Abstract
Together with the couple relationship, which was examined in the previous chapter, there are two other important features of gay men’s intimate life. The first is friendship, which the men interviewed for this study rated as their principal intimate relationship-more important than the couple relationship-and the second is what I have termed the ‘gay family’, which comprises families that gay men create who have been formerly married, when they take part in co-parenting arrangements, when they form what I have called a ‘gay nuclear family’ or, finally, when they make what is known as a ‘family of choice’.
‘You sometimes see the most amazing companionships or friendships or mateships that men of various ages have built.’ Ivan, 40.
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Notes
L. Jamieson ‘The couple: intimate and equal?’ in J. Weeks, J. Holland and M. Waites (eds) Sexuality and Society: a reader (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003), pp. 265–76.
The study of 5,476 people, which was undertaken on-line in 2005, and entitled Private Lives: a report on the health and wellbeing of GLBTI Australians, shows that for men (gay and bisexual), the three ‘best things in life’ are, in order of preference, friends (19 per cent), work/study (15 per cent) and relationships (13 per cent). See M. Pitts, A. Smith, A. Mitchell and S. Patel Private Lives: a report on the health and wellbeing of GLBTI Australians (Melbourne: Gay and Lesbian Health Victoria and The Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society, La Trobe University, 2006), pp. 60–1.
P. Ariès ‘Thoughts on the history of homosexuality’ in P. Ariès and A. Béjin (eds) Western Sexuality: practice and precept in past and present times, trans. A. Forster (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), p. 69.
H. Bech When Men Meet: homosexuality and modernity, trans. T. Mequit and T. Davies (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), pp. 73. Interestingly, this ‘sexualisation’ of friendship is not so clear cut in women’s friendships.
J. Boswell Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: gay people in Western Europe from the beginning of the Christian era to the fourteenth century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 10.
B. M. Dank ‘Coming out in the gay world’ in Psychiatry, 34 (1971) 182, footnote 8.
J. Weeks Making Sexual History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), pp. 212, 213, 219.
Such arrangements are known as ‘overlapping’ or ‘serial’ families. See U. Beck and E. Beck-GernsheimThe Normal Chaos of Love, trans. M. Ritter and J. Wiebel (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), p. 170.
For analysis of sperm banks in general and more discussion of semen as the ‘gift of life’ and other examples of sperm donors’ motives, see D. M. Tober ‘Semen as gift, semen as goods: reproductive workers and the market in altruism’ in N. Scheper-Hughes and L. Wacquant (Eds) Commodifying Bodies (London: Sage Publications Ltd., 2002), pp. 137–60.
R. Sennett and J. Cobb The Hidden Injuries of Class (New York: Alfred Knopf. 1973), p. 132.
E. Beck-Gernsheim Reinventing the Family: in search of new lifestyles, trans. P. Camiller (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), p. 97.
G. Simmel ‘On the sociology of the family’ trans. M. Ritter and D. Frisby in M. Featherstone (ed.) Love and Eroticism (London: Sage Publications, 1999), p. 291.
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© 2008 Peter Robinson
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Robinson, P. (2008). Friends and Family. In: The Changing World of Gay Men. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230584310_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230584310_8
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