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“MY GAY ROOMMATE”

Analyzing the Gay-Straight Living Situation

On one particularly lazy Sunday, my roommate Ashley decided to make dinner for the two of us. I had been working hard finishing an assignment for school, and eagerly welcomed the home cooked meal. As I cleaned off the table to the best of my ability, and set down a few dishes and silverware, she prepared some chicken breast, red potatoes and a green bean almandine.

“Here you go, honey,” she said sweetly upon serving me. I could not help but feel a little bewildered by this. Cooking for someone is a way of showing love in the way she and I both understand it. Did this make her like a mother to me? Or more like a wife, or girlfriend?

Ashley is, in fact, a friend of mine who I moved in with this past summer. And though our “straight girl-gay guy” relationship and living situation is commonplace in a gay metropolis like New York, what actually drives such a relationship?

A May 2005 article from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that one pheromone prompts the same brain activity in heterosexual women and homosexual men. Their research demonstrates a likely link between brain function and sexual orientation.

An article from the same year by Behavioral Neuroscience declared—“Gay men read maps like women.” It seems that homosexual men employ the same strategies for navigating as women, using landmarks to find their way around, according to the study. It mentions another article that looked at verbal fluency, and found that gay men are inclined to speak as much as straight women, while gay women and straight men use words less.

So if the brains of gay men and straight women truly operate so similarly, does this explain a predestined proclivity for relatedness between the two?

This project explores the issues of relatedness for gay men and straight women cohabitating in a New York City apartment. Since the four couples I am utilizing for this exercise are in their early-twenties, and in college, I wish to employ the work of Kathy Weston in Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, and Kinship. This time of life is critical for development, moving away from home, and structuring a new “family” of ones own, by choice—reflecting Weston’s study of surrogate families and gay relationships.

Ashley and I have shared a two-bedroom apartment in Prospect Height, Brooklyn for nearly a year. We met in the dorms during our freshman year of college and became fast friends.

Lorena and Michael grew up together in Salvador, Brazil before moving to New York to attend Parsons the New School for Design in 2004. They have shared a two-bedroom apartment in Fort Greene, Brooklyn for nearly a year. I lived with Lorena for a year before this, after a year living with Michael as well.

Chris and Catherine became friends upon entering Parsons for photography in 2005. They moved into a two-bedroom apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn last year.

Nelson and Nicole are brother and sister, who moved to New York from their home in the Bay Area of San Francisco in 2004. Nicole attends Parsons, while Nelson is doing a graduate program in oncology at Columbia University. They share a small apartment in the Nolita neighborhood of Manhattan.

There are several presuppositions about the relationship of gay men and straight women, perpetuated by neoliberal media and discourse, based on the work of Tina Grigoriou in her 2004 work, “Friendship between Gay Men and Heterosexual Women: An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis,” for London’s Families & Social Capital ESRC Research Group.

Mainly, Grigoriou satellites around the idea that straight women and gay men value one another for personality, and not sexuality. She decides that Will and Grace, an American television series based on friendships between straight women and gay men has been welcomed by a public that accepts such friendships as healthy and empowering. She also found that these friendships can be very valuable for gay men, heterosexual women and for their immediate social networks. Her first conclusion—

Gay men do not always trust other gay men as friends:

Contrary to previous research (including that of Kath Weston), Grigoriou found that most gay men reported that they were disappointed with their friendships with other gay men. Most reported a lack of trust in the gay world, which was described as ‘back stabbing’ and ‘bitchy’. Indeed, most of the gay men claimed that their need for intimacy and closeness was fulfilled by their friendships with heterosexual women because they could trust them and rely upon them.

Some gay men talked about their need to socialize with heterosexual people so that they feel more ‘normal’ and included within the non-gay world.

Straight women prefer a friendship with no sexual overtones:

Previous research suggests that heterosexual women are not satisfied with their cross-sex friendships. This study, however, suggests that this may only be the case for women’s friendships with heterosexual men. Most talked about a lack of sexual tension in their relationships with gay men, indicating the lack of an underlying sexual agenda.

Some heterosexual women claimed that they gained more from their gay friends than their heterosexual female friends. This is because their friendships with gay men offered them a male presence in their lives as well as a male viewpoint on various matters. Moreover, gay men appeared to contribute to women’s positive self-esteem. The women reported feeling good about themselves because they were valued for their personality and not their sexuality.

Partners and family can welcome gay men- straight women friendships:

Both gay men and heterosexual women suggested that their friendship was accompanied by acceptance among other members of their social networks. For example, their partners would not regard these friendships as a potential threat to their own relationship. Parents would also welcome and encourage such friendships, and some gay men’s parents hoped they would develop into a romantic relationship.

Indeed I had my own presuppositions about the existing relationships at hand, based on my initial observations:

1. When Ashley and I planned to live together, she joked about being “live-in lovers.” Our relationship has, more or less, followed suit and I am going to assume we may follow a “mock-heterosexual union” of sorts. Much of the same performativity is still taking place, though a legitimate sexual relationship is nonexistent.
2. Michael and Lorena most closely follow a “mother/son” binary, going on what I already know about them. Lorena is very high-maintenance, anal, and very much a Mother Hen figure. This came to a head upon her moving in with Michael, a somewhat reformed party-boy with a cocaine addiction. Their relationship became somewhat tumultuous throughout my study, and they stopped speaking on more than one occasion.
3. I have found Chris and Catherine to be so similar in disposition and personality, so it is hard to determine what mode of relatedness that they might follow, if there is one at all. For now, I would like to label them as friends who live together.
4. Because of their biological tie, I believed Nelson and Nicole would most likely follow into a brother-sister mode. They have a lifetime’s experience already living together, so what I have concerned myself with is the ways in which their relationship has changed upon moving across the country to share their own place.

Over the period of my study, I was able to interview my participants and observe their lifestyles by going to each household for dinner. Among my concerns was the following of gender roles in the domestic setting—who cooks, who cleans, and so forth—based on the fantasy that domesticity and homemaking is prescribed to the female.

“We live like a couple of frat guys,” my roommate Ashley decided. At times, this analogy rings true—when the stress of finals leaves our apartment filled with piles of laundry and empty beer cans. The fact is that I am usually the one working in the sink washing dishes, while Ashley is usually the one on her knees cleaning the bathroom. We tend to cook an equal amount of simple meals, usually sharing with the other. My bedroom is noticeably neater.

Lorena is the cook in her apartment, while Michael helps with cleaning by taking out the garbage. The two planned a brunch last month, inviting friends to cook and bring their families’ traditional foods. Lorena prepared a spread of Brazilian pastries and dishes, while Michael slept through the party and nursed a hangover.

In Greenpoint, Catherine cooks the more elaborate meals, though both roommates cook the same amount of simpler meals. Chris cooks any red meat they eat. Catherine takes out the garbage more often. They do the dishes equally.

Nelson is known as “Mama” in his apartment, and labeled himself as the domestic. “I had to teach Nicole to cook and clean properly,” he explained. But Nicole protested—“I clean relentlessly, while my brother never cleans.” Nelson cooks more often, but almost always for himself as he is a vegetarian and Nicole is not.

In general, the couples chosen for this study have a pretty even split of the domestic workload. It would a typical assumption to say straight men depend on women in this aspect, given the fantasy of female domesticity. What I have to go on is my parents: my father still does not know how to do laundry or clean a bathroom, or cook anything other than scrambled eggs or pierogies. He does, however, take care of washing the dishes about as much as my mother.

The next question I wanted to explore dealt with language and its effect on the gay-straight living situation. How does the language used in the household dictate the relationship?

Ashley seems to display a free reign of the word “fag.” When her mother visited for the first time, Ashley challenged her to pick the “gay bedroom,” to which she ascribed pathological organization and the better décor. I cannot recall her using this language before we began living together, a moment I feel gave her this sense of entitlement. After a few months of living together, Ashley and I began to say “I love you.” I must admit, this caught me by surprise the first time. What would it mean to tell Ashley, “I love you?” And did I really love her?

“What do you mean by language?” Lorena asks. “He is gay, and I am a fag hag. There is no performance, because I know what to expect from a gay boy… and he knows what to expect from me.” Judith Butler would probably slap her, based on her ideas of gender performativity. Butler characterizes gender as the effect of reiterated acting, one that produces the effect of a static or normal gender while obscuring the contradiction and instability of any single person’s gender act. This effect produces what we can consider to be “true gender,” a narrative that is sustained by “the tacit collective agreement to perform, produce, and sustain discrete and polar genders as cultural fictions is obscured by the credibility of those productions—and the punishments that attend not agreeing to believe in them.”

For Chris and Catherine, the same kind of informal language is used with one another that they use with their other friends. “We don’t have any special means of communication,” Chris furthers, “but I do have a nickname for Catherine.”

I predicted that these relationships are grounded in the blueprints of similar partnerships portrayed in the media we have grown up with. The most obvious is NBC’s Will & Grace, wherein a pair of best friends—one a gay man and the other a straight woman—shared an apartment in Manhattan. Also representative of gay-straight roommates for over fifteen years is MTV’s The Real World, which puts seven real-life strangers into a house to be filmed at all hours.

“Our relationship is somewhat similar to Will and Grace’s,” Nicole admits. “We use humor in our everyday lives, just like on the show.” Nelson lived with two of his best straight girlfriends during his undergraduate years at UCLA, and says they thought about pitching an idea for a sitcom or reality show called Two Hags and a Fag. “We thought it could be a contemporary version of Three’s Company.”

Lorena does not feel affected by such media: “I have too many gay friends, so I just compare all of them and make my conclusions based on that. But I do think you [gay] guys are more affected by the media in terms of how you should act, and I think Michael is like that.” However, Michael is not necessarily influenced by mainstream media, but by the more subversive gay cultural outlets. “I believe he does it just to fit in,” Lorena adds.

Chris and Catherine do not consume a large amount of gay interest media, and feel that they are more closely aligned with portrayals of straight couples rather than gay male/straight female representations. “But we both love Anderson Cooper,” Chris admits.

The way sex is dealt with in these households is also of particular interest. Is homosexual sex be more of a taboo than heterosexual sex? While Weston’s 1985 Los Angeles Times poll found 73 percent of respondents viewing homosexual acts as “wrong,” 2008 New York City has to be more accepting.

Ashley parades naked around me on a daily basis. We share a box of condoms, and openly discuss our sex lives. Nothing is sacred, it seems.

For Nelson and Nicole, open communication allows them to deal with potential problems before they arise. “We always keep an open dialog regarding the activities that might be going on in our shared area,” Nicole explained. “But when a significant other is around, or spending the night, we seem to have an unspoken understanding.” As long as there is no effect on there shared space, there is no conflict.

The first time I had sex in the apartment I shared with Lorena, she complained that I had contaminated it with my “sin.” While she may have been saying this in jest, it made me wonder about the stigma of gay sex she had learned. And why choose to live with a gay man, if she had a legitimate fear of contamination?

“I always saw myself living with a gay man when I grew up,” Lorena said one day. “But I pictured someone getting dolled up to go out at night, someone like Michael of course. I never thought it would be a writer.” Lorena displays a heterosexual female’s ideal of male friendship without the fear of sex. She seems to be fulfilling her need for male interaction with gay men, without having to confront the realities of a real, heterosexual relationship.

“And besides,” she told me, “no one appreciates a pretty girl like a gay guy.”

Works Cited

Butler, Judith (1999). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.

Viegas, Jennifer (2005). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, New Scientist news service.

Weston, Kath (1997). Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, and Kindship. New York: Columbia University Press.