Telling Danny

“I guess I should put Danny in the loop, shouldn’t I?”

Both Nate & Brian nodded silently.

“Do you know why I bought cough drops tonight?”

“Because you have mono?” Danny asked, concerned.

“Uh...no. It’s because I didn’t want to hack through me telling you that I’m gay.”

It’s sucked not being able to tell Danny since us Guys are pretty close and he’s been the odd man out the last few weeks, but he lives in the city and has a pretty active social life, so it’s been difficult getting a chance to. But since we were getting together in the suburbs on one of the last days of his midterm break, I was going to go for it because I knew my next chance wasn’t going to be for a while.

So after dinner and purposely picking up cough drops to fight this stupid cough I’ve had all week so I could tell him, I just went for it. He seemed sort of perplexed at first, but proud of me for telling him. I think he was (and still is?) sort of unsure where the boundaries are talking about my sexuality with me, because he got really quiet afterwards and didn’t really ask me much until he overheard me later in the night talking to Nate about maybe going to a rock climbing class with an LGBT climbing group (more on that later).  He started to ask me a few questions after that, with a lot starting with “I hope you don’t mind me asking, but...”. We've got a little bit of work to do there, but I'm happy all The Guys know and are cool with it. Danny even offered to set me up to go clubbing with a lesbian friend of his. Interesting offer, clubbing isn’t really my thing, but again it’s nice to know that the support is there.

Also interesting is when we were in the car leaving Danny’s place, Nate and Brian were telling me how relieved they were that I had told him. I guess they were feeling pretty awkward every time Danny made a gay joke with them knowing about me. Brian even got really apologetic about making those jokes around me in the past too, since he must have realized how uncomfortable it was for me, which I really appreciated. I don’t hold any resentment against them, it’s just one of those ways masculine guys tease each other, but I’m glad they’ve seen the error of their ways.

All in all, a good Friday night :)

Bro-Date

As a much needed break from writing papers, I went out for dinner with Brian last night. Nate was supposed to join us, but flaked on us for his girlfriend, so instead he decided to text and tease us all night about our “bro-date” (Hence the title.)

Whatever you want to call it, it was a lot of fun, mainly because I got to be honest about things that I’ve wanted to discuss since I came out to him and Nate (or anyone else for that matter). Like how hot I find his girlfriend’s cute blond friend. “Yeah, he is kind of hot, isn’t he?” “Yup, and I’m glad you agree bro.” A little bit of a downer though, because Brian went on to tell me a few stories about this guy goofing around with him and his girlfriend, so I’m losing faith that he’s being anything more than friendly when I see him. Oh well, a guy can hope...

There was a bit of a pause after we stopped talking about cute blond guy. “Hmmm...some things don’t change, do they?” Brian noted. He was talking about my thing for blonds/sandy blonds, since I had told him before that that’s one of the things I had been attracted to in girls. And then I had a “Matt-moment” and said something ridiculous like “You know, my taste in guys isn’t really much different than that from girls...light coloured hair, nice chest...except masculine...but I guess that’s the defining feature between guys and girls, isn’t it?” Brian just chuckled and worded it a bit better: “you mean just more butch and muscular and with a penis” Yeah, sounds about right.

 Cute like this would be nice.

I guess I was (and maybe still am) on a bit of a high that Brian was completely willing to talk and gossip about my gay side. In fact, he was the one to ASK ME which guy I had a crush on high school. *Side note: the answer was none, since I was in too much denial back then to crush on a guy, but I did tell him who I would have hypothetically crushed on and listed off a couple guys I remember being pretty hot for good measure. Anyway, I’m glad that he was so responsive and pretty enthusiastic to talk about that kind of stuff. I was always worried about things being awkward with The Guys after they found out about me being gay and having to avoid topics like dating or crushes or attractions because they didn't want to hear it or they felt uncomfortable talking about it, so it was encouraging to hear Brian ask the questions and discuss those topics like nothing had changed and it was perfectly normal.

To top it all off, I was telling my sister about my night while I was driving her home from the bus station. She was pretty pleased and happy for me that I could talk to my friends about all this. And being the wise-ass that she is, she reminded me that “As your SISTER, I have the LEAST vested interest in your sexuality, so don’t be afraid to talk to me about it.” Heh, thanks sis.

I got really lucky with my friends and family...I'm glad I have them. 

Still Kicking!

A lot can happen in three and a half weeks, so I’m going to try and condense this down the best I can, but I can tell you now that it’s still going to be a novel.

I’ll start with an explanation of what happened at that fateful counselling session. Liz and I came to the conclusion that I lead my life by following what people want or expect from me (or at least what I assume those things are). Where a lot of my stress originated from was forcing myself to do things I don’t necessarily enjoy, but since it’s what people expected me to, I did it anyway. So the solution we discussed was to find something that genuinely made me happy, not anybody else, as to boost my confidence and focus on something other than worrying about pleasing other people. I ended up misinterpreting that to mean that I was on my own to find what made me happy and that no one else could be around me since they could potentially influence what I decide to do, and the ruminating snowballed from there. And that’s what brought me to my last post.