“I don’t know what it is, but there’s something that goes on between women,” Robin (Mary-Louise Parker) tells the court in defense of her newfound friend, Holly (Drew Barrymore), in 1995’s Boys on the Side. “You men know that because it’s the same for you. I’m not saying one sex is better than the other, I’m just saying like speaks to like. Love or whatever doesn’t always keep so you find out what does, if you’re lucky.” It’s a sentiment that not only largely defines the genre of female friendship films but also acts in defense of real-life platonic love, a concept that many women—and ultimately queer men—come to know all too well.

I can’t even count the number of times I watched Boys on the Side as a teenager. My mom had a CD copy of the soundtrack in our car growing up, but it was never a movie that she had a profound attachment to. As most baby gays and therefore old souls tend to do, I gravitated towards the possessions of my mother and grandmother as whatever went on between women always fascinated and comforted me. I sought out Boys on the Side knowing nothing more about it than that my mom liked the soundtrack, which was enough for me. And I watched it enough times that the script still acts as a warm blanket on cold nights.

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I did the same with Mystic Pizza, a production I came to love so much that my last vacation was to the Connecticut town where it takes place. Another film from my mom’s era centered on three best girlfriends, something about the moral of the story being that some friends are always there for you was a message I desperately needed. These films were, after all, the ones I mostly consumed in private, where I spent most of my early teens with few friends outside of my neighborhood ones who were about to outgrow me. Growing up queer makes it difficult enough to make friends without also being deeply introverted, dreading the effort it takes to make new ones. I needed friendship in the form of Daisy Araujo (Julia Roberts) or Jane DeLuca (Whoopi Goldberg) to show me that love and companionship could exist outside of heteronormative boundaries, even if I didn’t know it yet.

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Image Via Warner Bros. 

I didn’t want to know why female friendship films resonated with me so much growing up, because it was somehow just automatically embarrassing to be a fan of “chick flicks” at the time, even if you were a woman. The only people in my life who also liked them were sometimes my mom and mostly my aunts, which only solidified my status as the kid who was supposedly wise beyond his years. In reality, I was just urgently searching for a narrative to relate to. I felt nothing watching The Hunger Games and was hopelessly teased by both friends and family for going to see The Twilight Saga: New Moon with my own girlfriends in sixth grade. I needed something that was mine, through which I could see and understand myself on the screen. Female friendship films were it.

It took many years and my own coming-of-age process as a queer person to eventually learn that tales of female friendship stereotypically resonate with gay men and that it always made complete sense that I clung to them. During times of deeply high stress as a college student—and even any stressful situation now—I turn to the wisdom of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, whose own tale of friends sticking by each other also simulated that warm hug I was always searching for. Well, that and listening to “These Days” by Chantal Kreviazuk over and over again from the soundtrack.

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Image Via The Samuel Goldwyn Company

Despite the fact that most mainstream female friendship films revolve around heterosexual women, there’s still something to be said for the way that gay men embrace their characters and narratives as their own. “I think LGBTQ people often look to heterosexual stories for something to relate to, simply because there aren’t a lot of options out there for LGBTQ-led stories,” author and podcaster Danny Pellegrino told me. “I always think about how many gay men love The Golden Girls, and of course the storytelling is brilliant, but I think gay men also saw themselves in these older women, who were adults with vibrant sex lives and friendships that became family. A lot of gay men, particularly at the time, weren’t seeing stories that looked like their own, but Golden Girls was pretty close.” This concept of found family within stories of female friendship often resonates most with queer men, as we’ve not only also had to fight for our femininity, but we know that the heterosexual narrative of marrying and starting a family to keep you company doesn’t always come true for us.

“If we’re not conforming to the conventions of marriage and having babies in our thirties, where do you look for a meaning in life?” asked Bridget Jones’s Diary director Sharon Maguire in the book From Hollywood with Love. “Whatever choices feminism has given us all—whether you’ve got empowerment, economic independence, all of those things—the fear of loneliness is still a valid fear.” I’d never want to fully equate the plight of gay and queer men with the centuries-long battle women have fought for their own equality, but there’s still something to be said for the ways in which gay and queer men find themselves represented within the confines of these portrayals of feminine loneliness. As much as the battle for LGBTQ+ rights has brought us same-sex marriage and a plethora of other victories, there’s still that gnawing feeling of still never finding someone who loves and understands your queerness, which is an equally valid fear.

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Image Via NBC

Because media and culture actively discourage us from loving or embracing anything feminine, thus making it shockingly easy to hate anyone—including yourself—for loving “chick flicks” (have we retired this term? I hope so), it’s nothing short of radical to love a film that is typically derided as silly or frivolous, which typically also means aimed towards women. While the female friendship genre has since been mostly cast aside into the form of Netflix original films, there’s no denying that there was a large and lucrative theatrical market for these films between the late 1980s and mid-2000s. Anywhere from Steel Magnolias to Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, these films gave enormous space to telling (white) women’s stories often without having to also pander to an audience of straight white males dragged along by their wives. These films were made for women, and in some lucky cases, by women. And one advantage of their legacy currently being in the hands of the Netflix generation is the chance for more diverse tales of female friendship to hopefully emerge in the years to come.

It took me a long time to understand why, but I would soon figure out why I loved female friendship films so much: because they allow me a space to fully embrace my queerness to whatever extent feels comfortable at that moment. There are a lot of years of internalized homophobia growing up for most queer people, so to wholeheartedly rid yourself of that weight—even again and again—is the most satisfying feeling of all. The women in these films bring me comfort as they remind me that romantic love is not necessarily the love we’re all destined to find. As Anita Gillette puts it in Boys on the Side, “You get whoever you end up with. Whoever is willing to stick by you and fight for you when everyone else is gone. And it ain’t always who you expect. But you just have to make do.” It’s true, love or whatever doesn’t always keep. But you know what does? Your favorite movie.