Can friendship be a sexuality? Intimacies among friends in Michael Cunningham’s novels

This article theorizes friendship as a potential sexuality by pushing queer theory’s discussions about friendships, homosociality and citizenship into new directions that trouble these categories. I argue that Michael Cunningham’s novels A Home at the End of the World and The Hours provide narratives where friendship can indeed be the main form of intimate connection that humans experience and, moreover, sex is pathologized through characters’ intimate interactions. Cunningham provides readers with an alternate form of human connection and the relationships that are at the centre of our lives, which creates scholarly space to unpack what a world would look like with friendship as a sexuality and a way to determine citizenship. Since these novels were written in the 1990s, it cannot be ignored that the height of queer theory was at this time, and yet this framing of sexuality, friendship and citizenship was missed in early scholarly conversations.