I would say this semester has been uneventful–thus, my hiatus from touching this blog or feeling the need to spend an hour or two every week to complain about life into the anonymous abyss of the internet–but when I think about it, I think it’s more because I’ve had you these past few months.
I don’t have many (or any) male friends, much less gay male friends. Foucault once talked about friendship as a way of life, and the more time we spend together, the more I think we embody what he was getting at. Homosexuality can be so easily written off as just a series of random hook-ups, of dirty encounters in bathroom stalls or quick glances over the urinals to satisfy that childhood curiosity of wondering what other dicks looked like, but his idea is that friendship is so much more inventive. Gay men loving gay men in a friendship is unpredictable and is not necessarily subject to the same kinds of petty issues that would pop up in the standard monogamous relationship.
I’ve spent a majority of my life feeling anxious about male friendships. All around me, straight males would have their straight male friends and male bonding was obviously highly encouraged (bro-codes and all that were big) but it always took a certain form. What I observed was boys bonding over all these things that reaffirmed their particular type of masculinity; it was about girls (or rather, jokes about women) and video games, and their language seemed to always draw from this very specific word bank (“dude,” “bro,” etc.) and common knowledge of gestures (it has been nearly 10 years since I first had to do that weird male-male handshake choreography thing and I have yet to nail it). So, as you can imagine, I’ve always felt on the outside of these relationships, always forming friendships with females because I was never comfortable with adhering to the mold of (straight) male friendship.
But the gay friendship as a “way of life” yields relations that do not resemble those that are institutionalized. What we have does not look like the straight male friendship I have stayed away from, nor does it look like the fleeting encounters with gay men off of Grindr, Tinder, and all that. Rather, it feels like I have found somebody to join me at my vantage point to observe the world that we live in from a formal distance (even though that means it can seem like we just come off as judging cosmopolitan gays, as we’d like to joke). We are always ready to talk about your interests in urban planning and mine in defining the Asian American experience. We watch The Bodyguard in your room, in awe of Whitney’s youth and beauty. We walk back home together from class, distressed over our occasional boy issues. You share with me the music that you grew up with and we sit together on my couch, knee touching knee, watching hours of YouTube videos of Patti LeBelle, Whitney Houston, and Chaka Khan (but not until after a good hour of listening to Mariah Carey’s live mic feed). I somehow became the first person you called the second after you received a very important call, informing you that you were awarded this prestigious and selective national scholarship that you have spent months working for and we jump up and down outside of Stern, hollering and making these incoherent squeals and noises that probably troubled those business kids ordering from the Halal cart outside.
And when we don’t see each other for 3 or 4 days and serendipitously bump into each other on the street, we can’t help but feel this weltering excitement brewing within us and hug each other (even though we rarely ever touch) because we have missed each other’s company and all that time apart feels odd because our lives have become so intertwined.
You provide so much support, wisdom, and love, and I am thankful for having you in my life.
A great piece on friendship.
– Fish
Gaysian Third Space 