Customer Reviews

Straight Women, Gay Men: Absolutely Fabulous Friendships

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I was thrilled when I read the synopsis and reveiws of this book. I had been searching for some insight into the complexity and depth of the relationship I share with my homosexual best friend. For the most part, I found the descriptions of relationships in this book to be very superficial. A great deal of detail is put in to the explanation of how the friendships come to be and what we like to do together. More than 15 pages are spent disecting the term "fag hag" and explaining why it is a derrogatory term. Meanwhile, relationships in which a gay man and straight woman decide to have a child together are given a short paragraph and Laura Rafaty shows that she has little understanding of or tollerance for women who are struggling with romantic feelings for their gay friends. The idea of having romantic fantasies about one's gay friend is dismissed as silly and misguided. Every once in a while, while reading this book, I would come across one sentence that I could identify with or provided me with some insight. I would get excited that they finally got to the important stuff, only to see the subject jump right back to the superficial, surface activities that make up a very small portion of such a deep friendship. One meaningful sentence every 10-15 pages? I was hoping for more. If Rafaty and Hopcke took out the fluff and really expanded upon the emotional aspects of the friendships, gathering opinions from people outside of their backyard, they might have something, because those few sentences were right on the moeny.

I am a straight white male, and I found this book to be very informative. Much of the information in this book can help a straight man get along better with straight women. The theme, at least from my point of view, is that straight women would like straight men to be more like gay men, with the exception being sexual orientation.

While reading this book, I felt like I was reading my own diary. This book is well written, but not overly done to where one can not understand it. I have yet to come across something that wasn't the whole truth. I am straight. My best friend is gay, and the majority of my friends are homosexual. They know how to treat a woman the way she should be treated - like a princess. You just can't get that from a straight man. That statement is this whole book in one sentence. It is well worth reading.

I totally agree with the reader who was disapointed. Specially regarding to the judgement about those woman who feel atracted to a gay friend or also the part who says that being in love is a bad thing! What is necessarily bad in life? What is necessarily wrong in life? If you go beyond supeficiality, you can easily get that this is a very complex situation to be analyzed like that.

it was a great book. it was funny and easy to read as well as very insightful to the relationship and friendship between straight women and gay men. it helped me understand a lot of the issues that these couples go through were not unique to me and my best friend and gave a lot of insight on how to work out some of these issues.

When I bought the first version of this book, called A Couple of Friends, back in '96 or '97, I didn't even know any gay people personally, and it came out well before the TV show about such relationships. I bought it because of my interest in learning more about gays since a singer I like is gay. I found it a very easy-to-read and insightful book, but it soon started collecting dust on my bookshelf for a few years.

About two years ago, purely by accident, I developed a close friendship with a gay man. When I discovered I still had the book this summer and re-read it, I was amazed about how closely the relationship between my friend and I gibed with what was in the book.

So, I wondered if my buddy had even heard of the book, and I thought it'd be a good idea if I gave it to him for Christmas! Well, I discovered to my disgust that they had changed the name, and therefore the focus of the book. Inside, it's more or less the same. Almost to be expected, there are new references to the sitcom Will and Grace, but that wasn't what bothered me about it. What bothered me was that the title they gave the revised version of the book focused on, I believe, the wrong aspect of these unique relationships. The old title, A Couple of Friends, focused on the friendship. In fact, the subtitle was,The Remarkable Friendship Between Straight Women and Gay Men. Friends in huge letters in the title, friends in the subtitle. And that's what my buddy and I have. We're just a couple of friends, and we do indeed have a remarkable friendship.

Compare that with the new title. Big letters: Straight Women, Gay Men. As if that's the most important thing about the relationship! Then, in little bitty letters: Absolutely Fabulous Friendships. Almost absolutely inconsequential.

I think this is wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. The whole point of the first book is that my orientation and his orientation (or for that matter, our races) don't matter between us. Even though they are the inescapable components in our lives and help shape how we relate to our worlds, our friendship comes FIRST.

So, I bought it, because I want my buddy to read what it has to say about us and other friendships like ours. I hope he likes it. I know for SURE that he'll have his own outspoken opinion about it either way! But I'm also tempted to find an older copy with the original title and picture, because I believe it was a little more to the point than this supposedly "updated" revision.

I hope that one day the publisher will realize that what we have as friends isn't to be trivialized for the sake of attention-grabbing commercialism (Straight Women! Gay Men! Oh, No!!), and will restore future revisions to the more appropriate emphasis on men and women who live in two different worlds and yet are the very best of friends.

Not only did I learn from reading this book, seeing as it contains a lot of good info in the form of actual interviews with gay men and straight women, but I had fun reading it. Its tone takes on an almost playful feel in some parts of the book, like in the section discussing the 10 most important lies gay men and straight women tell each other. I loved this book!