You can also tweet us at mom Stuff
podcast and messages on Facebook, and we've got a couple
of messages to share with you right now. We have
(38:19):
a couple letters here about consent um. This one's from Jennifer.
She says, love the podcast, and I wanted to share
something my parents did to teach us about the importance
of consent. As early as I remember, when my dad
and I, or my sister and I would play fight
artickle as soon as anyone said stop or no, we stopped.
(38:39):
I didn't realize how deliberate my parents were with this
lesson until I started working with children who had been
sexually abused. When I started, I mentioned on my parents
how I remembered their rule. My mom told me that
children are powerless enough, it's their parents job to reinforce
that even small children are in charge of their bodies
and are worthy of respect for their decisions about their bodies. This,
(39:00):
along with a comprehensive sex education from my mother, ensure
that I felt empowered to make decisions about my sex
life and ensure that I was the one friends came
to with any embarrassing questions. So thank you, Jennifer. And
I've got a letter here from Kendra who writes, I
just listened to your rate Prevention nail polished episode, and
when you talked about the importance of teaching people the
(39:22):
importance of getting and giving consent, especially when they're younger
than college age, I had an interesting reaction. I have
two sons and a daughter, and my sons are eleven
and nine. My daughter is six, and my first thought
was that my sons feel much too young to be
having conversations with them about their role as men and
about what it means to get consent from a sexual partner.
(39:43):
But later that day, as I interacted with the five
daycare children in my home, all ages three and younger,
I realized how easy it is to teach and model
those issues all the kids, regardless of age and gender,
for the same messages. For me, you don't use your
body to hurt anyone ever. It's okay to touch someone
they love, giving hugs and kisses, but you should always
(40:05):
ask first, and if they say no, that means no,
because we're all the boss of our own body. Sex
is a complicated issue, and when it comes to sexual violence,
there's no easy way to talk about it, and I
think there's a point at which kids are really too
young to be having those conversations. But the underlying issues
are easy to teach and easy to talk about. And
if we do that teaching that no means no and
(40:25):
that you don't get to touch anyone who says no,
maybe we can reduce the chances that anyone will need
to be afraid. So thanks for that insight, Kendra, and
I think that's fantastic advice. So if you have advice,
our anecdotes to send our way. Mom Stuff at how
stuff works dot com is our email address, and for
links to all of our social media as well as
all of our blogs, videos, and podcasts with our sources
(40:48):
so you can read along. Head on over to stuff
Mom Never told You dot com.
Stuff Mom Never Told You News
Hosts And Creators
Anney Reese
Samantha McVey
Popular Podcasts
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.