ABSTRACT
This chapter shows workplace friendships can play a vital role in helping gay men to challenge the normalising tendency to construct them as particular kinds of gendered and sexual subjects. Workplace friendships can perform an important identity-development role for gay men. Instances of how participants have re-interpreted their lives during moments of change, such as claiming an identity as a gay father, are strikingly powerful accounts about how friends can support and shape each other's lives. The chapter shows that it is important to raise certain questions about how gay men's workplace friendships can buttress and transcend discourses that divide and reduce who they are, and limit what and who they might become. In order to realise the potential for gay men's workplace friendships to condition the possibilities for human flourishing, then those involved in these friendships must address these questions, which is one way of saying that friends must come to learn about each other.
