Lessons in friendship
I've never really had a lot of gay friends but I have had a select few over the years. I’ve always kept my distance because there are parts of gay culture that I really don’t like. Some parts of gay culture are incredibly self-destructive. The back-firing at parents when we struggle with childhood coming out. By the time you come out, you have had often years of getting used to the idea, working out what that means for you, adjusting your picture for your future. Its old news to you, but sometimes it’s out of the left field, brand new information for the rents. They need time to adjust. If they don’t adjust, learn to accept it and love you as you are, they are arseholes of the ugly variety, but good people sometimes need time to process stuff. So many gay people struggle to accept themselves, but demanding instant hand clapping from the people you love as the minimum bar, you set the standard too high for most people to ever meet it. I’m all for standards, but if no-one meets your standards, your standards are the problem and your hurt is of your own making. I also don’t love the bitchy gay queen trope. I do love a bitchy queen, but there is more than one way to be a gay man, and if queening it isn’t you, then the stereotype is just another box you don’t fit. Large groups of gays can become quite negative, bitchy and queenish. I mean, it's all good and fun sometimes, but when its constant, its negative and schoolgirlish. No one but a mean girl wants life to be mean girlish, and there is nothing more tragic than an aging mean girl desperately clinging to her heyday. I think it stems from a place of insecurity, and negative and constrictive cultural ideas about what it is to be a woman or a man or a gay man or whatever. I tend to have a pretty high sex drives, coupled with the inability to accidentally spawn because of a broken condom, as a community we are not great at foreseeing the consequences of fucking all and sundry. No strings attached sex can be a lot of fun, but there comes a time when you want to be more to someone than an orifice. It’s not great for your long-term mental health to see yourself as a cum dumpster instead of a person worth loving and committing to.