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PORTSIDE CULTURE

HOW BLACK DOVES SUBVERTS THE GAY BEST FRIEND STEREOTYPE  
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Ryan Gilbey
December 16, 2024
The Guardian
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_ Ben Whishaw is Keira Knightley’s gay bestie in pulpy Netflix
thriller Black Doves but he’s playing more than mere sassy sidekick
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Ben Whishaw and Keira Knightley in Black Doves. , Photograph: Ludovic
Robert/AP

 

Black Doves
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starring Keira Knightley
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cover is about to be blown and Ben Whishaw
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mentor and confidant who comes to her rescue, goes off the rails after
its impressive opening episodes. One element that remains consistent,
however, is the show’s blasé approach to a type of character who
would once have been treated as sidekick, comic relief or exotic pet:
the gay best friend (GBF). No special song-and-dance is made about the
sexuality of Whishaw’s character, Sam, whose opening scene proves
that he applies the same precision techniques to both business and
pleasure. Whether it’s a hook-up in a hotel bar or a target in his
crosshairs, Sam gets his man. “I like that he’s just this queer
guy who shoots people,” Whishaw told me
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Nor is Sam the only queer character in the series: there is also a
smattering of snarky lesbian assassins. All of which would feel like
tokenism were Sam and co not lively, vital creations with demonstrable
social and sexual lives. Sam even has gay chums himself – yes, this
GBF has GBFs of his own! – as well as an ex-boyfriend whose presence
complicates the hitman’s work/life balance. None of this will be
news to anyone familiar with the show’s creator, Joe Barton. Black
Doves is cut from the same cloth as previous work such as Giri/Haji
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Bastard Son & The Devil Himself
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which led to Barton being commended recently
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for “consistently delivering slutty queer anti-heroes … That’s
allyship!”

In writing Sam in Black Doves, Barton avoids all the pitfalls of the
old GBF, who usually existed merely to make the straight protagonist
look more interesting or compassionate by association. Or simply
straighter. Think of I Love You, Man and Mrs Doubtfire, which each
include a gay brother who fulfils the same purpose as the GBF: that
is, to indicate to audiences that the main characters aren’t queer,
whatever their behaviour (craving a bromance in the former movie,
cross-dressing in the latter) might suggest.

The GBF has typically been allowed to be open about their sexuality so
long as there aren’t any meaningful physical relationships in the
offing. The assumption was that they had little-to-no existence when
not providing succour for the protagonist, as James Coco does to
Marsha Mason in the 1981 Neil Simon comedy Only When I Laugh. “Why
don’t we get married?” asks Mason, to which Coco replies:
“Because I’m gay and you’re an alcoholic and we’d have trouble
getting our kids into a decent school.”

If GBFs did exist beyond those limits, their sexuality had to be in
some way an issue or a narrative catalyst, as in the case of The
Object of My Affection, which asks what might happen if a straight
woman (Jennifer Aniston) got it on with her gay bestie (Paul Rudd).
That film looks like the Citizen Kane of GBF movies beside The Next
Best Thing, which used the same narrative template while trying to
cash in on Rupert Everett’s work in My Best Friend’s Wedding,
where he had been in full-on, rocket-fuelled,
scene-after-scene-stealing GBF mode. The Next Best Thing paired him
off with Madonna but neglected to give his character any traits beyond
being gay.

GBFs have still been valuable in providing audiences with examples of
queerness where none might otherwise exist. Rita Tushingham and Murray
Melvin set a high bar for the straight woman/GBF relationship in the
1961 film of Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey. Where would
Clueless be without the misguided desire of Cher (Alicia Silverstone)
for her Spartacus-loving classmate Christian (Justin Walker)? And
Scott Pilgrim vs the World was bold in its portrayal of the hero’s
horny gay roommate, played by Kieran Culkin in a dry-run for his
sardonic Roman Roy in Succession. The jury is still out on the matter
of Duckie (Jon Cryer), best friend to Andie (Molly Ringwald) in Pretty
in Pink. Ringwald has outed him in recent years, insisting that
“Duckie doesn’t know he’s gay”. Cryer, though, has said: “I
respectfully disagree … I want to stand up for all the slightly
effeminate dorks that are actually heterosexual.”

Duckie’s time may have come: surely no one in our more fluid age
would ask him to nail his colours to the mast. Times change. Campbell
X’s 2012 film Stud Life offered a radically progressive portrait of
queer friendship between a Black stud, or butch lesbian, and a gay
white Jewish man. This year, Problemista
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not only the former marginalisation of queer characters but also the
very idea that queerness must in some way be synonymous with scale,
colour, extravagance. The writer-director-star Julio Torres admitted
he had made a film where the hero was someone who might ordinarily be
considered “a secondary character”. Perhaps that’s the next big
step for writers and directors to reckon with: that not all queer
figures on screen need to slay or have main character energy. As
Taylor Mac asked: “Must the tender queens be ‘fierce’ to chisel
a place for themselves in the world?”

Narrating the 1995 documentary adaptation of Vito Russo’s seminal
book The Celluloid Closet, Lily Tomlin observed that “the sissy made
everyone feel more manly or more womanly by filling the space in
between”. But when everything is fluid and up-for-grabs, there is no
“space in between”. That space is everywhere now, as proven by
Black Doves. We’re swimming in it.

* black doves
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* LGBTQ
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* NETFLIX
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