The Unintended
After my entry of yesterday, I received an email that made me pause.
While it is always great to get a letter from someone about something that I have written, part of this email really got me thinking. The writer stated to me that he had only recently come out and that he was “surprised by how fickle and tenuous gay friendships can be. […] I am concerned that the immediate gay “family” I find will, unfortunately, also become immediate “dropped” .
And I think that I did a disservice to this man yesterday. Gay friendships are not any less fickle or tenuous than others and no matter who you are or what you are, you can lose friends. Over the past ten years, I have lived in five different cities on three separate continents. That mobility, while fun, is the leading cause of my difficulty in maintaining certain friendships. It is not the gay element.
I have typically found my gay friends to be very un-fickle. Gay people all share many common bonds through the process of coming out and the psychology that goes with that exposure as well as the difficulties in society at large. This is not to say that all gay people should or even could get along. Its not that simple. But we have a starting point.
But like any other relationship, the people in that group inevitably change. What happens when one changes and the other doesn’t? A “break-up” occurs. Also inevitable.
But my tale yesterday was not a condemnation of gay friendships at all. I was merely looking into how I treat people and how that seems to be at odds sometimes with how I treat others. What followed (since I tend to use a stream of consciousness form of writing) turned into a revelation of how hurt I was by something that happened to me.
My bad experience in no way should be construed as some sort of representative global-gay event.
While it is always great to get a letter from someone about something that I have written, part of this email really got me thinking. The writer stated to me that he had only recently come out and that he was “surprised by how fickle and tenuous gay friendships can be. […] I am concerned that the immediate gay “family” I find will, unfortunately, also become immediate “dropped” .
And I think that I did a disservice to this man yesterday. Gay friendships are not any less fickle or tenuous than others and no matter who you are or what you are, you can lose friends. Over the past ten years, I have lived in five different cities on three separate continents. That mobility, while fun, is the leading cause of my difficulty in maintaining certain friendships. It is not the gay element.
I have typically found my gay friends to be very un-fickle. Gay people all share many common bonds through the process of coming out and the psychology that goes with that exposure as well as the difficulties in society at large. This is not to say that all gay people should or even could get along. Its not that simple. But we have a starting point.
But like any other relationship, the people in that group inevitably change. What happens when one changes and the other doesn’t? A “break-up” occurs. Also inevitable.
But my tale yesterday was not a condemnation of gay friendships at all. I was merely looking into how I treat people and how that seems to be at odds sometimes with how I treat others. What followed (since I tend to use a stream of consciousness form of writing) turned into a revelation of how hurt I was by something that happened to me.
My bad experience in no way should be construed as some sort of representative global-gay event.
posted by Rye at 1:39 p.m.
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