Much of my apprehension for coming-out to my parents probably stems from me never having taken that plunge with other people that are very important to me. When I first told some friends at CEGEP that I was gay, I was using them more as test subjects because I didn't care for them very much at the time. Even with my three closest friends, Xav, Tim and Mike, I never came-out to any of them. They all fall into the same category "got told by someone else" or "I just never bothered bringing it up and all was fine".
For the rest of this post, I think I'll talk about how my three closest straight guy friends found out I was gay. To start off, I had always meant to tell them myself, but like with my family I cared too much about them to risk losing them. I never felt that push to say the words I am gay. Looking back, I do regret not be courageous enough, especially since it turned out so well in the end. Of course, there's nothing I can do about that now.
Let's start with Tim.
I had originally tried to keep my different groups of friends separate from one-another. My CEGEP friends, and by extension of their friends, all knew I was gay (whether I was comfortable enough or not to talk about it) mainly because I was outed to all of them. For that reason, I tried to keep them separate from my highschool friends (a.k.a. Tim, Mike and others), but as always it was a losing battle: some friends from each group met each other, they got along well and they decided to hang out some more. Most of CEGEP friends generally knew that my sexuality was a taboo subject, so they rarely mentioned it. I slowly grew relaxed about the meeting of CEGEP friends and Tim and Dave since nothing initial went bad, from my point of view.
Into the spring of my first year at university, Tim shared a lab course with a CEGEP friend of mine. One day in class, this friend was listening to some cock-goblin proclaim how he thought gay people were disgusting and should all die, yada yada yada... Being offended that some loser could say that about gay people, included several friends of hers, she decided to yell at him about his fucked up views. For some unknown reason, she decided to list off the names of her gay friends. Naturally, Tim just had to be sitting directly behind her.
Friend: No you're fucked up! Don't you dare say shit like that about my friends Chris or Suzie or Thomas...
Tim: Wait, do you mean Thomas Who Knows?
Friend: Uuuuhhhhhhh
Tim: Thomas is gay!?
My friend then picks up her bag and walks very quickly out of the room, ignoring Tim.
How do I know this? After leaving the class and about 1 hour of my friend frantically calling our mutual friends to find me, she takes me aside and explains the whole situation. Oddly enough, I took the situation pretty well. Having been outed to large groups of people, 1 person didn't seem so bad even though it was Tim. I knew the damage was already done so there was nothing more than to accept it, wait and see. My friend was just glad that I didn't decide to practice my backhand on her.
For a week, everything would be the same between Tim and I. He would call for help for a class and I would pretend I knew nothing.
During the weekend, Tim would give me a lift on our way to a friend's house. During our unusually silent drive, he would park the car before we arrived at our destination. He would then turn to look at me.
Tim: I don't know how to say this and I know this is going to make things awkward, but I don't know how else to do this. I know you're gay.
Me:.......*silence*.....Ya, you're right. This is going to make things awkward.
We would talk briefly about how he found out and how long I knew, but we were both really uncomfortable and didn't want to share much. The rest of that evening was awkward between us, but Tim still gave me a lift home. As I got out of his car, he said:
I was freaked out at first, but it's not like you're any different today than you were 1 week before I knew. We're still friends.
Over the next few months, Tim and I would talk about me being gay from time to time, when no one was around. It was definitely a learning experience. Tim didn't know how to ask the questions he wanted to understand and I didn't even know how to answer them, let alone even express my feelings about it all. Even saying the word "gay" gave me an uncomfortable feeling. It was all very slow progress, but looking back I know this was very important to me. If any of you readers recall the name Alicia, I had yet to really get to know her so I was still very uncomfortable and even scared in my own gay skin.
Tim's Best Halloween costume everI had pegged Tim as one of the most homophobic friend I had. He admitted himself that he said some pretty horrible things, but through our talks his views would radically change. He had never met a gay person, so he only had stereotypical assumptions about gays. It wouldn't be too rash to even say he briefly became more comfortable with me being gay than I was.
This post is pretty long, so I think I'll end it suddenly here and talk about Xav and Mike in my next post.
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