If history is a guide
In a technologically-sophisticated and physically dispersed world, friendship and community-building remain some of our greatest strengths. Gay communities have experimented with these things more than many
In the past, geographically-near relationships came easier. We lived in groups, in tribes, among our friends and amidst an assortment of family members. We spent our days with them, our time embedded in theirs, seldom were there moments of loneliness or even aloneness. We were always together, often supported.
This is an imperfect painting of the before times — and it’s certainly not utopic — but it’s not entirely inaccurate either. Humans evolved with others around them. In pre-agricultural societies, if people didn’t have the love and support and connection of those closest to them, they would die. They were nothing without others. There was no choice in the matter.
People today, particularly Westerners, are living through a radical experiment. To live in a few rooms with no one else, to navigate a day on a screen without talking with anyone, to be completely self-reliant and even get your life’s nourishment (food) from spaces without any connection to those spaces or the people in them — this is a life that is unrecognizable to anyone living merely one hundred years prior. While it certainly doesn’t exist for everyone, that degree of aloneness is more common today than ever before, technology and complex communication systems making it all possible.
And yet, relationships still take the same work. The same bonds demand care and vulnerability. But there are barriers today that haven’t existed in the distant past, like needing to close physical gaps that previously weren’t around. In a technologically-laden world, one that allows for the comforts and loneliness that a lot of space provides, relationships can be more difficult to maintain. That space — whether its blocks, acres or miles — means that the risk of being rejected is part of creating new, and even maintaining old, relationships.
Creating community in recent times
In more recent decades, there are some who are experimenting and exploring different ways of connecting and of creating community.
Due to a combination of stigmatization and available emotional vulnerability, gay folks have found deep connection with one another in a way that is often atypical of other friendships. These relationships, and the broad networks they established, are vividly captured in Peter Nardi’s Gay Men’s Friendships: Invincible Communities. In it, he writes about how friendship takes precedence over all else.
He writes, “A central narrative of gay men’s lives is that of how important their friends are to them, how this ‘rich network of friends’ is like a family, how sex has been a dimension of their earlier friendships with some of their friends, and how, for some, their friends mean more and last longer than do their romantic relationships.”
Building relationships eventually creates friend groups and community — sweeping connections between a larger swath of people. These are networks of care, of love, of romance, of (possibly) sex, and of a certain level of dedication to others that is rarer in these times.
In gayer spaces, community often took the form of living collectively, of people taking care of each other under the same roof, or set of neighboring roofs. This manifested most abundantly in 1970s American life, where community housing groups were formed. Notably, they began not simply as a form of care and mutual aid, but also as a way to combat larger political evils, like misogyny, racism, and patriarchy, and to create the world anew.
As public historian Stephen Vider writes, many gay living collectives formed in Brooklyn and Manhattan, where several men, most of them in their twenties, lived communally under one roof. One of these groups was known as the 95th Street Collective. The demands were only slightly more intense than having roommates: group meetings were held to make decisions and resolve conflict. But there was more to these engagements — living together also brought along discussions about how to live, and how to construct more perfect unions between each other, and with those beyond their circles.
That’s because communal living was meant to be a form of gay liberation, a vehicle to halting greater problems affecting both gay and straight Americans. This form of life was an opportunity for gay men to recreate their own roles and question norms and values they deemed outdated and offensive. Coming together was part of resolving both their own issues and those that pervaded life well beyond them. Ultimately, the problems they faced could only be faced together.
As Vider writes, “For many gay liberation activists, male sex roles, rooted in a heterosexist, capitalist patriarchy, were directly to blame for one of the primary problems facing gay men: loneliness — a sense of isolation and alienation from each other.”
What’s lost when we’re disconnected
Despite their efforts, much of the gay liberation collectives broke up in the 1980s. And today, American living models have mostly taken the form of nuclear families, cohabitation of romantic partners, or singles living alone. The fallen relationships, lost connections to friends, distant ties to family members — this phenomenon has negative repercussions for us all.
According to a longitudinal Harvard study of men over about an 80-year period, deep, long-lasting friendships are critical to creating happy and fulfilling lives. Unfortunately, new literature suggests Westerners are not investing enough in friendships. This has social, psychological and financial costs. As study’s authors write, “In the U.K., the economic cost of this loneliness — because lonely people are less productive and more prone to employment turnover — is estimated at more than £2.5 billion (about $3.1 billion) annually and helped lead to the establishment of a U.K. Ministry of Loneliness.”
Enter straight men into the conversation. Now written up by many a publication, straight men are lonelier than ever, and it’s having a serious deterioration on their lives and in the ways that they treat others. It may even be causing them to fall behind in the workplace, to have less money, and to feel valueless themselves.
Scholar Niobe Way suggests that this inability to involve themselves in friendship, to give and receive care, begins around puberty. At that time, they’re too afraid of being called gay, and the subsequent loss of status, which halts a potential friendship in its tracks. Over time, straight men become hardened, their lost connections make them colder, anesthetizing or blocking the feelings that should otherwise be considered human and normal. What is lost is the ability to reach for the vulnerable places that enable connection, both to self and others.
Instead of friendship, what gets prioritized is heterosexual sex and earning money — two things that, in and of themselves, can only be so fulfilling. These cycles of disconnection compound on themselves, creating further moments of isolation and disconnection and loneliness, until it calcifies and creates toxicity.
The irony of this behavior is that gay men and women, and the relationships they foster, can be a guide away from loneliness and into connection. If people only allow history, both distant and recent, to be a guide.
