GAY/STRAIGHT FRIENDSHIP: In honor of this weekend’s football related festivities, Gawker’s Brian Moylan has laid out a Contract for the Gay Guy/Straight Guy Friendship. Rules include :“We Don’t Want to Have Sex With You” and “Don’t expect that we’re going to be the guy you point to when you have to say, “I love gay people! I’m friends with a gay!”… This should be a relationship of equals based on strictly above-the-belt affection and shared interest. We may be on different teams, but as men we’re all playing the same sport.”
Reading it, I was intrigued by how much more complicated it seems to be for gay men to have straight man friends than it is for women. Not that a humor piece should be taken as a psychological indicator of The State of Gay Friendship, but I’d be hard-pressed to come up with a similar piece on straight girl/gay girl friendships — it just seems less complicated, and therefore less funny, and in my experience has always been so. Statistically, gay men are more likely to live in Urban Centers (with accordingly higher gay populations) than gay women are, which may explain some of our perceived discrepency.
But perhaps that’s only because I am a gay woman, I’ve always had straight friends, and therefore according to my sample size of the five people I know, we seem to be on the right path. So basically we’ve got no stats to back us up on this one, but it seems that lesbians have more straight girl friends than gay men do straight male friends. Furthermore it seems that lesbians have reportedly been far more successful than gay men in actually convincing their female friends to switch teams.
What do you think, lesbians and strais? If you’re gay, do you have a lot of straight female friends? What about vice versa? What about you, small contingency of Autostraddle’s male readers, do you think it’s more complicated for dudes? Why?
What would you include in a “Contract for Straight/Lesbian Friendship”?
GAY MARDI GRAS: Animal Liberation NSW, whose 2006 float was nominated “most creative,” was shunned from this year’s gay Mardi Gras in Sydney by organizers who wanted it more “fagged up.” Says a spokeswoman: “The subsequent feedback was that our entry didn’t fit the criteria of being queer orientated, so we changed the name to Sydney Queers for Animal Rights, but [again] they rejected us. … We’re really, really disappointed. In fact, I’m just gobsmacked.” (@advocate)
QUEER SCHOOLS: There’s the Hetrick-Martin Institute’s Harvey Milk High School in New York. The Minnesota-based GLBTQ Online High School on the web. And now a new project in Los Angeles, where LGBT students will have the chance to graduate from high school without being teased, tormented, and harassed on their way to class. The school, which serves grades 7-12, is a collaboration between Opportunities for Learning, a charter school with 34 locations across Los Angeles and Orange counties, and Lifeworks, a mentoring program for LGBTQ youth sponsored by the L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center.”(@latimes)
V DAY: The marketing department over at New Line decided to “de-gay” the upcoming romcom “Valentine’s Day.” What, you didn’t know it was gay to begin with? Yeah, well, that’s why you have us! “[Eric] Dane is a victim of advertisement editing that eliminates the trace of homosexual relationships in a film, even though they are central to the storyline. In other words, the film’s advertisements have been “de-gayed.”” (@cnn)
SEX DOLLS: Hey! Have you heard of Real Sex dolls? They’re only the creepiest things ever, and Contexts magazine is unimpressed that CNN is covering the new sex dolls “like it’s the iPad.”
To some men, she might seem like the perfect woman: She’s a willowy 5 feet 7 and 120 pounds. She’ll chat with you endlessly about your interests. And she’ll have sex whenever you please — as long as her battery doesn’t run out.
MEN: Apparently men are about half a century behind suddenly; they’re where women were in the ’50s! Waa! Who knew? This is clearly a topic best covered by Samantha Bee, who points out that the crisis is clear enough. Men only run 485 of our Fortune 500 companies and just three branches of government. She visits the “Better Man” retreat in the woods to investigate.
GAY MEN AND WOMEN: In these trying times, John Oliver thinks we should stop letting old people serve in the senate. Because really how are they any better than gays in the military?
RACHEL MADDOW: “Tucker Carlson‘s Daily Caller website has made a habit lately of calling Rachel Maddow “a man.” The site also maintains that this is not at all offensive. We’re not buying it: While it’s not not surprising that a site run by Carlson would take cheap shots at Maddow, it’s kind of interesting that they try to claim they’re not cheap shots.” (@jezebel)
