By Jarred Thompson
I write this on the other side of losing two close gay friends of mine as a result of lines being blurred between friendship and sexual attraction. Reflecting upon my own patterns of behaviour as a gay man, I wonder a lot about the perilous journey many gay men have to make in forming platonic relationships with other gay men. In my two former friendships (let’s call them Jay and Mike) I opened myself up to levels of emotional intimacy that made my friendships with them feel comfortable and homely.
Both Jay and Mike perceived this vulnerability as an indication on my part that I was interested in developing a romantic connection with them and, in all honesty, there were moments where I too believed that a romantic connection could be possible. These feelings of romantic possibility in my friendships were further complicated by the fact that I, separately, slept with Jay and Mike, unconcerned with the consequences that that might produce in our friendship.
When feelings of romantic possibility mix with emotional intimacy and a physical proximity to one another there is, in my experience, bound to be friction of some sort. Jay and Mike were both queer men who were a lot more feminine than I was: a male feminity I felt atttracted to but that I hadn’t fully understood at the time. When I slept with them, giving into a part of me that sexually desired feminine men, I affirmed at the back of my mind that my encounters with them couldn’t become romantic. Looking back, the reasons for this are complex.
First, I was afraid that if I entered into romantic relationships with them that my own feminine side would be erased on account that I would be seen as the “top” in the relationship: a fixed role I did not want to assume. Second, I had my own romantic fantasies of the kind of guy I’d like to date: a guy with a similar mix of masculinity and femininity to me—one where the sexual roles in the bedroom could alternate. Third, being seen in public with Jay and Mike immediately “outed” me as a queer man and because more masculine-acting gay men like myself live their public lives largely under the radar within heteronormative society this sense of being “immediately outed” raised issues of queer shame in me. Reflecting on it now, back then there were traces of hetero-patriarchal assumptions about my body, my self and who I wanted to be that wasn’t matching with how I was acting in relation to Jay and Mike. Put plainly, I had traces of internalized femme-phobia that continued to rear its ugly head in times when I thought I had liberated myself from all forms of internalized-homophobia.
I grew up in what I would define as a liberal Catholic household in Johannesburg, South Africa. My dad was an aggressive, domineering man in my pubescent years: his masculinity being displayed by his weight-lifting trophies in the lounge and the stories he’d tell us about being a police reservist in his twenties. When I came out to my parents at seventeen there were no other gay people in my family and the only gay friends I had at the time were the connections I’d made via social media (in those days it was a social platform called MXIT and then it was Facebook).
From these online connections I first learnt about sex between two men and what it all entailed and I was speaking to other young men who were in, or had come from, similar in-the-closet environments to my own. Throughout puberty I battled to rid myself of the internalized shame about being gay and when I came out, eventually being accepted and embraced by my family, I believed that the battle against this shame was complete. It wasn’t. My experiences with Mike and Jay revealed to me that while I was attracted to feminine-presenting men this attraction was something I could only express behind closed doors.
When I reflect on my undergraduate years at Alabama State University I believe my femme-phobia had gone underground during those years. It had been buried by my affirmations that I was now out to my family and friends and had recently begun to immerse myself in gender and queer studies by reading books like Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble and Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality Volume 1. During my undergraduate years I was playing tennis for Alabama State University’s Men’s Tennis Team and had gotten use to the heterosexual culture of college sports: a culture I’d learnt how to survive in by being one of the strongest, fittest and most academic-achieving tennis player on the team. By the time I’d graduated I believed that not only had I successfully integrated myself into a group of heterosexual male athletes but had also triumphed over my the specters of internalized femme-phobia and homophobia. What I was to discover, though, many years later, is that my journey with femme-phobia and internalized homophobia was not complete (and that it might never be complete).
In 2016, I’d come back to South Africa and was living in the heternormative and patriarchal city of Johannesburg where, as a gay man, one is constantly judging what parts of yourself are safe to show in public. Yes, this is not different to other patriarchal countries across the globe. Moreover, even though South Africa is a “more liberated” country in terms of queer rights compared to the rest of Africa, there are still moments when I pass a group of straight men in public and feel triggered to anticipate whatever comments they might have about the way I walk or hold my body. It is as if, in these moments, I fear that heterosexual men might detect my queerness.
Over the years, I’ve immersed myself in body conditioning and strength training and have developed a bulky outer exterior that I believe some part of me thinks will protect me from “being seen.” In other words, there is a part of me that treats my muscular frame as a bulwark against being outed as queer in public spaces. I say all this to drive home the point that, as gay men, its hard to say when the task of unlearning and relinquishing the shame that heteronormative and religious society inscribes upon our bodies will be complete. In terms of my friendship with Jay and Mike, I witnessed a bravery in them that I had never had to develop for myself on account of my masculine-presenting exterior because it was a bravery that affirmed their queer bodies, dispositions and male-femininity all of the time.
Coming back to the dissolution of my friendship with Jay and Mike, I was left questioning not only my inherent femme-phobia (that prevented me from loving them in an openly romantic way) but also a pattern of behaviour I had noticed in a lot of my queer friendships. This pattern of behaviour involved the tendency to confuse the emotional intimacy of friendship with more romantic or sexual notions of intimacy. In other words, I was left wondering if queer friendships were more complex on account of the fact that, being a sexual minority in society, gay people seek out sexual and romantic relations with those that are, to put it bluntly, a convenient and most proximate choice for the moment?
These questions are complicated and I don’t expect them to have a straight answer (nothing in queer life seems to have a ‘straight’ anything). I realize that in heteronormative society forging a close friendship with another gay man can be viewed to be a natural antecedent for a sexual expression of intimacy to emerge between two gay men. In contrast, some gay men might ask: “What’s wrong with that? Why do we need to conform to standards of moralistic, heterosexual, prudery? Why can’t we have sex with our friends?” Well, if my sexual interactions with Jay and Mike had some part to play in the break-down of those friendships I feel compelled to consider whether gay friendships exit the gate in an already overly sexualized manner, leading me to question the undeclared pushes and pulls that exist when a friendship between gay men blossoms.
Most meetings between gay men begin at a bar or (predominantly) on an app for dating and “casual encounters.” Even when someone’s profile stipulates “looking for friendship,” how often do those people actually find non-sexual friendship? A number of the friendships I’ve had in my gay community have started off on a sexual/sexualized note and I’m on the fence as to whether this is a product of a sexualized gay culture or the very nature of same-sex desire. Perhaps the seemingly precarious status of gay friendships may be a sign of the times: an indication that ideals of monogamy and archetypes of “the couple” are being undercut by more fluid, nuanced and shifting human relationships whose status is unstable—constantly shifting between sexual and platonic expressions of intimacy.
The truth is, as gay men, the pool in which we search for love is small—more so if you’re in a country with an especially small population of people (and statically an even smaller gay population). So why wouldn’t gay guys look inside their social circles and friendships for hints of love and promises of romantic reciprocation? Could it be that as gay men we’ve all experienced the loneliness of being different and when we encounter someone who shares our sense of loneliness openly we jump at the chance for love—a love that is supposed to reconcile the varied forms of otherness we’ve gone through in our lifetime and the ways we have othered parts of ourselves as well.
In my experience, gay friendships don’t follow the neat line of straight friendships simply because same-sex desire complicates the people you can and cannot be friends with. To be friends with another gay guy either means you both have absolutely no sexual attraction for one another, that you have had sexual encounters in the past which simmered into friendship, or that, rather rarely, one of you decided to let go of their feelings for the other in order to pursue a platonic relationship. Overall, I think gay friendships assume a more nuanced dynamic than straight friendships between two guys or two girls simply because the promise of “desire and romance” for straight, same-sex friendships is not there as some psychic carrot—goading the need for emotional intimacy into sexual liaisons.
In writing this article I’m reminded about a new initiative being started by a queer-activist friend of mine, Treyvone Moo, in Johannesburg South Africa. Moo’s initiative is called Cuddle Buddies and is set to be a regular meet up of queer mxn in Johannesburg who want to explore levels of intimacy with other queer mxn that is not based on the desire for sex but rather on the desire for intimacy. Moo’s goal in starting this group is to reach towards growing a community of emotionally intelligent mxn who are able to connect and relate to each other over and beyond the exhausting “hook-up culture” gay men find themselves in. Moo’s Cuddle Buddy sessions are geared toward opening up dialogue on the “politics of pleasure” in the gay community while workshopping yogic touch-sensory experiences that offer a safe place in which to explore non-sexual intimacy between gay men. In a world where sex is often exchanged and valued above intimacy, I think Moo is onto something here in that what gay men might desire in their friendships is a space to explore non-sexual intimacy: where we can be touched, looked at, admired, smiled at and laughed with—a craving that “casual sex” might alleviate for a brief moment but cannot really satisfy.
In thinking about this, I’m reminded of a recent discussion I was asked to mediate between Luke (a friend of mine) and a former friend of his (let’s call him Pete). It was interesting to see that Luke and Pete were going through a similar experience that I had gone through with Mike and Jay. Luke and Pete were friends in university who kept on hooking up with one another based on the fact that, according to Luke, Pete was the closest gay guy in the vicinity and, therefore, the most convenient guy to hookup with when they were intoxicated in their social circle. This issue of convenience (of seeking out “the lowest common denominator”) which Luke admitted to struck me as a pattern of behaviour I’d seen in myself and was now seeing in Luke. Luke and Pete’s situation made me realize that there are other silent pressures that exist when one is a sexual minority in most social spaces. Being a sexual minority puts pressure on gay men to connect sexually or romantically with the gay men who are most proximate to them and this yearning for connection (a yearning often interpreted and framed as sexual) is what makes navigating platonic relationships with other gay men at times rather complicated.
It stands to reason, then, that true friendship between gay men is a choice they make beyond the potential sexual attraction that one person might have for the other or that they might have for each other. I’ve seen this in two other gay friendships of mine—both of which started off sexual and ended in a level of intimacy I can only describe as “brotherly.” It stands to reason as well that there are gay freindships who manage, rather successfully, to circumvent this dynamic entirely by not being sexually or romantically attracted to each other at all. Moreover, I’ve learnt that there are those special gay friendships that will expose the internalized femme-phobia or homophobia in yourself (if there is any): phobias that you thought you had already dealt with but that underlie how you interact with, and self-monitor yourself in, heternormative society.
These kinds of friendships, ones that give you the freedom to explore the landscape of your gender and sexuality as a queer man, are important to cherish and learn from because, in my experience, they show you the blindspots in your thinking and feeling around queer male embodiment. Admittedly, though, we are nevertheless incoherent, fallible, human beings who can get their wires crossed sometimes and who might, in a night of drunken frivolity, seek physical exhilaration with a consenting friend who we feel a lot less lonely around. However, in light of my reflections, moments of attraction that challenge the fantasies of romance we have built up for ourselves should be handled with an honesty that is hard to come by because it is an honesty that exposes the unspoken social and sexual pressures gay men experience in our journey to relieve ourselves of feeling othered inside and outside our bodies.
