I have about 20 close friends from many corners of the globe, from Portland, Ore., to Tallinn, Estonia. And they’re all women.
Much like the stereotype, I’m a gay man who doesn’t have any close male friends. There’s some evolutionary explanation for this: Because gay men and straight women are not competing for the same mates, and this may be why they excel at dispensing dating advice when I scurry to the bathroom, mid-Tinder date, in need of a second opinion.
I love these women; they’ve made me the man I am today. However, there was a time that I was extremely self-conscious about my lack of male friends.
Back in high school, my rotating crop of female friends also made my sexuality more obvious to everyone else, before I was ready to come out on my own.
I couldn’t grasp why the people who felt most foreign to me were the ones who looked the most like me. When it came to tech decks, Quicksilver T-shirts and surfboards, I felt like an offseason tourist in my native Southern Californian town. From the gossip I’d heard around school, some of my male peers believed that associating with me would also bring their sexuality, or their masculinity, into question.
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Without a right-hand man, I felt that I was missing out on an integral social relationship. In high school, I even asked girls from my journalism class to help me find some male friends. We envisioned a “Bachelor”-inspired feature where we would select three guys from across campus from diverse social backgrounds. Only one could be crowned my designated male friend.
We interviewed these young men during homeroom and attempted to have them compete in humorous competitions that we could document for the newspaper. Unfortunately, though, our teacher scrapped the project last-minute, believing that the concept was too akin to a romantic reality show.
Even after our article was canned, my search for a male best friend — and my internalized homophobia — pressed on. For the remainder of high school, I befriended a number of guys while they would be dating my girl friends. Sometimes, they became targets of my own sexual infatuation. And if one of these relationships fizzled, the guy — and our adjoining friendship — would disappear, too.
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Eventually, I did find a male friend on my own. The first person I ever came out to was one of my first college friends. I confessed my sexuality only after he confided in me that he was gay. We came up with a game plan: We needed OKCupid profiles, fake IDs and more gay friends.
Share this articleShareHowever, once my first romantic relationship ended and his began, I became oddly jealous of my new friend. There I was, back where I started: Complaining to our mutual female friends about platonic male friendships over a bottle of Two Buck Chuck.
My first serious male friendship did teach me a valuable lesson: Most friends are volunteers in our lives; they’re not applying to fill a particular position. I had to learn to appreciate what types of relationships worked without focusing on the types of people in them.
Today, my friends are nudist photographers, fire dancers, hippies, healers and witches. They’re feminists and Amazon women.
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When my dates chuckle and ask me — “so, are all of your friends girls?” — I’ll excuse myself, head to the restroom and pull out my phone.
“I’m just not into it, he seems a bit insecure,” I’ll text to a close female friend.
“Then you need to tell him immediately, otherwise you’re wasting your time and his.”
READ MORE:
Where are all of my male friends?
Friends grow apart all the time, but we rarely talk about it
Coming out as LGBTQ: It’s not one moment, but several
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