Male Friendship Isn't Gay (It Never Was)

My friend C.S. Lewis once said, Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art. It has no survival value. Rather, it is one of those things which gives value to survival. Do you remember when we had Frodo and Sam, Maverick and Goose, Rick and Sam, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Tolkien and Lewis, Frog and Toad, and then they just disappeared? And not just from the big screen. Back in 1990, a tiny minority of men, just 3%, said they had no close friends.

By 2022, that number had jumped to 15%, five times more friendless men just 30 years later. Back in the 90s, more than half of men had at least six close friends they could count on. Now, that number's been cut in half. And even among men who'd Do you have friends? Only 21% say they get emotional support from them, and only 30% say they share their personal problems with their friends. And when things go south, only 22% of men call a friend first.

And listen, this isn't because men are too manly for feelings and friendship. In fact, in 2016, a YouGov poll found that while 65% of men over 65 Described themselves as completely masculine, only 28% of men aged 30 to 44 say the same. So the idea that toxic masculinity is what's keeping men from opening up doesn't hold water. The truth is more unsettling. Even as men have become more emotionally open and quote-unquote sensitive, their friendships have withered. No amount of think pieces about evolving male friendship will solve that crisis.

Why? Well, as we say in the biz, it's complicated. There are so very many factors. Lack of third spaces, death of all-male clubs, smartphones and social media leading to isolation and loneliness in every facet of society. But one reason sticks out as the root cause.

But before I tell you what it is, here's one friend who has your back. Taylor Fragon Capital Management. Do you ever feel like your money is working against your values instead of for them? That's no way to build a future for your children and grandchildren. At Taylor Fragon Capital Management, they believe investing shouldn't come at the expense of your family's principles.

Guided by natural law and Judeo-Christian values, they invest in companies that reflect Those same timeless truths, businesses with real vision, integrity, and long-term potential. With a disciplined process rooted in decades of experience, including a legacy going back to the 1960s alongside T. Rowe Price, Taylor Fragon specializes in owning high-growth, publicly traded companies for the long haul. They're not just another financial firm, they're a firm with faithful convictions to God and to you. And a track record of experience to prove it.

Whether you're a beginning investor, a hardworking family blessed with a high net worth, or an organization in need of a full suite of services, including tax, legal, and philanthropic planning, Taylor Forgon is fully capable of helping you through every meaningful financial decision you make. If you're ready to align your investments with your values, start the conversation today. Your children and grandchildren will thank you for it. Visit Taylor Forgon in the link below for a no-obligation consultation, and now back to some friends.

Male friendship has been sexualized. Anthony Esselin puts it plainly. He says male friendship is being choked out by a culture that sees everything through the lens of sex. But to understand how we got here, we have to go back to a philosophical shift, one that changed how society talks about sexuality. Identity and friendship. Before the late 20th century, most societies thought of homosexuality not so much as an identity, but as an action. It was a behavior, specifically the acts of sodomy and masturbation.

Sometimes tolerated, sometimes condemned, but it didn't always necessarily define a person. A man might have engaged in homosexual acts, but he wasn't necessarily considered a gay person. It was something he did, not always something he was. And that began to shift dramatically with thinkers like Michel Foucault. Foucault argued that in modern Western culture, sexuality has become a core part of human identity.

Being gay was no longer just a pattern of behavior. It was a way of being, a social category, a label that defined a person's very self, their true self, if you will. Now, being gay conflates same-sex attraction with homosexual acts by way of identity.

Once that shift took hold, everything changed. As the sexual revolution seeped down into mainstream culture and Main Street, especially in the 90s and the 2010s, that new identity wasn't just normalized, it was celebrated. We weren't simply told to tolerate people with same-sex attraction. We were now required to affirm to a This created a strange paradox. At the same time that our culture was celebrating pride, it was gutting close, non-sexual relationships between men. Here's how that works. If homosexuality is no longer just a behavior, but an identity, then any emotionally intense or expressive male friendship can be interpreted as gay.

And if it can be interpreted as gay, well, then we're going to do it, if it suits our agenda. If Legolas loves Gimli, if Jonathan embraces David, if John Henry Newman chooses to be buried next to Ambrose St. John, well, the new logic says... That must mean that they were sexually attracted and or involved. And once queer theory took hold in the academy, aspiring intellectuals started going back through history and literature with a highlighter and a smirk, insisting that what looked like deep friendship was really repressed desire, or could have been.

And since the men in question were dead or fictional, no one was there to say them nay. Suddenly, our cultural imagination became infected. Where previous generations saw self-sacrifice, loyalty, and chaste affection, now we see homoerotic subtext. In fact, unlike in earlier times when everyone just assumed that upstanding men weren't shagging each other, now the burden of proving you're not gay lies on the men in the relationship.

As one young Princeton student recently put it, all male gatherings have now been labeled with the crass and vulgar pejorative sausage fest. Surely, the only legitimate groups for men, the only manly groups, include women. Warm embraces between close friends have become bro grabs. And both parties are sure not to remain too close too long in said bro grab, their eyes darting about to make sure no one is... watching and judging, and don't even think about bringing the word love to the table.

Think of how often people today joke about Frodo and Sam in The Lord of the Rings, or how Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson's partnership is framed through a lens of modern sexuality, or how any passionate male bond is immediately under suspicion. The result? Well, affection between men, whether a hug, an arm around the shoulder, or even a handwritten letter, now carries a sexual question mark. And that suspicion has chilled friendships before they even begin. Instead of modeling themselves after the Inklings or the Apostles, boys are left with sitcom bromances or sarcastic meme culture.

They're taught to mask their affection in irony, lest they be labeled. This isn't liberation. It is a narrowing of human possibility. By turning sexual identity into a master key, we have locked the doors to male friendship. And lost something very precious along the way.

Male friendship is being choked out by a culture that sees everything through the lens of sex. What's worse, this erosion doesn't just kill fun weekends and deep conversations, it stunts civilization itself. Male friendship has historically been the seedbed of courage, creativity, and genius.

Think of the Inklings, Tolkien and Lewis, and their crew of literary giants who shaped the Christian imagination of a century. Think of Gershwin and Max Rosen, Henry Ford and Thomas Edison, David and Jonathan, Ignatius and Francis Xavier. None of these were sexual relationships. They were simply and profoundly male friendships that channeled incredible male energy into scientific, artistic, and spiritual breakthroughs. Friendship like that can only come to be and survive apart from identity politics. It requires clarity. And a level of security where you're not worried about identities or intersectionalities or victim status, where two or three or five or six guys can sit back, look at a problem, and revel in the question, do you see the answer too?

That kind of real friendship requires a shared understanding of the meaning of gestures, actions, and affection. C.S. Lewis, to go back to my friend, has a beautiful chapter on friendship in his Four Loves. He writes, That is the kingliness of friendship. We meet like sovereign princes of independent states abroad on neutral ground, freed from our contexts. More controversially, though, we also need to put sexual activity, all sexual activity, back where it belongs, in the lifelong committed marriage of one man and one woman.

We need to put the stigma back on adultery and fornication, and squarely back on buggery, sodomy, and mutual masturbation. This stigma, applied with compassion to everyone, including those who experience the personal challenge of same-sex attraction, makes room for powerful and fulfilling male friendships. Cicero tells us that friendship can exist only between good men. So, guys, give boys permission to be friends by modeling robust male friendships yourselves, and giving them all male spaces with a mission, clubs. Sports, church, service, places like Knights of Columbus councils, men's ministries, altar server clubs, boys-only spaces, and yes, even humorous, unexpected ones like my favorite, the men's shed movement, whose motto says it all to me, men don't talk face-to-face, we talk shoulder-to-shoulder.

I love that. And let's not forget the simple joy of just doing things together, watching the game, fixing a truck. Going for a hike? Building a treehouse with your boys? Simply messing about? Quantity time, not just quality time. Friendship. True, loyal, risk-taking, soul-stirring friendship gave us great saints, heroes, inventors, artists, and thinkers. We can't let it die on our watch. So, to the young men listening, you don't have to prove anything. Go make a friend, a real one. Share your life. Don't overthink every gesture. You're not weird. You're not broken. You're human. And you were made for friendship.