ABSTRACT
The interview accounts highlight the influence exerted on gay men's workplace friendships from the structural dimensions of organisational environments, jobs and work activities. Adopting a discursive approach helps us to keep an eye on the horizon of possibilities for viewing gay men's workplace friendships as localised sites of creative resistance, in that they might facilitate the generation of identities, relationships and actions that violate heteronormative assumptions. Indeed, study findings indicate that gay men's workplace friendships can encourage men to question and explore the limits of heteronormative discourses of gender and sexuality. The intellectual weight of feminist research on friendship cannot be underestimated, not least because it reminds us that, no matter how gay men's workplace friendships might incite others to reshape gender and sexual relations, they do not hold universal appeal in that endeavour. The sociology of friendship has been particularly robust at theorising friendship as a relationship that is marked by contextual contingency.
