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GMBF
By Damon Pythias
It was winter, and stone cold. There was a pile of
coats on a single bed in a shabby hotel. She was sitting on it wearing mittens and weeping
like a disbarred prom queen for some halted romance. Downstairs there was Eagle Bitter and
yobs in flannel shirts. Life was grim.
Then I arrived and rescued her again.
Not her new lover, or her old man but her "Gay Male Best Friend". I sat down,
said something consoling like "You'll live", and then asked her to name the most
awesomely depraved thing her deserting boyfriend had ever done or said. She knew instantly
what it was - he had once yelled "SHOOT!" at a critical height of intimacy - and
told me without hesitating. There was a silence. Then we both laughed until we couldn't
breathe any more, and I called a cab, took her home, tucked her up in my bed - and went to
sleep in the spare room.
For four years I've been a GMBF, dispensing empathy and irony in equal measures, meeting
adversity with a joke, and crisis with an arch nihilism. To continue the meta-cliche, the
subtle blend of girly compassion and boys'-own pragmatism is apt to make the right gay
male any girls' best friend, second only to diamonds and Clinique quick concealer.
Some girls have one; some girls employ a whole bureau; and some girls - silly,
unenlightened ones - recoil at the very idea. Why waste time with on a
less-than-a-love-machine, they ask in their innocence. I'm afraid that kind of quaint
normality is lost on me: it belongs in the land of village greens, and not in the glorious
cesspit of metropolitan manners and pure pretence that is city life. Here the very best
type of boy is gay, game and loves his girlfriends to distraction. Especially when they
are distraught, depressed, broke, and overweight.
The gay man is the great solace of the single girl. He might not want to bed them, but at
least he likes them. (Homosexual misogyny is a different story, full of piscine names for
the enemy genitalia and not part of my nice tale.) Quite why gays like girls is a matter
for neo-Freudian analysis and muttering behind net curtains ("He was brought up by
his grandmother, of course"), but it is certainly so. Your clothes, your nails, your
career will all be of interest to the gay man in your life. He knows how to listen. Even a
full and frank discussion of your latest X-rated gynaecological horror will not wither
him. This is the man you need at the birth of your baby, not its puking, petrified father.
The appeal of the gay is also practical, having much to do with their social availability.
Excluded from the cosy comforts of straight coupledom and its riveting discourse (what my
baby said to yours, are Myer centre sandwiches safe?) goodtime gays are like your local
deli - they stay open later. When they decide to be friends with you, they offer all the
hours, grooming and Erasure tracks it takes to have a good time, no strings attached.
Strings, it must be noted, that frequently strangle a platonic male-female friendship in
an atmosphere of tension, innuendo and When Harry Met Sally possibility. No, with your gay
friend, the coast is clear. And no one will be more at pains to keep it so than him.
After an evening out with a girlfriend of mine, we would return to her North Adelaide
flat, and enter the endless and familiar debate about who should sleep where. As there was
no spare bed, she would offer to share her roomy double divan, at which I would assume a
haunted look, and say, "Only if there's a modesty gap". On this condition, she
would have to erect an Iron Curtain of cushions down the centre of the bed. And dead
centre, if she didn't mind. Then I would lie awake all night, just to make sure that she
didn't roll over and touch me by accident. At that stage of our much evolved relationship,
only embraces of the air-kissing type were permitted. "Still", she told me,
"it's a relief to know for sure that the last place you want to get is into my
knickers. At least, while I'm still wearing them." For a terminal romantic like her,
who believes in love or nothing - a failsafe recipe for an eternity of nothing, believe
you me - gay friends are a life enhancer.
You might have trouble explaining your GMBF to your mother (who will find him irresistibly
clean), your best girlfriend (who may get jealous), or even to your boyfriend. Should the
latter complain, let him perish by comparison.
These plaintiffs are easily gagged. But people at large - the dreaded jury of our peers -
can give a girl a hard time and a bad name for soliciting the company of avowed
homosexuals. In her defence, she may invoke the names of great gay-fans of the age: Liza
Minnelli, her mother Judy Garland, Liz Taylor, and Kylie Minogue, who all have GMBFs. But
this has no effect. The fag-hag label sticks in its implication of the following
unpleasantness: that she is too ugly to get a boyfriend; that she is a lesbian; that she
is frigid; that other girls don't like her because she is a bitch. This is the revenge of
the football club, whose most interesting shithouse joke is Q:"Why did God make
homosexuals?", A:"To take fat girls to nightclubs."
Nevertheless, there are girls who make a career out of escorting gay men. This is usually
when the man is famous and running scared of a Sunday Mail expose. He would rather the
devoted consumers of his movies, his CDs, or his masculine image think he has a
girlfriend. The make-believe girlfriend is called a "beard", and her business is
booming. As each new HIV/AIDS statistics augments the moral panic, so another opening
appears for a good looking popsie to travel the cocktail lounges and VIP bars as the cover
for a boy who isn't quite so glad to be as gay as he was in the good old days of hetero
herpes. It's a shame, but a girl's got to have dinner.
For my own part, the pleasure of females as friends is an uncomplicated one. It is about a
relationship based on a contradiction: the distanced respect of the different and the
solidarity of the similar. It's funny, but it works. Only once has it not been
straightforward, and then the repercussions were upsetting. I was dining with a girl
friend, and talking of recent attempts to reclaim Noel Coward as a red-blooded hetero who
lusted after Gertie Lawrence. Taking her cue from precedent, my friend began slowly but
surely to let me know that her intentions towards me might not be as clearly defined as I
had thought. "What I am trying to say ..." she stumbled. But it was too late. I
was gone. I can get all this soppy stuff elsewhere.
Damon Pythias