Was That “Special Friend” in Jr High Actually My Boyfriend?
Listening to an old song but hearing it in a new way since my bisexual awakening led to a series of realizations about a confusing and painful relationship.
Through therapy, reflection, and my writing, I have been working out some early trauma which resulted in my full-scale bisexual repression by the time I was 16 years old.
One thing I keep revisiting is a complicated friendship from junior high. I spent every other weekend over at this friend’s house when my mother worked nights on the weekends as our only source of income.
There were times when he was not a great friend, when he would manipulate me into doing things that I didn’t want to do. But he and I were both considered outsiders to our peers so all we had was each other. For years we did everything together even when I wasn’t staying over at his house.
Part of that was when our bodies were changing we explored it with each other during those sleepovers. This was something he initiated in one of his manipulative ways but after the first instance I was a willing participant. There was a point when my mom got a different job and did not need to work weekend nights but I continued to frequently sleep over at his house for fun. Everything about our nighttime actions was awkwardly hidden and never talked about. But other than that these activities were consensual and enjoyable.
Then, one day in my last year of junior high, before we parted ways while we were walking home he hit me over the back of the head with his backpack and told me he didn’t want me coming over anymore, didn’t want to see me ever again.
I was crushed. This was my only friend for the past few years. By the time I got home an even worse feeling hit me. I began to panic as I feared what he could say about me and what we had done together. I was already bullied as an outsider but I knew it could get so much worse if any of our private activities were turned against me.
During those last few months of junior high, I would see him talking to our classmates and gesturing to me. Then they would all laugh and some random joke about me would circulate the class. Some were the smallest things that wouldn’t have bothered me if it didn’t come from him but because it did come from him, it was hurtful. Other times there was more personal info about how poor I was which already was a cause of shame.
Still I knew that something more embarrassing could be told if I retaliated. So I took it. I ended my time in junior high as the butt of all the inside class jokes. He went from being my one and only friend to being my worst tormentor. He betrayed me and held me hostage with his sensitive, personal knowledge of me.
Fortunately, my mother and I moved to a new town for high school which allowed me to reset everything. Unfortunately, part of that reset was repressing a large part of who I was, at least around anyone within the same school and town I lived in.
Now, as I have been working through my repression I frequently come back to the memory of that walk home before we parted ways, before he told me he never wanted to see me again. I had always been certain this was everything that happened and there was nothing that I had done to provoke him. It felt as though he had flipped a switch and decided to hate me. It was still just as confusing to me as it was the day it happened.
The other day while mowing the grass I was thinking about casual ways of including (more like not excluding) my bisexuality in conversations with my teens because as I am monogamously married to a cis-woman (their mother), it’s not easy, but I know how helpful it would have been for me at that age to have had conversations like that casually normalized.
“When You Were Young” began streaming through my earbuds and with my newly awakened bisexual awareness I heard it differently than I ever had in the countless times I’ve listened to it since I bought the CD when it was released in 2004.
While this song was playing I found myself practicing a conversation to my kids (or really anyone if I had the confidence), “Yeah, I had a boyfriend in junior high.” Aha. A sudden realization hit me. Oh wow. Wait a minute… I had a boyfriend in junior high! This long ago relationship instantly transformed from a messed up friendship to us being unrealized and closeted boyfriends. It definitely was not a healthy relationship but it’s clear to me now that this is what it was.
Reeling from this new realization, I reexamined our relationship and asked myself what it meant if we were boyfriends without the word spoken. Then I thought of how our relationship ended and about what it meant if he thought we were boyfriends. What would have been taken differently as a boyfriend instead of just a friend? What could I have done to make him….another aha moment.
Not long before the day he hit me with his backpack and said he didn’t want to see me ever again, I went to a junior high dance. I met a girl and we danced to all the slow songs together. The next week I passed a note to “ask her out,” which didn’t actually mean anything at this stage other than we could call each other boyfriend and girlfriend. She went to the private school across town so we literally spent zero time together after that dance. It’s not like my time was taken away from my friend but if he thought of us as boyfriends in his eyes it is possible he thought I had betrayed him…maybe even cheated on him.
Suddenly, his reaction made sense. Not that I believe it was OK for him to hit me but I now see how my actions were the trigger for his hatred which resulted in the torment I experienced until we moved. I know that I am not responsible for his mistreatment of me but in a strange way, I found a comforting closure in finally understanding this confusing memory of my childhood.
The more I am able to understand about myself and my past, the more free and unburdened I feel and the easier it is to find forgiveness for others and, more importantly, for myself.
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