Do Not be Afraid to Walk a Crooked Path: A Story of Queer Friendship
When I first spotted Nathaniel, he was reading. It was one of those golden fall days where the warmth of the sun was matched with a damp chill in the air. He was sitting outside a bar he invited me to. I recognized Nathaniel at once from his scruffy beard and smile, which matched the one that flashed at me from his profile photo.
This was our first date. As often happens on first dates, on the good ones anyway, we talked about relationships, our fears, recent pain, and other things that mattered to us. As I sipped my drink, the rapidly advancing evening took on a softness accentuated by the gentle pastels of the sunset and the warm glow of a nearby street light, only just then flickering on.
As we finished our drinks, my date explained he had to be going but that he’d like to walk me to my car. As we made our way, footsteps falling synchronously, I wished I hadn’t scored a parking spot so near by. I remember he asked if he could kiss me. The daring simplicity of his request, the chill in the air, the amber light of the moon, now rising — how could I resist?
It would make for a neat, tidy story if I could tell you that our first date, by all accounts a good one, lead to a second and a third, to meeting his friends and to the gradual interweaving of the threads of our lives, to the fabrication of a meaningful and lasting romantic bond. but that’s not what happened.
Conventional wisdom says that friendship is impossible between two people who are sexually attracted to each other. The potential for jealousy and hurt feelings is just too great. This wisdom is most typically applied to friendships between straight men and women, but applies just as readily to friendships between gay men and women.
That sexual and romantic attraction are antithetical to friendship, that they are friendship killers, is unfortunately born out in lived experience. Who hasn’t had a valued friendship poisoned by unrequited, unwanted, misplaced, or ill advised feelings of romantic and physical attraction?
I have. I’ve been on both sides and it’s always a spectacular way for a friendship to go down. On one side I have felt rejected, unloveable, stupid. On the other betrayed, bewildered, cruel, guilty.
A conventional, linear understanding of friendship simply doesn’t have room for the complications and nuance of sex. In fact, such an understanding exaggerates these complications and enforces a narrative that says, “when one friend reveals their unrequited feelings for the other, that friendship is already over. It has already failed”.
It is certainly easier and less complicated to simply be friends with people you don’t have the potential to be attracted to. This typically means that straight men are primarily friends only with other straight men and that straight women are primarily only friends with other straight women.
This amounts to a de facto segregation of friendship by sexuality and gender. This prevents people from developing diverse relationships. It also prevents knowledge from being spread, from experiences being shared. Yo, straight dudes, the best person to talk to about your dating issues might be a BGF (Best Girlfriend Forever) not your best bro.
These kinds of conventional friendships are also characterized by a strict regulation of affection and touch. Cuddling, hugging, casual physical intimacy of all kinds have been defined as romantic and largely off limits, particularly between men.
Queer friendships exist outside of these norms. They might include greater degrees of physical intimacy than is typical in a conventional friendship. They are certainly adaptable and dynamic. Queer friendships change, are allowed to change. As a result they are also often extremely non-linear.
There is no script to follow for queer friendships. Most people don’t have any role models for it, don’t know what it looks like, or don’t know how to reconcile it with the normative definition of what a friendship means.
What follows is a story of me navigating queer friendships for the first time. It is a story about acceptance and communication and of finding a community. It is also a story that is deeply rooted in my experience as a queer man who loves men. That being said, the queer relationships I am describing are not only for gay men. Experimenting, loving fearlessly and living authentically is for everyone.
I did meet Nathaniel’s friends only days later, at a barbecue his roommates were throwing. When I arrived, a bottle of wine and a cherry pie in hand, I had a mild panic attack. I couldn’t bring myself to get out of the car and the thought of knocking on the door of the unfamiliar house terrified me.
A mischievous monkey voice in my head told me I wasn’t wanted, that I was intruding. Maybe this was the wrong house it said, or perhaps you misremembered the day or the time. How stupid you’d look showing up unexpected. I double checked the date and the time and the address. I double checked the number on the house. I triple checked everything. I gulped down my panic, walked up to the front door and rang the bell.
I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that this party, brought about from a random encounter with someone I met only once for a drink, was a turning point in my life. The moment the door opened, I was surrounded by gay men. There were single men, groups of friends, new lovers, and committed, established couples. That night I met many future friends, role models, conspirators and even a roommate or two. What I remember most clearly was the affection and the tenderness, the playfulness, the glowing warmth and camaraderie these men showed for each other.
These were men that touched each other, hugged each other, shared what they were feeling and thinking, gave each other encouragement and support. Theses are, of course, the kinds of things that friends, and more generally people who care for one another, do. However, I can’t think of any other time or place in my life, prior to this moment, when I can remember men demonstrating this kind of unguarded show of feeling for one another.
Growing up, my two older brother’s rarely touched me. Indeed, the death of platonic male touch in American society is well documented (for more about the taboo of male touch, read this and this and this). I was socialized to consider any physical contact between myself and my male peers as potentially violating, gay, faggy. The male relationships I saw growing up were distant, cold, competitive, and often violent.
I fell in love that night. A little bit with Nathaniel, yes, but my intentions were focused on something else. Seeing all those men together, seeing how they cared for each other, made me realize how starved I was for male companionship. I wanted to wrap myself up in that community. I wanted the brotherhood, the friendship, the loving support that these men shared. Prior to this point, I had never had a close friendship with any man. Sure, I had been intimate with men, I had fucked, shared secrets, weaknesses, hopes, aspirations, even shared love with men; but outside the passing platonic relations that grow out of necessity and proximity, I had never had a close male friend. Having never made a male friend before, I realized I didn’t know how.
When I first started dating men I was twenty three years old. At the time, and for some time after, I grappled with what my newly adopted identity meant. Who am I now that I love men, I wondered. I am still searching for an answer, but I’ve since rephrased the question. I now ask myself, what kinds of relationships are possible for me now as a gay man? Do the familiar modes — friend, brother, lover — even still apply? Or even more fundamentally, how do I know a friend when I meet him and how do I distinguish him from a lover?
Soon after the barbecue, Nathaniel told me that he was getting back together with his ex-boyfriend. Our first date had apparently coincided with a brief break they were taking; in other words, there wasn’t going to be another date. Whatever connection I felt with Nathaniel, whatever feelings I still had for him, would have to be channeled in another direction.
I wish I could say that what happened next was that my initial feelings for Nathaniel developed past attraction and lust and grew into a close friendship, but that isn’t the case either. Even though intellectually and emotionally I knew what I wanted to find friendship and community, I still felt the sting of disappointment. More viscerally, I perceived the loss of a potential romance, a future the details of which my imagination had already begun to supply. Fantasy and memory make for a volatile brew.
There would be no more golden fall evenings or nights spent reading together, if that’s even what Nathaniel did with his evenings, and no more kisses. Before anything else, I first had to mourn the loss of the phantasmagorical relationship my mind had produced spontaneously, with little conscious effort on my part.
Mourning the loss of something that never existed is a curious thing. The mind gives rise to If-Onlys and What-Ifs, apparitions capable of haunting you just the same as any ghost. And on top of everything, there is the awareness of how absurd it feels to expend emotional energy over illusory heartbreak.
Nathaniel and I didn’t become fast friends. But I found a niche for myself in his community. I say “his” because that’s how I thought about it for so long, but truthfully it’s my community now, too. More than companionship, friendship with other gay men gave me role models, confidants, peers, mentors. queer friendship gave me a mirror that reflected and affirmed my experiences and proved to me that I wasn’t some kind of freak, that I wasn’t alone.
The crisp fall evening I first met Nathaniel froze into one of the worst winters I’d ever experienced which then melted into a glorious, temperate summer. Like the snow, my relationship with Nathaniel had receded somewhat. We were friendly, genuinely so; occasionally we spent time together — always in groups and usually by accident — but we weren’t particularly close.
It was around this time that I was first introduced to Vincent. Like me, he preferred to stay at the peripheries. Also like me, Vincent started dating men recently — in the last few years, had only just begun exploring life inside a queer community and was still questioning what it meant to live life as a gay man.
I saw a lot of myself in Vincent. This lay a foundation for a growing tenderness between us. About a month after we first met, Vincent invited me to go to a concert. I wasn’t sure if it was a date or not. Neither of us called it that. I remember standing huddled together in the crowded room, awash in the melancholy blue light that poured off stage, listening to the soulful timber of a male voice singing of heartbreak. I wanted badly to kiss him.
Almost from the very beginning, I think, Vincent and I were confused. We didn’t know if we were friends, brothers or lovers. We had a habit of spending time together in marathons. We’d make plans to hang out on Friday night and end up eating cheap asian take out and binge watching T.V. until Sunday afternoon.
During these marathon weekends we’d strip to our underwear and cuddle on his couch, watching youtube videos, listening to music and sharing stories for hours. In these early days of our relationship, we were still making out. This was something I worried about. I wasn’t sure what kissing meant in the context of our relationship or where it was going. I didn’t want to risk our friendship by escalating our physical relationship, I wasn’t sure I wanted a physical relationship. I liked what we had, whatever it was, and I was afraid to lose it. I think we both were.
Vincent and I shared friends and interests in common. We worked out together and were often invited to the same birthday and holiday parties. If someone invited me to happy hour drinks, there was a good chance they’d invited Vincent, too.
We slept together often, spooning for warmth, buried under piles of blankets in his poorly insulated room which held no heat, even in the summer. Once, after a particularly steamy makeout session, very early in our relationship, we had sex. We never talked about it and it never happened again. Soon, the kissing stopped too, as did the marathon hang out sessions and the sleep overs. Despite all the intimacy we shared that summer, there were walls between us we didn’t have the courage to bring down, or even fully acknowledge.
It wasn’t until summer ended that Vincent and I ever talked about our relationship. We had been dancing around the topic for weeks, alluding to it in the abstract, telling anecdotes that we both knew reflected ourselves. We were testing the waters, feeling each other out.
A weeknight ritual of Vincent and I’s is to cook and eat dinner together. On one of these nights, Vincent told me about a friend he had been ambiguously dating for a few weeks before things settled into a more or less platonic friendship. “That happened to us”, I heard myself say before I had time to think about it. I stole a furtive glance at Vincent’s shining, surprised eyes and quickly returned my attention back to the sauce I was making.
This was the opening line of the first conversation Vincent and I ever had about what we meant to each other. It was the first time that we acknowledged the spark between us and the friendship that had grown in the light of its steady glow. It was at this moment that I realized what good friends we had become and how important his friendship was to me. This conversation brought us closer together.
Surprisingly, in open contradiction to the recent affirmations of our platonic friendship, we also started making out again. The sleep overs started back up, too. It felt good to spend time with Vincent. We make each other laugh, and in a true test of intimacy, he knew how to get under my skin. There is a spot somewhere between shock and hilarity that makes me want to laugh and scream at the same time. Vincent knew exactly where that spot was. He could send me a picture or a video that could make my eyes cross and leave me doubled over in disbelieving fits of laughter.
I looked back on my relationship with Vincent and wondered if I’d made a mistake, if I’d let fear get in the way of what had been a blossoming romance. I resolved to finally ask what was going on between us. We couldn’t carry on like this, holding each other, kissing, cooking for one another, and keep calling what he had friendship. There was something more there, just under the surface, and I wanted to unearth it.
I approached Vincent about a romantic relationship twice.The first time, he confirmed that he had feelings for me, deep feelings of friendship and others of attraction and desire. But ultimately, he valued our friendship over anything and didn’t want to jeopardize it by exploring a romantic partnership. He just didn’t think it was a good idea.
Vincent’s rejection of my advances were filled with his care for me. Knowing how much I meant to him made me grateful for his friendship and made my unrequited feelings for him easier to bear. But I still had a nagging crush on him. Shortly afterwards, while listening to him vent about the trouble he was having dating I asked him: is a romantic relationship between us really such a bad idea? His response? Maybe not, but he wanted friendship, not romance.
Vincent’s friendship was too good to not accept for what it was. I can’t say that letting go of the fantasy future I had imagined with Vincent was entirely without pain, or that my feelings for him will ever truly change, but what he had to offer me was enough. His friendship in the present meant everything to me, much more than any imagined future.
Many of the most important relationships in my life follow a crooked, bent trajectory; they’ve been queer. Queer relationships can only be as straight as the people in them, and we are all a little bit queer.
Traversing the trail of these relationships changed my perspective, it changed the way I thought about my identity as a queer man. I realized I’d been looking at myself and I should have been looking at my relationships, towards the community, towards others. Coming out didn’t just mean that I entered a new sexual awakening, there was a cultural and a mental awakening too. Dating men meant living a counterculture lifestyle. Adopting a queer identity meant getting to know different ways of living, of expressing myself, of who I could be individually and with others.
It meant that I began relating to men in new ways. Despite the hypersexualized representation of gay men in the media, most of those relationships had nothing to do with sex. This sounds obvious. It’s an easy thing to know intellectually, but when you’ve grown up without ever knowing a gay couple, or for that matter, any gay person — it’s a hard thing to locate in reality. It’s one thing to know it, another thing entirely to live it.
Despite all of the advances that have been made in the last several decades towards the equal and fair treatment of LGBTQ people, we still live in a homophobic society. All of us, even queer people, carry a part of this homophobia inside of us. For myself, internalized homophobia manifested, at least in part, as a discomfort with the trajectory of my relationships with other gay men. Why did all of my closest friendships with gay men seem to get complicated with feelings of romantic and sexual desire? Was it me? Was the fact that I had trouble maintaining a tidy separation of my platonic and romantic feelings a problem?
This internalized homophobia is supported by social narratives about friendship that normalize homophobic attitudes towards gentle, platonic touch, queer sexualities and queer relationships. These narratives scream, at top volume, that affectionate touch between men is wrong, that friendship in the context of physical attraction is impossible.
I passionately disagree with this narrative, with normative assumptions about friendship in general. The strict separation of physical and emotional expressions of affection between friends is crippling us.
Queer people need queer friendship. Everyone deserves to have a friendship with someone who shares their identity and their experience. Everyone deserves to feel connected to someone who understands them and can see the world from their perspective. This is not a privilege for straight men and women alone. Likewise, straight people deserve the freedom to experiment. Straight people should be able to make mistakes, to turn flirtations into hookups into friends and back again. They deserve the opportunity to build relationships with people they otherwise would have abandoned because they didn’t fit the mold of normative friendship.
It’s okay if it’s messy. It’s okay if it’s not linear. It’s okay if it feels hard or confusing. Don’t give up on people because they are offering you a friendship that is a little out of the ordinary, a little extra. Lean in. Queer friendship is for everyone.
