Gay best friend. GBF. The sassiest. The “Slay Me Queen." The “OMG, that top is giving me life!" The Basically One Of The Girls.
As a gay male in this social media world of both burgeoning acceptance and lingering homophobia, it can be tough to find my own identity. Glee tells me I have to be coiffed and cool and collected. Skins tells me I have to be sexually experienced and a loose cannon. Faking It tells me…well, I'm not sure what Faking It is telling me. Looking tells me that I can fit into one of the archetypes: geek, jock, bear, otter, and that still won't guarantee that I will be perfect.
But, probably, the strongest and most insidious thing that people are telling me I need to be is the gay best friend. And I understand why. From the outside, I am a slay me queen kind of gay. I am snarky and sassy, tall, oh so good-looking and humble, too, and I have a love of social media and pop that rivals the biggest fangirl. So, I often find myself trying to be collected.
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And while I find the “gay best friend" trope repellant, I also deeply understand the appeal. I grew up in a small, Christian-based town, and I came out when I was 15 in an all-boys, Catholic prep school. Basically, I was Brendan Fraser in School Ties, except gay instead of Jewish, and with poorly plucked eyebrows. So when girls began to collect me and possess me as their gay best friend, I nestled into the warm, Body Shop-scented embrace.
Being safe in the knowledge that you are a gay best friend is intoxicating. You are special amongst friends, but because you are othered. You are not quite boy, not quite girl, but gifted—clearly—with a shamanistic sense of fashion and quips and hair tutorials. But at the end of the day, you are still an object. You are still, first and foremost, a gay best friend.
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I thought that after high school, when my sexuality became less of my “thing," I could avoid the gay best friend identity. But there were the obvious “oh, you're gaaay? Omg, I looove it!" girls. There was the girl who, after three interactions, called me her gay best friend. But there are also the more internalized gay best friend-isms.
I am eternally the “date to every formal." If a girl doesn't have a date, she asks me because I am so fun and funny and cute! But when that girl finds a heterosexual option, she tells me, sorrowfully, that she really wants to go to the dance with “someone she can take home," and would I mind if she went with him, instead?
Now, I'm not saying that all friendships between girls and gay guys, or straight guys and gay guys, are like this. I am proof that you can have healthy, stable-ish, meaningful, deep relationships with people of differing sexual orientations, genders and sexualities. But I also know from experience, that for every amazing person who sees me for more than my sexuality and my sharp wit, labeled again as being “sassy" -- which ranks up high in my list of words that I hate -- there is someone who was conditioned by our world to believe that gay guys exist to take to dances and gossip about One Direction.
So here is my plea. Some people are perfectly all right with the gay best friend identity, and that is their right and prerogative. However, I am more than your personal shopper. I am a guy who loves reading and watching TV and being lazy and going to the gym and reading about Hillary Clinton. I am a guy who likes guys and can debate Taylor Swift's latest single and binge watch Beyonce's music videos. But I am still a person. I am not a collectible, a possession, a thing to be grabbed off a clearance rack and paid for and owned. My sexuality is a huge part of the man I am today, and I won't deny the power and force it had in shaping my life. But it is not me.
Call me your friend, call me your acquaintance, call me your best friend. Acknowledge I am gay, acknowledge I am smart, acknowledge that I am funny.
I am not your gay best friend. I'm me.
