Note

This is a cultural-analysis essay I wrote in 2022 for a Gender & Sexuality Studies course at Emory University. It starts from something most men will recognize: how little room men are given to be physically or emotionally close with other men without it reading as gay. The essay looks at who gets to be intimate and who gets mocked for it, and how that line falls along race. It’s academic in register, though the reader is warned that the essay is R-rated due to the films and content it analyses. Read on if that’s your thing.

How men lost touch

Contrary to public belief, male same-sex friendships can be quite complex. Before the modern era, men were often physically intimate, emotional, and endearing toward other male friends.^[1] In the 1900s, Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) introduced sexuality as a social construction of one’s upbringing, a culturally malleable phenomenon. Growing awareness of homosexuality in America led to the stigmatization of a homosexuality that could supposedly develop from “feminine” upbringings, those where men received emotional nurturing and support.^[2] So for the greater part of the 20th century, straight male friendships were socially disallowed the physical and emotional intimacy that had become associated with homosexuality.^[3] Only recently, with the increased visibility and acceptance of homosexuality, have some groups of mostly white straight men been allowed to once again publicly participate in physically and emotionally intimate same-sex friendship, or homosociality. The exclusivity of intimate homosociality to white men has made it a pathway to further marginalize Black people and members of the LGBTQ community through popular mediums like film and social media.

In contrast to the early 1900s, the dominant narrative in America today is one of an innate, stable sexual orientation. There are several reasons for this shift. Studies during the 1990s, including a widely covered 1991 study that reported neural-structure differences between straight and gay men, laid a biological foundation for the cause of homosexuality.^[4] Extensive media coverage of these discoveries gave rise to a determinism-versus-choice debate and inspired the search for a “gay gene.” Research in attribution theory finds that people are more likely to support homosexuality when it is seen as outside one’s control; otherwise it can be read as a flawed choice or personal failure.^[5] So these biological narratives were also widely used, whether intentionally or not, as an effective political device to generate support for LGBTQ rights. This is easy to see in the pop culture around the same-sex marriage movement. Take Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’s anthem Same Love (2012), whose chorus insists “And I can’t change, even if I wanted to, even if I tried,” or Lady Gaga’s Born This Way (2011): “there ain’t no other way, baby, I was born this way.” Both buy fully into the immutability of sexual orientation, cementing the idea that sexuality is not a choice. This shift from a socially construed to an unchangeable sexuality is partly responsible for the increased acceptance of LGBTQ people today. It is also partly responsible for why straight white men are now allowed more of the homosociality they enjoyed in the past.

A study by Robinson et al. (2018) on “bromances” followed the same-sex friendships of 30 heterosexual white undergraduates in the UK.^[6] These men showed high support for male homosexuality, which correlates with physical and intimate homosociality. Nearly all of the 30 reported being publicly intimate with their bromances: kissing them on the mouth, hugging them, sharing a bed, even participating in threesomes with their bro and a woman. They regarded these relationships as extremely valuable, an emotional and physical outlet that sometimes even romantic relationships could not provide. As Robinson et al. put it, these men have “disassociat[ed] the intimacies of same-sex touch from homosexuality.” This homosociality can be quite healthy for men, if they can make that disassociation and are socially allowed to. For Black men, it is not so easy.

Who gets to be close

The rise in socially permissible homosociality has not been equally available to the Black community. This may not be surprising. Ingrained expectations of Black hypermasculinity perpetuate the policing of “feminine” behaviors, vulnerability, tactility, open expression, of the kind that was prevalent in the 1900s. That hypermasculinity is audible in gangsta rap, where violent and sexist themes advertise male toughness,^[7] and visible on social media. Consider the “flip the switch challenge,” a trend in which couples swap clothing to Drake’s Nonstop: it drew criticism from several Black rappers. Waka Flocka posted, “Never will I act or dress like a female … where’s the be a real man challenge.” Casanova filmed his own version of the trend in disapproval.^[8] This hypermasculinity carries over into policing the intimacy allowed in Black male friendship. The level of intimacy in Robinson et al.’s study is close to unheard of in Black communities. In fact, it is hard for almost any intimacy between Black men to read as socially acceptable. Film reflects this. In bromance comedies like The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005), Pineapple Express (2008), and Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008), Black characters are relegated to scenery, used as the butt of jokes, and easily discarded.^[9] These films feature primarily white casts, and the few Black characters present are never shown needing the emotional attention the white characters receive, which makes them forgettable and distills them to their extreme masculinity. As Saaret Yoseph puts it, “if this is what it takes to be one of the boys, the brothers may just be better off fading to black.”

White characters, meanwhile, get to emasculate Black characters and use their own physical intimacy to poke fun at gay men. In Pineapple Express, Craig, a Black assassin, is written as overtly violent and careless. He mocks his partner for not being as ruthless as he is, and eventually kills him for “going soft.” Yet his primary comedic value comes from unexpected feminine lapses. In one scene he is hit with a coffee pot, knocked to the ground, and left crying helplessly. In another he blurts, “I might act tough, but I got a lot of feelings,” to his partner’s surprise. Most telling: right after killing his partner for “going soft,” Craig is startled by a car speeding toward him and lets out an unnaturally high-pitched squeal before he dies. One of the top YouTube comments on the scene reads, “i love that hes an emotional gangster haha.” His emasculation for comedic value is a common trope of Hollywood comedy.

The same scene also sneaks in a gay joke. Red, driving the car that kills Craig, has just saved his bro from being murdered. In the heat of the moment he confesses, “I came back for you bro … I want to be a better friend to you … I want to be inside you holmes,” then immediately squirms in regret.

Gay for the boys

Ironically, as Robinson et al. and Jane Ward both point out, homosexual contact is a major component of white heterosexual bromance. In Not Gay (2015), Ward describes how white men can practice unquestioned, context-dependent heteroflexibility by manufacturing “opportunities for sexual contact with other men.”^[10] She recounts a fraternity ritual in which straight white men strip naked and insert their thumbs into each other’s rectums to “build brotherhood.” A more recent version is the “acting sus” trend on TikTok, in which presumably heterosexual men perform homosexual advances toward other straight men for laughs. The bit can be used to prove one’s heterosexuality by reacting with disgust, or to demonstrate loyalty by showing a willingness to be a little bit gay for a friend. Either way, its comedic framing files homosexuality under abnormal and unexpected, something to be laughed at. And the phrase itself comes from the social-deduction game Among Us (2018), where “sus” marks the person you can’t trust, the impostor. So the trend paints homosexuality as undesirable and invasive while licensing same-sex contact as a tool for establishing heterosexual masculinity and power.

Ward argues these encounters are most common in hyper-masculine heterosexual settings: the military, sports teams, fraternities. There, white men can use their privilege and presumed-static heterosexuality to dissociate homosexuality from same-sex contact. Military initiation, like fraternity hazing, can involve cross-dressing, nipple piercing, anal penetration, and simulated sex.^[10] Yet these acts are never read as homosexual, because associating homosexuality with the military would puncture its hyper-masculine image. Movies do the same work in the cliché locker-room scene, staging “homosexual accidents” as comedy for the sake of male bonding rather than anything genuinely homosexual. In the Canadian film Goon (2011), two men simultaneously thrust into another player’s helmet purely for the joke. In Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011), Steve Carell passes out on top of Ryan Gosling’s nude genitals while getting advice on how to win women back and reestablish his manhood, a scene that neatly captures the paradox of heterosexual masculinity benefiting from homosexual behavior. Both scenes, unsurprisingly, feature only white actors, since only they are granted the public “sexual border crossing” (Ward) these acts require.

Male same-sex friendship is complicated. The shifting attitudes about where sexual orientation comes from, together with the intersection of sexuality and race, make it a genuinely hard thing to analyze. We have seen that complexity arises from the constant public awareness and defensiveness required to keep a male friendship socially acceptable, especially for Black men. It also arises from the use of homosexual contact as a demonstration of heterosexual loyalty and a tool for building white male bonds inside hypermasculine groups. Those same groups of straight white men have been granted context-dependent heterofluidity, participation in spontaneous homosexual acts, without ever having to carry the label of homosexual and what it brings. Through these accounts and examples from popular culture, we have seen how that arrangement can quietly undermine gay men and Black men alike. Studies like Robinson’s suggest these depictions are not far from the current state of male homosociality. But we need far more research into Black homosociality to understand the role race plays in men’s relationships.

References

1. Ibson, J. (2002). Picturing Men: A Century of Male Relationships in Everyday American Photography. University of Chicago Press. ↩
2. Cancian, F. (1986). The feminization of love. Signs, 11(4), 692–709. DOI ↩
3. Diamond, L. M., Savin-Williams, R. C., & Dubé, E. M. (1999). Sex, dating, passionate friendships, and romance: Intimate peer relations among lesbian, gay, and bisexual adolescents. In W. Furman, B. B. Brown, & C. Feiring (Eds.), The Development of Romantic Relationships in Adolescence (pp. 175–210). Cambridge University Press. ↩
4. LeVay, S. (1991). A difference in hypothalamic structure between heterosexual and homosexual men. Science, 253(5023), 1034–1037. DOI ↩
5. Lewis, G. B. (2009). Does believing homosexuality is innate increase support for gay rights? Policy Studies Journal, 37, 669–693. DOI ↩
6. Robinson, S., Anderson, E. & White, A. (2018). The bromance: Undergraduate male friendships and the expansion of contemporary homosocial boundaries. Sex Roles, 78, 94–106. DOI ↩
7. Oware, M. (2011). Brotherly love: Homosociality and Black masculinity in gangsta rap music. Journal of African American Studies, 15(1), 22–39. DOI ↩
8. Casanova — Flip the Switch Challenge. YouTube. Video ↩
9. Yoseph, S. (2009, October 2). Male nudity, illicit substances and ill-timed professions of love. The Root. ↩
10. Ward, J. (2015). Not Gay: Sex Between Straight White Men. NYU Press. (Reviewed in Sexualities, 19(8), 1001–1003.) ↩