A recent ad for the US TV show Shahs of Sunset finds two of its male stars lazing on lounge chairs at the beach. Amid a scene of scantily clad sun worshippers, best friends Reza Farahan and Mike Shouhed gaze at different objects of desire: Farahan at muscle-bound guys, Shouhed at voluptuous women.
Their distinct lusts, which may have alienated gay and straight men from each other in the past, inspire the ultimate gesture of fraternal connection: a fist bump.
"Mike and I are so similar," Farahan said. "He has been a womaniser and I've been a player. In the ad, we're having a moment, and it's the same moment. The only difference is that I'm looking at men and he's looking at women."
Gay straight alliance
The bond strikes Irish author Jarlath Gregory as fresh for the culture and familiar to him. His latest novel, The Organised Criminal, has at its centre a brotherly friendship between a gay man and a straight man.
"That kind of easy relationship would not be credible to a broad audience 10 years ago," said Gregory, 38, who is gay. "One of the things my publisher liked about my book was that this friendship was something we haven't seen much before."
At least in pop culture we haven't. Obviously, there have always been friendships between gay men and straight men, but only recently have they become more prominently, and comfortably, represented in TV shows, movies, books and blogs.
There is often a traditionally masculine sense of familiarity at play in these portrayals, exuding a feeling particular enough to suggest its own term: bromosexual relationships.
Their emerging representation contrasts with one that has become a cliché: the connection between a straight woman and her gay male best friend.
The latest media reflection also takes a significant leap from one of its earliest iterations. From 2003 to 2007, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy presented gay men as magical beings who functioned as helpers to heterosexual men, schooling them in matters of fashion and home décor while keeping much of their own lives off-screen.
Antique crushes
By contrast, the last season of Scream Queens found hunky Nick Jonas presenting himself as a gay frat boy who bonds over golf with his straight fraternity brother and best friend, Chad.
The writers of Scream Queens exorcised that anxiety through satire in a scene that gained traction on YouTube. It portrayed Jonas' character conning his way into the bed of his straight best friend. "That kind of crush seems really antique," said Lucas Whitehead, 29, a straight man who lives in a brownstone in Fort Greene populated by a revolving mix of heterosexual and homosexual males.
Amid his milieu, he reports zero self-consciousness about having gay friends or roommates. Yet disconnects do linger, some of them concerning sex. "I'll talk to gay friends about the before, not the after," Whitehead said.It's an attitude echoed by one of his gay roommates, Ben Moss, 25, who said: "I talk with straight guys about what surrounds the sex rather than what we've actually done."
Natural wing men
In the recent documentary Strike a Pose, about Madonna's dance troupe from her "Blond Ambition" tour, a key plotline traces the arc of the lone straight dancer from homophobe to a man who becomes emotionally liberated by his many gay friends. Another series on US network Bravo, Manzo'd With Children, prominently features the relationship between the heterosexual lead brothers and their gay best friend, who was previously their roommate.
And that network's most recognisable representative, Andy Cohen, who is gay, rarely misses an opportunity to toast his close kinship with guitar hero and ultimate ladies man John Mayer.
Cohen mentions Mayer no fewer than 14 times in his best-selling book The Andy Cohen Diaries.
He also wrote an article for Entertainment Weekly last year chronicling their bromosexual exploits. In one outing, during gay pride weekend, they attended a concert by an incarnation of a band both men love, the Grateful Dead.
Cohen wrote that a friend had texted him: "if I'd celebrated gay pride in any more of a straight way, I'd have had sex with a girl at the Super Bowl." Another night, Cohen and Mayer went to a gay bar, where Cohen found that his heterosexual pal was the "ultimate wing man."
"Straight men are very good that way," said David Toussaint, whose compilation of essays, Toussaint!, contains many humorous pieces about sexual identity. "If I'm walking down the street with this young, straight guy I know, and he sees a guy look at me, he'll say, 'Go get him!'"
Masculine bonds
Vin Testa, 26, a math teacher, who is also an LGBT liaison for the district's public schools, said the changes in relationships between straight and gay men have been so rapid that he sees a significant difference just since he graduated from high school. One of his greatest obstacles in coming out, he said, was something he thinks many gay men share: "the intense fear of losing those masculine friendships we have had."
As it happened, the main impetus for Testa to come out in college was discovering that friends from his high school football team were "the ones who most wanted me to do it," he said. "They were honestly concerned for me."
Gregory, the Irish author, thinks that one connecting point for the younger generation is the proliferation of geek culture. "It's technology, superhero movies, Pokémon Go and even some indie rock," he said. "They're all part of an often male culture that young gay guys feel part of, too."
The end of hostility
"Our traditional way of thinking of relationships with gay and straight men is that they are hostile, even bullying," said Michael LaSala, 57, the author of Coming Out, Coming Home: Helping Families Adjust to a Gay or Lesbian Child. "For that reason, gay men have traditionally not felt comfortable in these relationships."
LaSala, who is gay, said he could not imagine being close friends with a straight man when he was in his 20s. In the past few years, however, he has formed a warm bond with Dr. Robert Garfield, 70, a straight man who wrote the book Breaking the Male Code: Unlocking the Power of Friendship. The two lecture together on the negative effects of homophobia on straight and gay males.
"My relationship with Michael, and with other gay men, is wonderful for me," Garfield said. "It expands me as a human being. There's a playfulness in talking about sex that I don't hear from my straight male friends."