AS I WAS watching the new Hulu adaptation of Sally Rooney’s 2017 novel, Conversations With Friends, I kept waiting for something to happen that was never going to happen. The show follows two young women in Dublin, Frances and Bobbi, who become romantically entangled with an older married couple. As the series progressed, I was waiting for Bobbi—the lesbian secondary character to the bisexual main character, Frances—to have her own storyline, one that doesn’t revolve around Frances or Frances’ troubled relationship with a man. I knew this would not happen because I’d read the book. But that didn’t keep me from hoping.
Bobbi is just the latest iteration of a burgeoning trope in film, TV, and contemporary literature: the Lesbian Best Friend. The LBF is always the sidekick of a straight (or occasionally bisexual) female protagonist. Though these characters began cropping up in the early 2000s, we have seen an explosion of them in the past 10 years. It’s a trend that, on the surface, might seem like progress. But ultimately, the trope does more harm than good, reinforcing the idea that queer storylines are only legitimate when they’re in close proximity to
