"Friendship networks are the avenues through which gay social worlds are constructed, the sites upon which gay men’s identities and communities are formed and where the quotidian dimensions of our lives are carried out. It is through the grounded relationships with friends that the personal and the political, the micro and the macro, the individual and the collective, all come together. Friendship may be the central organizing element of gay men’s lives - the mechanism through which gay masculinities, gay identities, gay cultures, and gay neighborhoods get created, transformed, maintained, and reproduced."