So I did. It took a lot of courage. I was afraid of their disapproval and disdain, of losing their friendship. I had only a couple of close friends, and I didn't want to reduce that number any further.
Well, they made all the right noises. "I'm so glad you trusted me with this, N." "It doesn't surprise me, but it doesn't change anything." Yeah, right. The bloke who said that at once started making a point of sitting as far from me as possible when we met, with his arms crossed tightly across his chest. The other one, a born-again Christian, with all the baggage that brings with it, said all the right things, but suddenly stopped phoning me.
I haven't seen either of them for 2 years now. Despite all their political correctness, their real feelings have been revealed (as so often is the case) by their deeds.
I can console myself by saying that this is the real me, and if they don't like it, well, fuck them. Except that I miss them. I was very fond of them And now I have no close friends. The guy who pushed me to come out has died. And the others have dumped me. We'd been friends for 15 years.
A friend is, as it were, a second self. [Marcus Tullius Cicero.] Yes, and their betrayal hurts.
Then, about a year ago, I got to talking with a bloke on the train. He was a nice man, with a kind face, and he seemed intelligent and funny. We started down the road of friendship. So when he asked me what I was doing on my laptop, I thought it would be OK. I told him. I was working on Wilde Oats. Oh, he said, and immediately looked it up on his smartphone. Next day he was still friendly, a week later he was sitting on a different seat and wouldn't meet my eyes and now he travels in another carriage altogether (the trains are in units of 2 or 3 coaches, and you can only move around within one unit.)
Ah well. The world is what it is, and I don't have the strength to try to force change on it. But I won't be telling anyone else soon that I write romantic m2m stories or that I edit a gay-shaded e-zine. Nor will I be trusting straight blokes again.
2 comments:
Send a copy of this blog to your former friends if you know their email. They should know you can see through their smarmy hypocrisy. They put a label on a human being and then see only the label. They have made the adjective the noun, so to speak, as if you were not a gay Australian but an Australian gay. (I won't go into homosexual human vs human homosexual.)
The big problem I have with coming out is that the person who does it sticks a label him/herself in a way that turns an attribute into a definition. While I don't for a second believe that people choose their sexuality, I do believe that it does not define them; they define it. Homosexuality is as heterogeneous as heterosexuality. (Hell, a person can be both homosexual and Republican.) All aspects of our personality affect and influence each other, no one trait defines us. There was a lot more to Helen Keller than her deafness and blindness.
I don't come out to everyone. I'm not a public figure and my sexual preferences are of no more concern to anyone than my preferences in food or music. To those to whom I do come out, I don't say "I'm gay" or "I'm bi", I say "I'm in a relationship with a man."
Gay is not one color of the human rainbow, it is itself a rainbow, and your gayness, N., is one shade of one color of that rainbow. Your gayness is a sexual attraction to men, and if you hadn't fallen in love with a woman, you would probably be in a relationship with a man, unless you fell in love with another woman. That is not what gay means to the friends who rejected you, so the information the got from you was false because of how they processed it.
My take on coming out? There is a world... no, a cosmos of difference between being the the closet and being in the spotlight, and where you are is not a question of either/or. Not telling the world is not "living a lie". Hiding a truth from someone who does not have the right to know that truth is not lying. (Yeah, I know I'm not a Kantian. I also know I've started rambling. Maybe I should have written you all this off blog.)
You're full of wise advice (as usual). But alas, as regards these blokes, it's too late for me to follow it.
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