“Two Men In Love With Each Other But Don’t Know How To Show It” Is My Favorite Genre

Gore Vidal…rules.

“The four most beautiful words in our common language: I TOLD YOU SO.”

“Never lose an opportunity to have sex or be on television.”

“A narcissist is someone better-looking than you are.”

Ahh. Such wit! Such intellectual sparring! A time when MEN WERE MEN, you know what I mean? When there were FEUDS to be HAD and DRINKS to be THROWN and BITING BARBS were immortalized on TALK SHOWS. And also everyone wore suits and stuff. No, jk, I hate all that false nostalgia shit. Things sucked then, they just sucked in different ways. But I will say that my secret favorite genre of book, essay, and movie is Two Men Who Are In Love With Each Other But Don’t Know How To Show It.

Sometimes it’s fun in an explicitly sexual way (~winky face emoji~), but mostly I just think male relationships are so weird and so fucked because, like, hi, men also grow up in a society that warps expectations of how they should behave and it totally impacts the way they relate to each other!!

Of course my primary concern is always how men relate to women, because I’m a woman and a really good-looking narcissist and so my experience takes priority over literally everything else, but watching two men or more navigate the emotionally ambiguous waters of a complex relationship is always, always fascinating for me.

As an example, The Guardian’s Gore Vidal profile was an excellent window into the mind of a verbose, combative, delightfully witty asshole who frequently came into contact with other assholes who were equally combative but had varying levels of verbosity or wit. That kind of intense rivalry is a form of love, or affection, the way any highly concentrated attention is. It’s the same reason I love Point Break, or Good Will Hunting, or reading any gossip about David Foster Wallace’s fraught relationships with Jonathan Franzen and Jeffrey Eugenides. I want to see a very specific kind of masculine friendship because I want a window into a completely different kind of brain than mine.

A few months ago I had the opportunity to eavesdrop on two male friends who talked, seriously and thoughtfully, about what kinds of dads they hoped to be. A few weeks ago I listened to a group of men discuss what they should do for lunch; that same week, a male friend spoke to me at length about a man he believed had betrayed his trust. And many, many years ago, staying with four male university friends who shared a filthy apartment, I applied my makeup in the hallway mirror while they played video games and talked about whether the girls they liked really liked them back.

In those cases, I’m sure my presence subtly altered the way those men talked to each other, but I tried very hard to be as silent as possible, like I was studying a rare ecosystem: don’t disturb their environment! My personal experience with friendships and relationships is, of course, so tied to my experience of being a woman, and our friendships (in my experience) seem radically different. More praise, for one, and less direct confrontation. More confessions, more intimacy, more time. But there are unlimited ways to have a fulfilling relationship, or so I hear, and I want to see all of them!

Alex and I have often spoken about the chemistry, or maybe alchemy, that occurs when you put more than one person in a room together; like, the combination of two or more personalities creates a third dynamic which influences the way people talk or relate or interact. I know I’m different around different people for wildly different reasons, some of which are very connected to sex and gender. And I’m looking to see what their dynamic is like with or without me present. So I guess it is like an anthropological experiment, in a sense, to find the people who are different than I am in one fundamental way and examine the way they talk to each other, the way they talk about each other, and the way they are represented in pop culture.

TLDR: Men!! How do they work?!?