Romantic friendship

[liv]

I've been pondering this post for most of two months, but well, life happened with intensity.

Someone in my dwircle made a locked post linking to this Tor essay by Cori McCarthy: Fraught With Destiny: Queering L.M. Montgomery’s Anne Shirley and Diana Barry. And melannen has thoughts about the book canon of Good Omens. I was particularly interested in point #8: It’s also very definitely not the story of Crowley and Aziraphale’s epic sphere-crossed love affair.

I really like McCarthy's reading of Anne of Green Gables. Yes, I'm exactly McCarthy's age, and yes, I did grow up without a positive concept of Queer anything. (I didn't really have strong negative associations with the word either; my grandmother used it to mean 'gay', in a somewhat derogatory sense, but it wasn't used by bullies against me. People who called me names used the respectable term 'lesbian'.) And yes, I was completely obsessed with Anne Shirley when I was about 10, and for me, as for McCarthy, it's something of a formative book. I completely love the portrayal of a life partnership that can be likened to Anne and Diana's lifelong friendship.

What I personally learned from Anne and Diana was not so much that it's possible for girls to fall in love with other girls. Though there was no be/do confusion in my imaginary crush on Anne; I related 100% to Diana, I wanted Anne to love me even though I'm much more boring and prosaic than she is. What I learned was that friendship matters, that it is possible to have passionate feelings about your friend without it looking like the model of romance that I had available to me of boyfriend/girlfriend dating as a trial run for eventual marriage. It's not just Anne and Diana either, it's Montgomery's whole concept of "kindred spirits". Anne and Diana might be "bosom friends", which you could almost fit into the category of what we nowadays call "BFFs", but Anne forms deep, passionate connections with multiple people, including some who are much older than her, and from totally different social backgrounds. What was important to me was that Anne could make deeply important and life-changing connections with people who aren't her peers, people who couldn't possibly be in an exclusive pair-bond (whether sexual/romantic or any other form) with her.

I can buy McCarthy's argument that Anne's relationship with Gilbert (which honestly disappointed me as a child reader) is mostly about her making a life with her best friend, while making space for the truly romantic connection between Anne and Diana. But I don't want to choose between: Anne really loved Gilbert and Diana was her best friend, versus Anne really loved Diana and Gilbert was her best friend, and she married the male one because of social convention at the time. The second reading is valuable because it gave and continues to give hope to readers who are starved of Queer role models. Either way, though, Anne had her kindred spirits, bonds that were completely independent of the kind of relationships that we like to sort into the categories of "romantic" or "platonic".

Similarly, I think melannen's reading of book!Aziraphale and Crowley is very sound. Partly because they are in fact angels and there's no call to squeeze them into human categories of gender, sexuality and relationship style. Which is not to say I don't love first fandom!Aziraphale and Crowley, and subsequently the choice made in the TV series to refocus the story as a rom-com between the Ineffable Husbands. Centring the romantic relationship is both a really lovely thing for gay and Queer representation, and also a divergence from the book. Not because in the book everybody is straight, but because in the book their relationship is its own thing. It's not a m/m romance, it's not a platonic friendship between straight men who are definitely very no-homo in their totally platonic love for each other, because Crowley and Aziraphale are not men. Not humans, not male, not men. That's very close to being TV series canon too, at very least it's, hm, whatever you call "voice of god" when you're talking GO fandom and the usual term would be confusing, anyway, Neil Gaiman said so. But in TV canon the Ineffable Husbands are played by male actors, and their relationship is framed using the cinematic language of romance, so in some sense this is canonically a gay romance.

If you look at the comments on the Tor post, you get the absolutely typical het-splaining response to someone looking for Queer rep in canon: In the Victorian era women were very physically affectionate with each other [...] Anne was a very lonely girl who desperately wanted a friend and was a romantic but not in a sexual way.. Or: In the Edwardian period and before, these deep, comfortable, non-physical friendships between people of the same sex were were common and normal. Because we all know lesbian and gay people were invented in 1969, so any possible evidence of same-sex romance or attraction before then is anachronistic and wishful thinking.

I think there are multiple valid readings of ambiguous fictional relationships. Because they're fictional, for a start, part of what fiction is for is for readers to be able to empathise with imaginary characters who might be more or less like themselves. So I think there's ample room for melannen to see ace representation in Good Omens, and for kass to imagine explicit kinky sex between genderfluid lovers, and everything in between. But also because real world relationships are ambiguous. Not all of them fit neatly into a binary of gay or straight, sexual-romantic or platonic.

When we were planning our wedding, jack commented that I have about a dozen friends who are like the other half of my soul. Which seemed like a really great compliment at the time; maybe Anne Shirley would have approved of me after all. Some of those friendships are definitely platonic, because they exist between people who don't have the potential to be attracted to each other. And some of my dearest friends are people who have made commitments that exclude developing any kind of romantic or sexual relationship with me, even though in theory there might be some kind of mutual attraction there. Some of my friendships have sexual aspects to them but they still feel more like friendships than romantic partner type relationships. And some are just something else again, they are physical and sensual and emotionally intense, but not in a way that's to do with either sex or the sorts of connections that are conventionally depicted as romantic.

I don't expect to see those kinds of relationships in my media, not really. Anyway if they did show up at least some part of the audience would consider them to be slash or romantic relationships, and attribute the differences from a standard sexual-romantic relationship to the fact that it isn't fully safe to be Queer or to show people being Queer. I think maybe Good Omens is a good start because the angel background gives more space for the characters to be just who they are, and absolutely no one has a problem with that. The linked essay, which I found incredibly moving, reads the Ineffable Husbands as non-binary, and I am so delighted that the writer was able to connect to that representation. But just who they are seems even better; you don't have to define them as gay men, but there's certainly room to do so, and equally, you don't have to define them as a romantic couple, or platonic friends, or anything other than just themselves, just people who, to return to melannen's analysis, realized they get on with each other better than with anyone else, and who have each other’s backs when it’s important.

Queerplatonic seems like a clunky, pretentious word. But I need some kind of word that allows both people like McCarthy and people who are on the a-spectrum to see themselves in Anne and Diana's relationship. And people (like me) who might sometimes be attracted to people of a given gender or no gender or any gender, but also have intense, passionate important friendships that aren't about attraction but also aren't focused on its absence.

Comments

[miss_s_b]

This gave me a lot of thoughts, especially this bit:

"Some of those friendships are definitely platonic, because they exist between people who don't have the potential to be attracted to each other. And some of my dearest friends are people who have made commitments that exclude developing any kind of romantic or sexual relationship with me, even though in theory there might be some kind of mutual attraction there. Some of my friendships have sexual aspects to them but they still feel more like friendships than romantic partner type relationships. And some are just something else again, they are physical and sensual and emotionally intense, but not in a way that's to do with either sex or the sorts of connections that are conventionally depicted as romantic."

I immediately started sorting my various freindships and relationships according to those criteria, and... yeah. I think I need to percolate.

[ambyr]

As someone who has intense, passionate, important friendships and often struggles to find words or models for them--I hear you.

[rosefox]

Queerplatonic seems like a clunky, pretentious word.

I know, I really do want a more mellifluous word than this. (And not zucchini, please.) But it's such a crucial concept.

Mostly I say "my people". My people include a gay man and a monogamously married woman; it's been wonderful to figure out how to have close bonds with them and not feel restricted by "if it's not romance, it doesn't count" when romance is simply not in the cards. They also include two people who I suppose I could date if that's what we wanted, but it's not what we want. We want to be each other's people. To be just who we are.

Maybe we're ineffable friends. :) Ineffriends? Ineffs? I like ineffs.

[naath]

Ace relationships make for good meta but atrocious smut. Um. I mean, I can certainly see a point on the 'not all friends have to be fucking to be a Great Friendship' side, I'm certainly not shagging all my friends. But still, I like reading smutty fanfic. This is not a philosophical position.

I basically love that fandom doesn't really need to make one thing Be The Truth. Because it's not really possible for one thing to be all things to all people, and lots of different people deserve to see themselves in stories.

Queerplatonic sounds like a good word to me.

[flippac]

I've realised recently that one of the biggest needs I have for queerplatonic is as a way of talking to friends that "nothing is going to happen with", what with my being an asexual who very much fucks.

Because so much of how we got there often involves being in a position where yeah, okay, I'm not focused on it not happening as opposed to not making people uncomfortable. And even straight friends who've been around fandom can see what might be queer in us ceasing to treat whether I'd be happy to have sex with them if they were with me as the central fact of the relationship we do have - or even of what degree of flirting may have occurred!

I'm not reproducing anyway. Sex is a medium for me first and foremost, and when it's the message per se it's because it was part of the message's subject. I'm kinda fed up with leaving the interpretation of that up to heteronormative culture.

On the bright side, both my parents loved the TV version of GO (I haven't watched it yet). Dad already sort of gets it? But I might actually be able to explain things to my mum one of these decades.

[mrissa]

I just will be so glad to see more canon-queer relationships on the page/screen (for so many reasons but including this one:) so that we can read the intense friendships we see as intense friendships. Because honestly that's one of the things I want most in fiction.

It never occurred to me that anyone could identify with Diana. With either half of Ilse and Emily in Montgomery's other series, certainly; I am an Emily but have known several Ilses. But thank you for explicating how one could identify with Diana. I am enlightened.

[sfred]

I am nodding lots at this (and don't have many words in my brain this morning).

[silveradept]

I am coming later than initially posted, but this was a useful read, and I am appreciative that there's a space now, with words and ideas, that can be sketched out as as various points on the three-dimensional plane of friendship, romance, and sexuality, rather than the series of endpoints already found being represented as the sole places where someone might end up. Because it's so much easier to find yourself when you have a continuum, rather than having to say "this, but not really this, because not that, and not that, and there's no word for it yet."