\n<\/p>\n
Since queer characters are today put at the center of many more stories than they used to be, it\u2019s probably no surprise that most of the attempts to revive the Gay Best Friend are period pieces \u2014 including \u201cAnd Just Like That \u2026 ,\u201d which, for all of its contemporary inclusiveness (there are nonwhite and nonstraight \u201cSex and the City\u201d ladies now!), still has one Manolo Blahnik planted firmly in the late \u201990s. In the second season, Anthony is granted a boyfriend, a handsome, sweet, literary, affectionate, prodigiously endowed Italian poet decades younger (honestly, even as wish fulfillment, it\u2019s a lot). It feels like the writers, afraid that that status of Gay Best Friend is now fatally lacking in dignity, decided they needed to turn Anthony into a replacement Samantha Jones (after Kim Cattrall, the actress who played the character, refused to rejoin the reboot). But you can still feel where their hearts are \u2014 with Anthony when he\u2019s at lunch with the ladies, saying things like \u201cThe universe is a bitch!\u201d or sitting at home alone, desperately waiting for one of them to call and invite him to be a plus-one to the Met Gala. That\u2019s who they, and we, want him to be. And \u201cThe Gilded Age,\u201d which wrangled itself a third season in part by unexpectedly becoming a kitschy hit among gay men, is also striving to have it both ways. The show\u2019s creator, Julian Fellowes, lets himself have grand fun with Nathan Lane as the society string-puller Ward McAllister, using his lubricious drawl and insinuating gleam to map out social strategies with the ladies, but he can\u2019t bring himself to make the character officially gay (although Lane, as always, knows exactly how to subtextualize what he\u2019s been given). It\u2019s much more pleasurable than the show\u2019s official gay story line, a dull, earnest B plot about a character not being able to live his truth (yeah, it was 1883, we get it).<\/p>\n
What\u2019s still missing, though \u2014 and what\u2019s hard to picture \u2014 is the Gay Best Friend in 2024. What does he look like, and what does he want? Nobody seems able to decide if he\u2019s regressive, or interestingly retro or so politically incorrect that his arrival would count as subversive \u2026 and therefore very<\/em> correct. This is an era of constant mandated affirmation and, in gay pop culture (honestly, in all pop culture), that\u2019s frequently shorthanded as \u201cYou\u2019re a star, baby!\u201d You\u2019ll hear that line often on the most venerable of all gay TV series, \u201cRuPaul\u2019s Drag Race<\/a>,\u201d now in its 16th season, which can sometimes resemble a group therapy meeting in which it\u2019s always everybody\u2019s turn to talk, to narrativize their lives as the triumphant surmounting of exhaustively enumerated adversities. The idea that any of Ru\u2019s queens would see themselves as mere ladies-in-waiting is anathema to the premise, and to much of current gay culture; it\u2019s a world in which also-rans are immediately rebranded as all-stars, then brought back for more showcasing. In that context, the celebration of a gay character as marginal \u2014 the thing we all fought very hard not to be treated as \u2014 feels so unthinkable that maybe it could now qualify as an interesting new flavor; so much of pop culture still excludes gay men entirely that sticking us where we no longer belong might qualify as daring.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n