The complexities of friendship: exploring how gay men make sense of their workplace friendships with straight women

Abstract

Despite the contemporary attention paid to the gay male–straight female friendship dyad within popular culture and a growing scholarly interest in male–female friendships, not enough is known about the friendship dynamics between gay men and straight women, particularly in the workplace. I draw upon qualitative findings from in‐depth interviews with 28 gay men employed in a range of work roles in the UK to document their existence and shed light on how gay men understand, value and give meaning to workplace friendships with women. Study findings reveal the paucity of textual cues and practices to direct the development and maintenance of these friendships. Overcoming this, study participants are shown to be inventive in their approach to doing friendship. As problematic as some friendship ties are for understanding differences along the lines of sexuality and gender, the opportunities for challenging heteronormative ways of relating in workplace friendship are regarded as more promising.

Keywords:

• friendship
• work
• gay men
• women
• heteronormativity
• sexuality

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the reviewers for their comments on an earlier version of this article.

Notes

1. The knowledge gap on the friendships between men and women is largely due to the fact that male–female friendships have been subsumed under the study of romantic relationships (Gaines 1994; Reeder 2000).

2. Discourses, comprised of images, beliefs, concepts, language and actions (Foucault 1979), provide the means by which individuals negotiate the construction and meaning of genders and sexualities as they pertain to various identities and subjectivities.

3. It is worth briefly mentioning the limitations of the vocabulary this analysis employs. Throughout, I use the terms ‘straight women’ and ‘gay men’. Given my proclivities towards a queer methodology I am only too aware that such terms are not unified identity categories even if the very mobilisation of the terms suggests otherwise. Following many lesbian and gay friendship commentators that operate in the same vein, I bear these limitations in mind. As lesbian friendship writer Jacqueline Weinstock avers, friendship researchers, including Weinstock, have not yet ‘adopted an adequate system for speaking about or assessing’ gender and sex (1998: 124).

4. Following the insightful historical work of Alan Bray (2003), it is possible to appreciate how friendships once conveyed wider social meanings. Before the second half of the seventeenth century, affectionate gestures such as kissing and embracing in public, as well as communal activities such as eating, drinking and sleeping could be read as formal signs of patronage, protection and cordiality. Where these gestures were exchanged between friends, friendship could be understood not just an important bond of affection, but also as a relationship of high social standing.

5. The question as to whether platonic friendship is possible between men and women is one that typically occupies the troubled minds of heterosexuals in films such as When Harry When Met Sally (1989) and pop culture writers such as Gee (2004). It also features in some of the films and television programmes that explore the presence of sexual attraction and intimacy in friendships between gay men and women such as The Object of My Affection (1998). Contrary to conventional wisdom, these friendships are not immune from the dilemmas of sexual attraction and intimacy.

6. The American cable television show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy is a conspicuous manifestation of this idea.

7. It is worth stating that, from a queer theory perspective, the notion of an interview relationship existing outside a network of power relations is untenable.

8. The use of a snowball sampling technique is typical in studies of populations that are rare, hidden or hard‐to‐reach, of which gay men are one example (see Browne 2005; Heaphy, Weeks and Donovan 1998; Ward and Winstanley 2003).

9. For some years the term ‘fag hag’ has been loosely used to label straight women who have gay men as friends. As Nardi (1999: 118) rightly points out, there is no common interpretation of the concept, and opinion as to whether ‘fag hag’ operates as an insult or term of endearment runs strong in both directions. For more on the personal and political dimensions of the term ‘fag hag’, see Maddison (2000).