You see, feelings are never as clear-cut as heterosexuals would like you to believe, and our friendships don’t need to mirror those of the girls from Sex and the City or a “bromance” from whatever reality-TV show MTV is peddling.
Thankfully, we don’t have to live by those rules. The balance of attraction might be hard to get right, but I think that’s because, as LGBTQ people, we’re also programmed with the same heteronormative constructs about platonic and romantic love when they don’t align with us. Gay people don’t always have role models to look up to, so we turn to our friends and those around us and try and live as they do.ĭoes all this mean that I loved them or that I was in love with them? Perhaps it’s both. There was also, I’ll admit freely, an element of emulation I wanted to be just like them because of their success/attractiveness/ability to pick up guys. I had an attraction to these people, sure, but that attraction stemmed from their return of affections, from their kindness, and because they respected, understood, and lived something akin to my own queer experience. In my mind, this repetitive pattern occurs for a reason: For queer people, the definitions of friendships and relationships aren’t as formulaic or cookie-cutter as for our heterosexual pals, and that’s because the distinctions between platonic and romantic love don’t quite fit queer experiences.įrom my experiences, these distinctions of love weren’t two-sided they were blurry and multifaceted. You should really stop buying so many books. This is, unfortunately, only partially true, because as adults those straight boys become gay boys, and so, while there might be a bit of reciprocity, we’re still left fancying a friend, co-worker, or that cute guy who works at Barnes & Noble and whose glance always lingers just a bit too long when you buy a book (and you buy too many because of said cute guy. When we get older, we hope that these inconvenient feelings will dissipate, because the real world is nothing like high school and is actually filled with ripe homosexuals who’ll lust after us and love us back. Our adolescent years are spent lusting after our (mainly straight) classmates who, if they knew that you’d had more than one wet dream about them that week alone, would’ve likely beaten the living crap out of you. These feelings of confusion are practically a gay rite of passage. Answer me this: How many times have you turned around and realized that you’d actually been lusting after one of your friends, or that straight colleague who’s always so nice to you and offers to make you cups of coffee? How many times have you sat despairing in the quagmire that is unrequited love? If the answer is a lot, you’re not unique…you’re just gay.