ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the implications for gay men's workplace friendships by drawing extensively on organisational research. It conveys how organisations can be understood as heteronormative, raising questions about how, why and with whom gay men might develop and maintain workplace friendships in these organisational settings. While the literature on sexual minority employees is short on insight into the role and place of friendship in lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and transpeople (LGBT) people's work lives, the chapter delves into a parallel literature on workplace friendships. While the subject of workplace friendship now commands an engaging literature, it too contains next to nothing on the workplace friendships of LGBT employees. Moreover, research on workplace friendships tends to be framed by a broad set of rationalist and managerialist discourses, privileging organisational interests and understandings of the role placed by friendship in the workplace.
