Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys: It's more than just shopping and cocktails

Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys: True Tales of Love, Lust, and Friendship Between Straight Women and Gay Men is a new book of collected of original essays on relationships between Wills and Graces (or, to be more current, Marcs and Amandas) that hopes to find a more nuanced view of these friendships. The book looks to add some depth to the subject -- typically in our entertainment, gay men are rarely more than a source of witty banter or a shoulder to cry, while straight women exist to be made stronger for having befriended a gay man.

These relationships have been seen more and more frequently in the past few decades. Will & Grace are probably the most identifiable pair, but the kinship between Sex and the City's Carrie and Stamford (or Charlotte and Anthony) has been equally influential in how we view these friendships. Meanwhile, Armistead Maupin set the tone by giving us the first straight woman/gay man friendship to reach a mainstream audience in Tales of the City. Movies like The Object of My Affection and The Next Best Thing have looked to complicate their central relationships by adding unrequited love and even accidental pregnancy to the mix.

Reading about this book in the San Francisco Chronicle and the comments made by its editors and contributors, I'm left with the impression that Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys is the first book of its kind, the first to explore straight female/gay male relationships in such depth... and I'm having a hard time finding an example that proves them wrong. Is there a really great discussion of straight woman/gay man relationships that goes beyond scintillating brunch conversations and clothes shopping that's gone unrecognized?