[Vol. 6] Am I ... The Gay Best Friend?
How a fun on-screen trope messed with my identity.
For as long as there have been effortlessly-beautiful female leads in need of a hand to zip up their dress, a sassy remark about their frenemy’s waistline to cheer them up, or a shoulder to ugly-cry on, the gay best friend (or GBF) has been in the picture.
Whether she’s the underdog, you’ll-suddenly-realize-I’m-stunningly-gorgeous-when-I-take-off-my-glasses kinda gal, or the confident, icy head cheerleader, the rom-com female lead and the GBF are a match made in heaven.
Two overdone tropes that fit perfectly together, like yin and yang.
And look, don’t take my heavy-handed sarcasm here as my “I hate GBF characters” soapbox speech. I love watching a pasty boy in a button-up shirt and perfectly quaffed hair take down his enemies with his lightning-quick wit and defense-mechanism-born cruelty as much as the next guy.
In fact, I’m supremely jealous – I wish I could think up smart comebacks in the heat of the moment like him instead of imagining a do-over duel in my head 24-hours later.
The truth is that our favorite rom-com/coming of age movies wouldn’t have been the same without our equally favorite GBFs.
But (and it’s a big but), while the GBF character may be fun to watch on screen, he’s not real. He’s a figment of Hollywood’s imagination that’s not only impossible to replicate in real life, but also potentially dangerous.
The GBF is a lot of fun on screen, sure, but what happens when he steps out into the real world?
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A GBF, or “gay best friend”, is … well, exactly what he sounds like.
Not to make an already one-dimensional character even more one-dimensional, but let’s break him down in bullets, shall we?
A GBF is a guy who …
likes guys – but not too much (he never goes farther than first-base … or at least he never talks about it).
only has one giving love language: Words of Affirmation. AKA he can’t truly exist without Heather asking him how she looks before hopping in a limo to go to prom (but *gasp* will her prom date show up??)
dresses for the job he wants – which I’m not totally sure what that is. Judging from the regular reappearance of tight plaid pants, collared shirts overlayed with pastel sweater vests, and meticulously buffed dress shoes, I’m guessing … a substitute music teacher?
is, most importantly, quick-witted and mean-spirited (albeit concealing a possible ooey-gooey center). Never have I ever seen a GBF who couldn’t sass his way through life.
The many GBFs of Hollywood don’t always check all these boxes, but so goes the classic trope.
When you look at the history of the GBF, you’ll see the trope is as old as time – or, at least as old as the time it was kosher to show gay characters on screen. Apparently, that time was 1984, when one of the earliest examples of the GBF popped up in a Gene Wilder movie called The Woman in Red.
That started a long-standing tradition carried on over generations where the otherwise lonely female lead is paired with her perfect match, the GBF (that is until he helps her snag the man of her dreams).
From Carrie Bradshaw’s right-hand gay, Stanford Blatch, in the Sex and the City series, to Mean Girls’ Janis Ian’s sarcastic best bud Damian, the GBF we bulleted-above has been around the block and back again for quite some time.
Oh, I forgot an important element in the GBF’s stereotypical arsenal: over all else, he’s fun. His quick-witted remarks can break up any tense moment or emotional scene a director can throw at an audience.
So how bad can such a fun character be?
Well, for generations of young gay men trying to find and define themselves after coming out, he’s not quite as fun.
When I came out, what I was really searching for, above all else, was a sense of definition. I know a person’s sexuality is just a small sliver of their identity, but it doesn’t feel that way when you’re questioning – at least, it didn’t to me.
When I “came to” to the fact that I was gay in my Junior year of High School, I was less occupied with my sexuality than I was with what a “gay version” of Till would look like.
My only examples of gay men came in the form of on-screen GBFs, and that wasn’t me.
As liberating as coming out was – and it really was – part of me ended up even more confused than I was when I existed on the other side of the closet door. I thought the hardest part of coming out was over, that throwing open that door and declaring my love for boys was enough to make me feel … settled.
But then came the task of figuring out who I was beyond my sexuality, and how my sexuality would fit into that greater identity. That’s when I started to feel the pressure of the gay archetype - the GBF pressing his perfectly manicured thumb to my head.
I thought being gay meant I had to become the GBF archetype we bulleted above, and I resented that.
After just having come out, my personality felt malleable and impressionable. I felt like I was constantly fighting against and bending to people’s expectations of “the newly gay Till”.
I actively distanced myself from things I decided were too stereotypically gay – singing, theater, pop music, sex with men (ok, we’ll chalk that last one up to the -5 gay kids at my High School).
‘Yes, I’m gay’ I thought, ‘but I’m not that gay.’
I was so scared that I’d slip into a GBF personality that I became hyper-aware of how I acted out my gayness.
I didn’t want to be pushed into a GBF-type persona that I didn’t recognize or like. Their gayness made them accessories, plot devices, comic reliefs, and emotional tear-jerkers. The GBF’s entire existence was simplified to “gay” and “friend”.
What I didn’t realize at the time was that in spending all my mental energy fighting off stereotypes, I was slowly becoming one: I was letting myself and my life be defined by my sexuality.
With every sassy remark I made or outfit advice I handed out, I couldn’t help but wonder: ‘Am I …. the gay best friend?’
The best examples of true-to-form gayness actually did end up coming to me from a screen – only, it wasn’t the silver screen.
Queer creators like YouTubers Mark Miller, Ethan Hethcote, Damon Dominique, Cammie Scott, and many, many more, ended up being my real identity heroes.
They live their lives as gay men and women, record their reality (or, as close to reality as one can get on video), and put it out on the internet. In doing so, they show what it’s like to be a gay person in a way that Hollywood never can (or even wants to). Just by doing their job – posting curated bits of their lives on the internet – they’re inadvertently and continually adding to the ever-growing virtual collage of all the different kinds of gay people you can be.
They are granting themselves, and those like them, visibility.
By writing this newsletter, I hope, in my own small way, to do the same.
The funny thing is, when you zoom out far enough on that collage and take it all in, you’ll find that it really isn’t very pretty. It’s imperfect; it’s human; it really can’t be defined.
That’s because there are as many ways to be a gay person as there are ways to be a person. The GBF may have been one of the only gay personas you saw on screen growing up, but the truth is, he’s always just been a pinpoint in that big, messy collage.
And that was That’s Gay, Volume 6. See you in Volume 7, folks!
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