Between Straight and Gay is totally...

“Between Straight and Gay” has taken its place in my mind as my favorite ethnographic study. Though this was mainly in its style. The novel-esque direction that Tillman-Healy takes is really quite engaging and allows one to really get the feel of the community she is interacting with in a way that purely academic ethnography cannot. I also appreciated that she realized that it is impossible to do an objective study of this kind, it is as in all experiments: you cannot make an observation of something without disturbing it on some level or another.

However, I believe that what she thought she was studying was not at all what was really going on. Her premise of “I want to see how friendship dynamics between straight and gay men work and what is contained within them” should have been modified to “I want to see how friendship dynamics between straight and gay men work when the straight man is in the minority rather than the majority”.

Tillman-Healy’s book subject needs so many more qualifiers before it can be applied to anything else in the world that it pretty much becomes useless as anything beyond a meta guide to doing an ethnographic study. “relationships between a group of gay men and a straight couple from the midwest in Florida in the mid 1990s” doesn’t really help anyone out in general application.

Personally I think that she should have tried to study pre-existing friendships between straight and gay men where there was more of a balance between the sexualities. I have two friends who are roommates, one straight and one is gay. I have spoken to the straight one, Deck, about the book and he seems interested in how it would apply to his friendship with Ryan. I don’t think it would apply very much at all however. When I hang out with them we've pretty much got the spectrum covered, and in this interaction and others I've never known anyone who felt they were 'invading' a gay community if they just happened to be the only straight one there. Maybe they felt like a foreigner, but never in a negative way thats been expressed to me.

I’m not really sure where I’m going with this. I guess my main point is that to me Tillman-Healy’s book seems to be more about how to write a Ph.D. in ethnography and sociology than to actually examine her relationships with the men involved in a meaningful way.