the sanctity of platonic male friendship

oldsouldier:

sonickitty:

radialarch:

i’ve seen a lot of variations on this argument pass my dash ever since that cacw empire article came out, so i’m just gonna say it: it is not harder and better and somehow more purer to portray a platonic male friendship on screen than it is to make the relationship romantic. it’s not. the history of media is full of guys who love each other and would do anything for each other and then go home to their wives, because well obviously they’re not gay.

“romance is just an easy shorthand for intimacy and trust.”

please. please send these easy shorthand gay relationships my way. what universe do you live in that gay people can hook up easily on-screen and the audience reaction is “what a cop-out, they’re just doing it to avoid developing their friendship.”

listen. heterosexual romance is often an easy shorthand for intimacy and trust. this works because there’s an expectation – both on part of the filmmaker and the presumed audience – that heterosexual romance is normal and part of the background radiation of everyday life. and anyone makes a movie where the male and female leads hook up, without much build-up or development of their relationship, they then strengthen that expectation in a self-perpetuating feedback loop.

gay romance does not have the same cultural history. the default assumption is in fact that same-sex leads will not hook up unless they live in the gay/lesbian genre. platonic male friendship is, in fact, the easy way out. 

it’s absolutely homophobic to say a gay romantic relationship would somehow lessen a bond of friendship. and i mean this in the kindest of ways, because it’s not the same kind of homophobia that leads to gay people being physically attacked, or laws being written to actively restrict people’s rights for the fact of being gay. it’s a low-grade, pervasive homophobia that results when the speaker doesn’t conceptualize gay people as a part of a normal, everyday milieu. that a character being gay has to be narratively justified in some way (as if gay people around the world don’t have to justify their right to exist every single day!); that a gay relationship is somehow “pandering” and “inorganic”, because the normal, natural – straight – audience could never really relate to a gay relationship.

look. we are all shaped by cultural expectations. it doesn’t make someone a bad person if their mental conception of “an intense relationship between two guys” defaults to “friendship” instead of “romance”. but responding to any challenges to that paradigm by extolling the virtues of same-sex friendship and ignoring the long history of gay relationships in media being censored and sanitized and othered? yeah. that’s homophobic.

Agreed. If it were really so “easy” to say they were lovers, it would have been done already. 

The use of the word “brotherhood” as a counter to gay relationships has really started to bother me.  

“What’s fascinating about the Cap-Bucky story as well is it’s a love story,” says the co-director. Stop your sniggering at the back, he’s talking about the fraternal kind. “These are two guys who grew up together, and so they have that same emotional connection to each other as brothers would, and even more so because Bucky was all Steve had growing up.”

Brotherhood has become a more polished “no homo,” apparently to the point that two male characters can have a “love story” on screen and still be totally straight. They could say the characters are “just friends,” but they have to go all the way to “brothers” to make sure the relationship can be as emotional as they want with no gay repercussions. When I see this, I feel like it sets up a dichotomy of queer vs. familial, where “brotherly love” is held up as the safe, natural reading, and a queer reading becomes even more perverse by contrast. 

I also hate when people will bring up the constraints men put on their friendships. “This is such an important depiction of male friendship. Men are never allowed to show this amount of love or vulnerability with their buddies.” The implication, of course, being that to turn it into a gay romance would be to cheapen it. That it’s more important to have yet another statement about the beauty of masculine friendship instead of queer representation. Look, buddy, it’s not my fault men won’t hug each other. And what’s this about them not being allowed? Men are absolutely allowed to hug each other, to be open and vulnerable and demonstrative with their friends. You know why they don’t? Because they’re afraid someone will think they’re gay. Because male friendship is acceptable and male romance isn’t.