Does it bother me not really having any gay friends? Sometimes, but not much right now. I have had close gay friends, but we've drifted apart since. When I was first coming out in CEGEP and university, I was actively seeking out other gay people. I wanted to meet people who were like me and whom I could talk about being gay. Fiona, Alicia and others were an amazing support system, but I wanted to actually talk to someone else who felt the way I did.
Unfortunately, since my comfort level with my own homosexuality was so low, I was pretty disappointed with the people I met. It wasn't their fault though. I did tend to project onto other gays my fears of "gay culture" (or at least what little I had been stereotypically exposed to) and what I was afraid of inside myself. However, in a lot of the cases, I either didn't have anything in common with the people I met or it just wasn't worth trying to penetrate their little clique, bitchy groups.
I did eventually make some gay male and females friends, but that was only really only in the last year of university and we're not really friends anymore. Today, I have plenty of acquaintances, but I don't care much about them since I would never choose to call them up to hangout. The more recent happenings will be a topic of a different post. I think for the rest of this post I'll focus on the period of me unsuccessfully trying to find other gay people with whom I could relate.
In CEGEP, when I first came-out/ was outed, I briefly checked out the school's Queer Association. The group was really small, I didn't feel I could talk to anyone (knowing that I was too afraid to even talk about my own feelings, this outcome was obvious) and the head of the association had an instant crush on me. In all bluntness, the head-guy was a one-man pride parade and that freaked me out. Up until then, I was looking for other gay people who were not the stereotyped image that I was so desperate to prove wrong and stay away from. So for a mixed bag of reasons, I stayed away from all of them.
As an unrelated note, based on that CEGEP group it's really sad to see how many gay teenagers have fucked up lives (not of their own faults). The head-guy was afraid to go home at night because of what his single dad would do to him. Two other girls there were alcohol and drug addicts. I was pretty fucked up in my own head as well.
I was sure I would meet some similar-minded people when I got involved with my university's Queer Association. There was a huge student body and lots of organized events. Well, it turns out I was wrong. There, I seemed to encounter two distinct types of people:
- incredibly awkward individuals, who had been social stunted by whatever factors in life (maybe being gay made them too scared to speak to people or maybe they just liked playing alone, in the dark, in the basement a little too much or again maybe just a bad history)
OR
- individuals who were pleasant on the surface, but who are part of their own clique, so deeply rooted in some sub-culture that it was impossible to actually comment or add anything to a conversation with them and their other clique friends. Most of the time they were also pretty hostile to outsiders. Unfortunately, most queer women that I have met fall into this category.
I ended up volunteering on and off for about a year at my university's association, but nothing really changed. Always the same, few clique people who spent way too long talking about some amazing underground, subversive lesbian comic published in Plattsburgh/Michigan Womyn's music festival or kids who were as interesting as doorknobs.
My search did briefly go toward the internet forums and Gay.com. After sorting through the dozen of older men who's profile pictures were penises or whom wanted to cam with me, I did speak to 2 or 3 guys my age. The first guy seemed nice and I met him person, but I quickly realized I wanted nothing to do with him since he used the word fucking and faggot way too often in a sentence. I got talking to a second guy, on a university's downhill ski team, who was more closeted than me and would spend half his time high, drunk and hoping all the gays would just die and he'd be "cured". He wanted to meet me in person and asked if I would dress like a woman for him. I THINK NOT.
Based on these experiences, I hope you all agree with my decision to stop looking for The Gays on the internets.
The first real connection to another gay person happened without me even trying. One day I got a Facebook message from a guy at my university. I had only just joined the site and it was cool to see someone thought I was cute. I looked at his profile and he turned out to be beautiful. We ended up sending messages back and forth for a week or two before we decided to meet up one day. I'm not going to get into detail about meeting and talking with him, but suffice to say it went really well. I've already written about part of the encounter in the post just under this one. Pretty much the first cool gay guy I meet, I end up hooking up with and dating.
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