Whatever Happened to the Gay Best Friend?

And then, seemingly without anybody noticing, he ghosted, disappearing from the scene with barely an acknowledgment that he’d been there at all. (The momentary appearance of Earring Magic Ken in 2023’s biggest film hit, “Barbie”, is the last known sighting.) Was the cultural demise of the Gay Best Friend a defeat, or was it a sign of progress? And either way, whatever happened to that guy? He was fun to have around and, all in all, good company.

It makes sense that, in the 2020s, the Gay Best Friend is not only virtually extinct but even frowned upon as démodé, a quaint form of minstrelsy. In an era in which everybody is determined to live life as the star of their own show, the G.B.F., a member of a sexual minority who accepts that his destiny is to serve as a tangential character rather than a central figure, feels self-abnegating in a way that renders him politically suspect. Why would any self-respecting gay man choose to define himself primarily as a woman’s ornamentation? The trope is by now so familiar that it can be spoofed: a 2023 “Saturday Night Live” sketch, “Straight Male Friend”, shrewdly posits that being the Gay Best Friend (as embodied by Bowen Yang) is essentially uncompensated emotional labour, and that after a long day (or at least a long brunch) of listening and supporting and encouraging, what gay men really need is a dude-bro buddy with virtually no emotional intelligence who just wants to hang.

Has the character simply outlived its questionable-in-the-first-place value? The inverse of the Gay Best Friend is the Fag Hag, and the minefields of that particular stereotype announce themselves right in the label (twice in just six letters). Forever bemoaning her rejection by the straight world, often the first to announce that she considers herself overweight or unattractive and viewed by her gay friends as a kind of rescue case, the Fag Hag character can be predicated on affection, condescension or both, but the general sense is that her time has passed. The character has also come under fire for reasons that lie outside of popular culture, as frustration has increased over the minimisation of the role of women, both straight and lesbian, in the struggles and movements that have defined the past 60 years of gay history.

The phrase “gay best friend” may be more polite, and at least it keeps overt misogyny out of the mix, but it’s just as dicey and out of step with current thinking, which privileges queerness over dull, dated, vanilla gayness and, in some areas, is eager to discard gender altogether. The Gay Best Friend reinforces the rules of gender by highlighting a benign deviation from them: he’s technically a man, but a man who’s granted access to the intimacies of straight women in part because he’s cast out of the world of straight men. He has surrendered masculine autonomy for the consolation prize of female companionship. The gay man-straight woman dynamic is, on the surface, entirely wrong for our politically heightened, anti-assimilationist, queer-separatist age: to believe in it, you have to acknowledge gender binaries enough to take some pleasure in a relationship that seems to both depend on and subvert them.

But it’s odd to see the whole dynamic either ignored or disdained because, in real life, far more than movies and television shows would have you believe, friendships between gay men and straight women continue to thrive and be mutually nourishing — and not just in an “it’s nice to have someone to sob about men with” way. Gay men make good friends, which may be why I’ve always enjoyed the character, though some of his cinematic origins are more distinguished than others. Last winter, the film writer and curator Michael Koresky programmed a retrospective series called “The Gay Best Friend” for the Criterion Channel and found a starting point of sorts in the 1961 British film “A Taste of Honey”, a far-ahead-of-its-time international success in which Rita Tushingham and Murray Melvin play a pair of misfits, she a pregnant teenager and he a diffident, socially shunned gay boy who’s ready to devote his life to helping her raise her baby. It’s a touching movie, the first to imagine the possibility that young gay men could thrive by creating a chosen family to replace an unkind or rejecting biological one — and it seemed to point the way to a cinematic landscape in which gay characters might begin to find more of a place in straight stories.

Twenty years later, the character of the Gay Best Friend hadn’t grown up so much as sagged into a disappointed middle age. In 1982, the gay actor James Coco won a best supporting actor Oscar nomination for Neil Simon’s “Only When I Laugh”, in which he plays an unemployed actor named Jimmy. The role epitomises what the writer and editor Jess Cagle has called “the flower-toting sissy”, the not-busy-enough queen who shows up at the leading lady’s door, geranium in hand, announces, “I brought you a plant!” (the gays love to beautify) and marches in to tidy up her living room and her life. “Only When I Laugh” isn’t about Coco’s character; it’s about Marsha Mason, who plays an actress just out of rehab for alcoholism and determined to smile through her tears and sob through her smiles. Jimmy, whom we meet as he’s frantically preparing her apartment for her return, is there to serve as her hand holder and her audience — to comfort her, applaud her weight loss, buck her up and, if she becomes too self-absorbed, remind her that he, too, has a life — but, not to worry, it’s a disappointing one, made up of lost jobs and men who got away and various small mortifications. His only bright light is her.

This archetype was cemented the following year by two more Oscar nominations. One was for John Lithgow’s warm and sympathetic portrayal of Roberta Muldoon — a variation, the trans best friend — a former football player who becomes an all-purpose aide to three generations of a family in “The World According to Garp”. When she drives off, it’s only to a date that doesn’t work out, so that she’ll have a tale of rue to share upon her return. The other was for Robert Preston as Toddy, the self-described “inconvenient . . . old queen with a head cold” who is best pal to Julie Andrews in “Victor/Victoria”. Toddy has a sex life (it’s comical, but it’s there), although his primary relationship, his love relationship, is with a woman. Both performances are heartfelt and human, but it’s not a coincidence that they were also supporting actor nominees — being supporting, or supportive, was the greatest honor a G.B.F. could hope to achieve.

In many ways, the early Gay Best Friends were symptomatic of a larger cultural imbalance. On television, most of the first gay characters to appear did so in “very special episodes”, arriving on the scene in order to exemplify some issue by teaching the straight characters a small lesson and then, having exhausted their utility, vanishing forever. On film, the gay friend next door was the emblem of an era in which next door was as close to the spotlight as a gay character could get. In an overwhelmingly straight film universe, good gay characters helped straight characters; bad gay characters menaced them. Whatever they did on their own time was irrelevant.

In the early 1990s, that began to change, albeit slightly. In Barbra Streisand’s “The Prince of Tides ” (1991), the straight comic George Carlin plays the femmey (“The stage direction said ‘flamboyant,’ I think,” he told The New York Times in 1992) Gay Best Friend to a suicidal woman. One essayist derided him in The Times as “a terminally single simp who makes knowing, man-weary wisecracks about sex and spends a lot of time in Bloomingdale’s”. That was accurate but, although the character may be wildly overinvested in the lives of straight people, at least the movie lets him throw a party that shows audiences he has a life and social circle of his own — one that includes other gay men. And in “Frankie & Johnny”, the 1991 film adaptation of a Terrence McNally play, Nathan Lane goes full fairy godfather to Michelle Pfeiffer’s contemporary Cinderella, but with droll self-awareness: “This is so exciting — I feel like I’m your big sister!” his character, Tim, tells Pfeiffer’s Frankie as he watches her apply makeup. McNally, notably, gives Tim not only a lover but one who doesn’t buy into the cliché, muttering, “Leave me out of it”, while Tim ministers to his best girlfriend.

By the end of the decade, the G.B.F. was evolving into something more complicated. In the 1997 romcom hit “My Best Friend’s Wedding”, Rupert Everett plays the Gay Best Friend (and editor) to the journalist Julia Roberts. Yes, she successfully ropes him into a ridiculous romantic scheme that’s entirely about her, but he seems to participate as a lark — a brief vacation from his own apparently full, successful and sexy life (this was late ’90s Everett, breaking new ground for the Gay Best Friend by being absurdly hot). Everett’s George is supportive of Roberts’s Julianne, probably more than he should be, but he’s not living through her or using her emotional highs and lows to fill a hole in his sad, empty days. And then came the double revolution of “Will & Grace” in 1998 and “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” in 2003 — two TV series that so altered the G.B.F. landscape that, ironically, they may explain why the character is currently M.I.A. A younger generation of gay viewers that dismisses “Will & Grace” as safely bourgeois may not be able to grasp how much it changed the game, or how quickly. For one thing, here was an ongoing narrative in which a gay man was the co-star, not the supporting player. Novels like Stephen McCauley’s 1987 book, “The Object of My Affection”, had been able to do that, but not TV shows or movies. (It’s not surprising that it took 11 years for McCauley’s book to reach the screen.)

Finally, both a gay man and a straight woman could be depicted as the main characters of their own existences. And perhaps because, in its early seasons, “Will & Grace” has to tread extremely carefully in terms of giving Will (Eric McCormack) a romantic life, it finds a subversive alternative: it furnishes Will with his own Gay Best Friend, Jack (Sean Hayes), a character who embodies every trait — horniness, sluttiness, bitchiness, campiness, narcissism, hysteria — that writers who wanted to have some fun with a gay character couldn’t afford to give the role model Will. Jack turns the G.B.F. inside out; the show demonstrates that someone who functions for straight women as a kind of patient, forbearing superego can, for straitlaced gay men, operate as a playful, impish id. (If you don’t think this dynamic persists today, I invite you to look at the public role that Andy Cohen plays in Anderson Cooper’s life every New Year’s Eve.)

When the original “Queer Eye” came along, it looked, on paper, like an almost preposterous throwback — five gay men, good at things like cooking and decorating and getting dressed, collectively flitting into the life of a straight dude in order to make it better and then vanishing. Would they just be the homosexual equivalent of the widely derided “magical Negro” stereotype, put on earth to bestow blessings on straight people? But in execution, “Queer Eye” felt different — bracing and fresh enough to become a pop culture phenomenon. The gay men were breezy, bossy, confident; the straight men were generally hapless and abashed. The power dynamic was altogether new and, at the end of each episode, the gay men did fly away, but we followed them into their next adventure; it was the straight guy who was never seen again.

After “Queer Eye” and “Will & Grace”, it wasn’t clear where the Gay Best Friend could go next. And so he went nowhere. There was no place for him anymore; bringing back the character would have been tantamount to announcing a preference for a less enlightened age.

But lately, it feels as if the ground is being tested for his return. The indie publisher New Directions has just reissued “Love Junkie”, a 1992 novel by Robert Plunket narrated by a brashly oblivious straight housewife who decides to latch onto a Gay Best Friend and suddenly finds herself in a world of orgies and porn; Plunket’s other novel, “My Search for Warren Harding” (1983), is a cult classic, a savagely comic take on the Gay Best Friend as a malicious manipulator. And “The Rachel Incident”, Caroline O’Donoghue’s well-regarded 2023 novel, uses a female narrator to explore, with contemporary self-awareness and sly meta nods to “Will & Grace”, what a 21st-century bond between a straight woman and a gay man looks and feels like, for better and for worse.

Speaking of “for worse”, the recent FX miniseries “Feud: Capote vs. the Swans” is a fascinating archaeological dig into the ugliest implications of the gay man-straight woman friendship. It begins with the oldest Gay Best Friend cliché in the canon: in the very first scene, Truman Capote (Tom Hollander) arrives at the doorstep of the sobbing socialite Babe Paley (Naomi Watts), sweeps into her Fifth Avenue apartment, sends the servants away for the afternoon and sits her down for a session of girl talk and life repair. But the writer Jon Robin Baitz and its main director, Gus Van Sant, two gay artists who have been working long enough to know their way around this archetype, suggest that neither party to this inherently toxic relationship can be trusted an inch — that women are at best ambivalent about gay men, and vice emphatically versa. The swans — a set of wealthy Manhattan wives — view Capote as a neutered poodle available for house calls and dinners on short notice and otherwise as expendable as any employee; Capote, in turn, views his swans as dull-minded, easily manipulated puppets and as fodder for his next book. “I let him in,” Paley says ruefully of Capote, as if she knows she broke the first rule of vampirism by inviting what she calls “this homosexual court jester, singing for his supper” over her threshold. It’s worth noting that the marketing campaign for the grim, death-haunted miniseries misleadingly sells it with the slogan “the original Housewives”, as if it were a cheerfully campy hoot akin to a Bravo franchise whose legions of gay male fans in effect serve as the watching-at-home Gay Best Friends to the over-the-top female protagonists.

Since queer characters are today put at the centre of many more stories than they used to be, it’s probably no surprise that most of the attempts to revive the Gay Best Friend are period pieces — including “And Just Like That . . . ”, which, for all of its contemporary inclusiveness (there are nonwhite and nonstraight “Sex and the City” ladies now!), still has one Manolo Blahnik planted firmly in the late ’90s. In the second season, Anthony is granted a boyfriend, a handsome, sweet, literary, affectionate, prodigiously endowed Italian poet decades younger (honestly, even as wish fulfillment, it’s a lot). It feels like the writers, afraid that the status of Gay Best Friend is now fatally lacking in dignity, decided they needed to turn Anthony into a replacement Samantha Jones (after Kim Cattrall, the actress who played the character, refused to rejoin the reboot). But you can still feel where their hearts are — with Anthony when he’s at lunch with the ladies, saying things like “The universe is a bitch!” or sitting at home alone, desperately waiting for one of them to call and invite him to be a plus-one to the Met Gala. That’s who they, and we, want him to be. And “The Gilded Age”, which wrangled itself a third season in part by unexpectedly becoming a kitschy hit among gay men, is also striving to have it both ways. The show’s creator, Julian Fellowes, lets himself have grand fun with Nathan Lane as the society string-puller Ward McAllister, using his lubricious drawl and insinuating gleam to map out social strategies with the ladies, but he can’t bring himself to make the character officially gay (although Lane, as always, knows exactly how to subtextualise what he’s been given). It’s much more pleasurable than the show’s official gay storyline, a dull, earnest B plot about a character not being able to live his truth (yeah, it was 1883, we get it).

What’s still missing, though — and what’s hard to picture — is the Gay Best Friend in 2024. What does he look like, and what does he want? Nobody seems able to decide if he’s regressive, or interestingly retro or so politically incorrect that his arrival would count as subversive . . . and therefore very correct. This is an era of constant mandated affirmation and, in gay pop culture (honestly, in all pop culture), that’s frequently shorthanded as “You’re a star, baby!” You’ll hear that line often on the most venerable of all gay TV series, “RuPaul’s Drag Race”, now in its 16th season, which can sometimes resemble a group therapy meeting in which it’s always everybody’s turn to talk, to narrativise their lives as the triumphant surmounting of exhaustively enumerated adversities. The idea that any of Ru’s queens would see themselves as mere ladies-in-waiting is anathema to the premise, and to much of current gay culture; it’s a world in which also-rans are immediately rebranded as all-stars, then brought back for more showcasing. In that context, the celebration of a gay character as marginal — the thing we all fought very hard not to be treated as — feels so unthinkable that maybe it could now qualify as an interesting new flavour; so much of pop culture still excludes gay men entirely that sticking us where we no longer belong might qualify as daring.

Who would a newly minted Gay Best Friend be? We, along with the heroine of some unnamed future movie, TV series or novel, will just have to wait for a knock at the door — and to hope that the man on the other side doesn’t enter bearing a tale of woe, a malevolent hidden agenda, a list of historical grievances or, worst of all, a potted plant.

Read more expert Arts and Culture coverage by T Australia:

• • How Twins From Brisbane Became New York’s Newest Creative Visionaries
  • Phoebe Philo, Famous for Transforming Both Chloé and Celine, Breaks Her Silence
  • Meet the Class of T20