Patrick Stewart was the straight best friend we all needed

This story originally appeared on Them.

It was impossible not to feel your heart warm when watching a video of actors Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen together. Their friendship was warm, with a level of camaraderie, candor and care, that any of us deserve, and that many coveted. But they weren’t just friends, they were also a model for something that is not always seen, appreciated or explored in queer lore: the gay-straight male friendship.

Gay men are known to roam in gaggles. And, in usual depictions of gay groups, such as on Queer as Folk or Looking, a group of queer male friends might include other letters of the LGBTQ+ acronym, but is very rarely depicted as including our straight counterparts. That is, in part, understandable: being exclusively surrounded by gays can feel like letting your hair down. You can speak in gay lingo, spew cultural references ad nauseum. There’s no need to code switch. And, of course, for many gay men, their experiences of straight men are not always pleasant, nor is that discomfort exactly abating. Many LGBTQ+ people, gay men included, have felt the chill of the uptick in homophobia in recent years.

But for those of us who count straight men among their closest friends, this specific friendship can be a balm. It can cure our own fears of interaction with straight men and directly counter notions we have that there are no good straight men out there. Among my own straight male cohort, I count several college and work friends who are great friends, devoted fathers, and who counter almost every stereotype out there about the emotional capacity of The Dude.

Which brings me back to McKellen and Stewart, who died on Wednesday at age 86. Their friendship always had the looseness and conviviality of a queer friendship, but across lines of sexuality. In appearances together, such as on the Graham Norton Show, their ease with one another was touching and poignant. When they sat next to each other, they held hands, denoting an intimacy that everyone around them could practically see radiating off them.

You can also see that intimacy in one of the many kisses they’ve shared publicly. There is a long and unfortunate history of “two men kissing” as a comedic trope, often played for laughs. But their kisses were often not funny. They represented two men who had done the most human thing: let down their walls enough to let another person into their lives so fully and with so much respect, that a kiss just seemed a natural modality of affection.

The two first met in 1974, when McKellen joined the Royal Shakespeare Company, to which Stewart was already a member, per NBC News.

Despite their long tenure as acquaintances, they grew much closer when depicting Magneto and Professor X, two powerful mutants bonded by shared history and separated by ideology.

“We have to thank X-Men for the two of us really getting to know one another, because every day on an X-Men movie you spend far more time sitting in your trailer than you do on the set doing a drop of work — and those trailers are extremely luxurious. And we had adjoining ones, so we sat around and talked and reminisced,” Stewart said in 2014 while speaking alongside McKellen at New York University. “And I discovered a lot about this chap and he about me, and we found that there were many, many overlaps in our careers and many areas where we had little in common.”

The two became each other’s biggest supporters. McKellen officiated Stewart’s wedding to songwriter Sunny Ozell in 2013 and Stewart took every opportunity possible to practice full-throated LGBTQ+ allyship.

“There was never a moment where I made an intellectual choice that I would be a supporter of gay civil rights. It was always a natural and uncomplicated choice,” Stewart told The Advocate in 2015. “Then later in life, as I got to know well-known activists like Ian McKellen, I was only too happy to join campaigns, march, and support in whatever way I could because it always seemed to me to be something that much too much fuss was being made about.”

Perhaps the word that comes to mind is that their friendship, and the public acknowledgement of it — that they shared it with us — was healing. McKellen has been public about the power of coming out and living as an out gay man, but what he and Stewart offered the public in their friendship may have been just as powerful. It was a reminder that intimacy across sexualities is possible and welcome, and that we can enter into it without having to sacrifice being our whole, full selves. These friendships matter — and, when people like Stewart open their arms to LGBTQ+ people, we get to see a different, and better, version of the world.

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