Just friends: The role of friendship in lesbians' lives

When we co-edited the book Lesbian Friendships in 1996, we wanted to focus more attention on the functions and meanings of friendships among lesbians. We asked lesbians to write about the ways in which being lesbian affects their friendships. Here are some quotes:

Novelist Terri de la Peña wrote: “My New-Hampshire-born lover was more than a bit jealous of Elisa. In her New England accent, my lover sometimes expressed a desire to write fiction, and perhaps for that reason, felt threatened that Elisa and I were creative types already, not to mention Latinas, too. With that plain-spoken Yankee, I often had to translate my mother's Spanish phrases and interpret cultural traditions; with Elisa, I rarely had to explain anything. We were linked by an instinctual sisterhood, sharing religious and cultural upbringings, bilingual abilities” (p. 33).

Novelist Jane Futcher wrote to her friend and former partner Catherine Hopkins: “Before we met, I felt like an orphan, moving from apartment to apartment, from city to city…. You opened your door and welcomed me, introducing me to your friends, sharing your home. You had created a lesbian family, and I became part of that family. After a great wringing of (my) hands, I moved in with you, and we were very, very happy. I remember nights lying together on the couch as Linda Ronstadt sang ‘Heart like a wheel,’ about love that never ends, just grows and bends” (pp. 66–67). Though their lover relationship ended after a few years, their love and friendship continued to grow and bend for over 20 years until Catherine's death.

Vermont English professor Carey Kaplan and New Mexican history professor Ellen Cronan Rose refer to themselves as “strange bedfellows.” The former a lesbian, the latter heterosexual, they had collaborated on feminist books and articles over 10 years. When they wrote an essay about their collegial relationship and described their collaboration as “erotic,” they had great difficulty in getting the essay published. As they state in our book: “By the time ‘Strange Bedfellows’ was published, we had so theorized and abstracted lesbian Eros that it had no physical, genital resonance. It was, therefore, presumably no longer threatening…. We have concluded that this must have to do with the aura of mystery and exclusiveness that surrounds our relationship. When we work together, we devote ourselves to each other, selectively tolerating but not welcoming phone calls, invitations, visitors. This degree of absorption in one another, which extends beyond the working hours to shopping, walking, eating, watching movies, connotes to most people a love affair. Everyone who knows us knows that we are not lovers. Yet we appear to them to behave like lovers. Hence, the mystery—which is kin to the mystery attendant on lesbian sex: ‘What do they do?’” (p. 109).

When we asked for submissions for that anthology about lesbian friendships, we wanted to make friendships more visible. Women wrote about extraordinary friendships, about the politics of friendship, and about lesbian community. Several examined the fluidity of movement from friends to lovers and back to friends, or else the places in between the boundaries between friends and lovers. Many authors described friendship across difference, between African American and White lesbians, between lesbians and heterosexual women, between lesbians and heterosexual men. Often, lesbians described their friends as “family.”

It has been nearly a quarter century since that anthology was published, but scholarship about lesbian friendships continues to be mostly invisible. Western society places so much emphasis on romantic and sexual relationships that friendships are not given the same importance. In particular, lesbians are often defined as women who have sex with women, so that the sexual aspects of relationships are overemphasized and other ways of relating are ignored. The phrase “just friends” indicates the relative salience of lovers versus friends.

The current issue reflects our latest attempt to draw attention to friendships as a relational form while also revisiting the question of the role of friendships in lesbians’ lives. It brings together articles about lesbian friendships in various forms and across research methodologies; some of these articles provide us with a look back in time, while others offer reflections upon the future of lesbian friendship (and lesbian identity). Of the articles that look back, one focuses on the role of friendship in history. Ann Huse cites letters of two well-known British authors, Katherine Philips in the seventeenth century and Sarah Scott in the eighteenth century, focusing on the role of the female chaperone (and close homoerotic friend) of new brides during their honeymoon after marriage to a man. Two other authors also focus back, but only to the 1980s, and they focus on lesbian friendships in two different works of fiction. Kristen Proehl compares how female same-gender love and friendships are represented in the novels Fried Green Tomatoes and The Color Purple, and then how this portrayal changed in the film adaptations of these novels. Stephanie Schechner examines multiple themes of romance, friendship, and gender identity in the French novel Hymne aux Murènes (Hymn to the Moray Eels).

The remaining articles describe and examine more current experiences and reflections on lesbian friendships in select personal and socio-cultural contexts. Three of these articles report on qualitative research findings. Asifa Siraj conducted intensive semi-structured interviews with two British Pakistani lesbian friends in order to underscore the importance of friendship in an isolated and homophobic setting. Clare Forstie interviewed 25 lesbian, bisexual, and queer women in a rural, Catholic Midwestern city about the role of community in a “post-lesbian” era. Abbie Goldberg, Reihonna Frost, Melissa Manley, and Kaitlin Black interviewed 20 lesbian couples who were first-time parents adopting a child, focusing on how sexual orientation, race, and socioeconomic class affected their relationships with other parents in their child's school. The last two articles in this special issue are personal reflections on topics that expand upon our understandings of the role of friends in lesbians’ lives. Rachel Silverman defines her friendship with her “metamour”—the woman with whom Rachel's wife is having a sexual relationship. Elana Dykewomon portrays the importance of her lesbian friendship networks when her partner developed dementia and subsequently died.

Interestingly, we did not receive submissions reporting on the results of quantitative research. Although there is a large research literature in the social sciences on social support, that is not quite the same as friendship. It is hard to know why this omission: Is it lack of interest? Lack of perceived relevance (now that marriage is legal in so many countries)? Limited funding? The changing nature (and perhaps decline) of lesbian identity itself? Perhaps friendship is too amorphous to lend itself easily to categorization in standardized questionnaires. Whatever the reasons, we recommend this as a fruitful area of future research.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jacqueline S. Weinstock

Jacqueline S. Weinstock, PhD, is an associate professor in the Human Development and Family Studies Program within the Department of Leadership and Developmental Sciences at the University of Vermont.

Esther D. Rothblum

Esther Rothblum, PhD, is professor of Women's Studies at San Diego State University and editor of the Journal of Lesbian Studies.

Together, they have edited Lesbian Friendships (New York University Press, 1996) and Lesbian Ex-Lovers: The Really Long-Term Relationships (Harrington Park Press, 2004).